How to easily view and filter Android's logcat in Windows?

Question

I'm "debugging" a Xamarin Android application that only has a problem when a debugger is not attached, thus, I'm having to fall back on logging to figure out what the problem is. However, doing adb logcat from the command line is quite painful. The constant window scrolling is quite troublesome. Xamarin has some integration for logcat in Visual Studio, but in practice, I find it's too buggy to use. From what I can tell online, it looks like everyone uses some plugin for logcat in Eclipse. However, I don't have or want Eclipse.

Is there any tool out there that presents logcat in a nice and easy to filter (and that isn't constantly scrolling) way? Preferably in a GUI since I have to sift through quite a few messages from a single run of trying to figure this bug out

Have you checked [logcat-gui](https://code.google.com/p/logcat-gui/)? — Piovezan, Oct 03 '13 at 20:33
On the command line, `grep` is your friend! Should be built-in on Linux or OSX, and available via mingw or Cygwin on Windows. — Chris Stratton, Oct 03 '13 at 20:42
@ChrisStratton The thing is I need to be able to see the messages as they show up. That's how I know if I've waited long enough for the bug to appear or not. I'm pretty sure Windows doesn't have a `|` like operator on their crappy shell... although, maybe cygwin could handle it — Earlz, Oct 03 '13 at 20:48
You will see messages almost instantly. Windows does have a | operator. What it doesn't normally have is a grep, but you can get one from many sources. This is not a gui solution of course - it just happens to be very convenient to customize. — Chris Stratton, Oct 03 '13 at 20:51

score 55 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 03 '13 at 20:57

55

If you need a GUI, the Android SDK delivers a filterable logcat display tool in the Device Monitor.

Execute monitor.bat in the android-sdk\tools folder to bring it up. You can en- or disable scrolling with the Arrow-Down symbol on the right of the filter bar.

answered Oct 03 '13 at 20:57

dst

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And on Linux it is called ```monitor``` – Fahad Alduraibi Oct 09 '15 at 19:24
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Device monitor have been deprecated in recent Android Studio releases. What would be an up-to-date answer in 2019? – Max Yankov Jan 24 '19 at 14:37
Seems like using a third-party GUI is the only option now. Try this [out](https://github.com/felixb/logcat-gui) – Amogh Jahagirdar Jun 04 '20 at 08:25
I have an alternative called [Device Lens](https://github.com/DelphiWorlds/DeviceLens) – Dave Nottage Oct 02 '22 at 19:33

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 30 '18 at 16:51

For anyone using Android Studio:

The top answer is useful, but I found if you run monitor.bat from android-sdk\tools while Android Studio is already running, you will get conflict on the port:

"Could not open Selected VM debug port (8700). Make sure you do not have another instance of DDMS or of the eclipse plugin running. If it's being used by something else, choose a new port number in the preferences."

So it was preferable to run it from the Android Studio menu:

Tools > Android > Android Device Monitor

How to easily view and filter Android's logcat in Windows?

2 Answers2

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