Viewing Rails logs from Windows commandline is ugly. I’ve been looking for a solution for awhile only to find one was right under my nose. Following the advice of this post I remembered that Git on Windows uses MSYS + MinGW. Just open up the Git Bash prompt shortcut in the start menu (the target for mine says: C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c “”C:\Program Files\Git\bin\sh.exe” –login -i”) and then tail your logfile:

tail -f log/development.log

Only problem is I can’t figure out how to modify the color scheme. Fortunately though it looks about a million times better by default.

Also check out: Ryan’s screencast about logging. There’s some easy stuff you can do to modify the logger to not use coloring so you can get things to appear nicely directly in the Windows command line.