Temporal indicator

[oniony]

Probably a bit early in this project's development to be making this suggestion, but it would be really cool if there were an option to turn on some kind of marker for empty periods of log activity.

For example, during development it's common to flip-flop between making coding changes and then testing them out. After a test, you dip into the log to see what's happened and you quite often have to fish around for the start of the test by looking for the gap in the timestamps.

The feature I imagine is that if a period of time passes (e.g. one minute) with no log updates then Tail Blazer would draw a horizontal rule, or an empty row with an icon and the elapsed time or somesuch to indicate that time has passed. This would make it really easy to see the clusters of activity in the log file.

Example:

2015-11-16 16:53:01 Blah blah
2015-11-16 16:53:01 Wah wah
2015-11-16 16:53:02 Nee nah
       ↕ ↕ ↕ 00:02:05 seconds ↕ ↕ ↕
2015-11-16 16:55:06 Whoop de doop
2015-11-16 16:53:01 La la la

Ideally the length of time at which such an indicator would be drawn would be configurable.

[RolandPheasant]

An inactivity indicator. Great idea.

[khellang]

This is actually a really good suggestion :+1:

[drewnoakes]

Nice idea.

While TailBlazer is running, it can collect these timestamps itself. However when a file is opened, it could only attempt to parse a date/time from the start of the line. That sounds more fragile.