The new and frequent updates to winbox.exe , from mikrotik, have been great! (thanks mt!)

however one change that me (and others i work with) have found troublesome is the truncation of log messages in the winbox Log window.

This is not really an issue on high res or 4k monitors, however even on a 1080p laptop monitor, there are times when we can not read the full log message (including critical parts of log messages), especially when in the field and on a laptop screen.

In prior winbox.exe releases, log messages were word wrapped, such that a long message would take up two lines.

as of winbox releases over the past year we often run into this issue (with no way to see the full message but for terminal-> /log print

I think the best solution would be to allow the user to choose between Word Wrap: enabled/disabled , for the log window, in winbox

here is a screen shot, from a laptop in the field that a co-worker sent me showing what im refering to (ie there is no way to read the end of this log message):
thanks

(EDIT: just for Znevna: please substitute 720p res for 1080p in my post comment- tks)

That screenshot is 1281px wide, adding the missing menu from winbox probably results to 1366. That again, ain't 1080p, because if it was it should've been close to 1920 not to 1366.
Disable the Display Scaling.
And you can always export the log and view it with your favourite text editor, wrapped or not.

Word wrap wouldn't be valuable for me either.

Besides Znevna's comments, I would suggest that you can double-click on a log event so the full content is displayed in a properties box. You can also fire up a syslog daemon on the PC you're using for admin and send log events there. That gives the added benefit of a much faster method to search, filter, and view events. You could narrow your other columns for more messages real estate. You could zoom out your display so all content is smaller, albeit harder to read.

Just some thoughts.

I like how there's something obviously wrong and people still defend it, saying that it's actually ok, and suggesting more or less complicated and not always practical workarounds. ;)

Syslog server is great, but is it argument against good log window in WinBox? No. If it would be, we could as well say that log window in WinBox is completely unnecessary and we can get rid of it, because external syslog is so much better.

Exporting log and opening it in favourite text editor, that's great too, sometimes. But not when you need to quickly see what's happening right now. Same for double clicking the line. If it's just one or two, fine. But if there's too many and new ones are coming one after another? Meh..

And if you have small screen or bad eyes, then what? Tough luck, no simple log viewing for you? Don't forget, WinBox recently added support for vertical scrollbars in windows, so that clearly shows they are not against small screens or big zooms. :)

I like how there's something obviously wrong and people still defend it, saying that it's actually ok, and suggesting more or less complicated and not always practical workarounds. ;)

Fair enough. I was more or less commenting on my personal use cases and what I would do in the situation, rather than nixing the whole idea. At least the OP offered the option to enable or disable wordwrap instead of forcing it on me. :-)

I have a syslog daemon on most of my admin PCs just for this reason. Many devices I manage generate hundreds of log events per second, so it is second nature for me to review logs this way. However I admit that I often review the log window in Winbox for what I'm looking for also.

Of course, wrapping should be optional. Because there's also already possible (but somewhat hidden) horizontal scrolling and someone may like that better. Scrolling may look as the solution, but it still doesn't allow to see everything at once, which would be useful too.

I like how there's something obviously wrong and people still defend it, saying that it's actually ok, and suggesting more or less complicated and not always practical workarounds. ;)
[...]
And if you have small screen or bad eyes, then what? Tough luck, no simple log viewing for you? Don't forget, WinBox recently added support for vertical scrollbars in windows, so that clearly shows they are not against small screens or big zooms. :)

I'm not defending anything, and there's nothing "obviously wrong" here, but it's the second time I see something like this "MikroTik do something!!111 winbox is too big for my 1080p screen" and he posts a screenshot that's nowhere near 1920px wide and saying that HEY IT WORKS ON 4K Monitor (and what, you're running that 4K monitor at 1080p maybe?) since you're running this 1080p screen on something lower anyway?

I have nothing against the request for the log window wrapping option, BUT post a valid problem with valid data, if you say that it doesn't fit in that screen also post the display scaling level used or atleast check the screenshot before sending, if you had no ideea that your Windows set display scaling for you because you have a native 1920x1080 on a 15.6" display or smaller.

And you could also disable some of the columns (like buffer and topic because you know where they come from anyway) and maybe use a smaller than 14 characters prefix for the logging rules that you need to follow, makes more room for the actual data, that might even fit on 1366x768, yes.

Cheers.

A lot of the replies in this thread show why an Option to sw between word wrap or not , is needed! (some prefer it, others do not), especially when the status quo has been changed.

That screenshot is 1281px wide, adding the missing menu from winbox probably results to 1366. That again, ain't 1080p, because if it was it should've been close to 1920 not to 1366.
Disable the Display Scaling.
And you can always export the log and view it with your favourite text editor, wrapped or not.

Thanks for reply-
This was an example image i made, so please ignore the actual pixel width of the image. I think you did get the point of what i was trying to show w the image. (also i dont use display scaling, i actually hate it, im always at 100%)

Yes ofcourse i can print/export the log and view it wrapped in winbox terminal or file=out.txt then open it, or i could view it in our splunk instances.
However all of those options take a bit longer than just viewing it in winbox-> log, as was the case before (ie a feature that used to exist in winbox, but now does not (word wrapped log window))

also i mainly spoke in the context of in the field where it would be nice to only need winbox, and not external tools (and scrolling/finding a single log message in winbox-> terminal, among a /log print of 1000+ messages can be difficult).

I would suggest that you can double-click on a log event so the full content is displayed in a properties box.

Excellent! i cant believe i hadnt tried that (as i use that same action in other winbox lists/output all the time, like connections list of FW tab)-> ~15 yrs of using winbox and still finding new features! Although this does not fully solve the problem, as you may come across several truncated fw log lines when trying to troubleshoot an issue. Or what about custom script :log messages? so now those are limited in max length (by a variable length) as well.

I like how there's something obviously wrong and people still defend it, saying that it's actually ok, and suggesting more or less complicated and not always practical workarounds. ;)

Syslog server is great, but is it argument against good log window in WinBox? No. If it would be, we could as well say that log window in WinBox is completely unnecessary and we can get rid of it, because external syslog is so much better.

Exporting log and opening it in favourite text editor, that's great too, sometimes. But not when you need to quickly see what's happening right now. Same for double clicking the line. If it's just one or two, fine. But if there's too many and new ones are coming one after another? Meh..

And if you have small screen or bad eyes, then what? Tough luck, no simple log viewing for you? Don't forget, WinBox recently added support for vertical scrollbars in windows, so that clearly shows they are not against small screens or big zooms. :)

EXACTLY! Great reply! trying to keep something simple and quick, simple and quick (ie reading a log message), not add un-needed complexity + time