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Yeah, call me a moron, but mostly i am doing System.out.println() when it comes to debugging my J2EE Projects and i am debugging quite a lot, it just gives me a good feeling when everything works like expected, so its more than debugging, its about to see if everything is ok.

But i am going a step further, i am not only a sout<tab> (IDEA folks know that acronym) guy, i am also developing on Windows because i somehow got used to the interface (perhaps i will switch to powermac sometime). So i recently started to use Tail for Win32 because i got sick of reopening logfiles or using ultraedit for those boring things.

Then i saw this little feature called "keyword highlighting" inside Teil for Win32. This in conjunction with a modified live template of IDEA is a really cool combination. I modified my most-used live template "soutv" and added some custom string like "*MLDBG" in front of the standard stuff, this way:

System.out.println("*MLDBG: $EXPR_COPY$ = " + $EXPR$);

Now when i tail the tomcat log (or whatever logfile), i can very quickly see my own loglines and forget about the standard crap inside it.

I am quite sure that i wont earn a Nobelprice for this idea, but perhaps you know the feeling you get when combining two nice tools and getting a really valuable output. Of course, most of the merits goes to IDEA, but also thanks for the Tail for Win32 Developers (Paul Perkins and others), not only because of Keyword highlight, but also due to keeping such a small utility small. Have seen Win32 tails with over 2 Mb, which seems odd to me, at the end, i just wanna do tail ;-)