Open Radar

 
The introduction of Unified Logging in Sierra made it more practical to log a large amount of information. However, this comes at the price that Console now shows a firehose of information, and it’s hard at a glance to know how to drill down into something specific.

Logs are partitioned by attributes such as Subsystem, Category, and Process, and Console does provide a UI to filter based on them (e.g., a query like “subsystem:com.apple.defaults”. However, other than waiting for streaming log messages to appear, it’s hard to know _which_ subsystems and categories are available to choose from.

Console can help here in various ways:

* as streaming logs start appearing, it can collect known subsystems, categories and processes. (Subsystems could also be gathered from plists, and running processes could obviously be gathered differently.)
* it can then, as you start typing a query, autosuggest. For example, typing “subsystem:com.apple” should show a popup with quite a few options.
* alternatively or in addition, the sidebar could be extended with sections “Subsystems”, “Categories”, “Processes”, which are each populated with a list of checkboxes, so rather than typing a filter by text, you can drill down interactively.