A fork of JakeWharton/pidcat, which is itself an update to Jeff Sharkey's excellent logcat color script. Both filter adb logcat down to the log entries for a specific application package; this fork adds an interactive, full-screen filter UI on top, turning pidcat into more of a REPL than a one-shot stream.

Install

Use Homebrew:

brew tap imcarlost/pidcat-repl
brew trust imcarlost/pidcat-repl
brew install pidcat-repl

Usage

During application development you often want to only display log messages coming from your app. Unfortunately, because the process ID changes every time you deploy to the phone it becomes a challenge to grep for the right thing.

This script solves that problem by filtering by application package. Supply the target package as the sole argument to the python script and enjoy a more convenient development process.

pidcat com.oprah.bees.android

If you just want the original, non-interactive pidcat, use the upstream JakeWharton/pidcat project or pass --plain here, see Interactive mode below.

Here is an example of the output when running for the Google Plus app:

Interactive mode

When both stdin and stdout are a terminal, pidcat opens a full-screen filter UI instead of streaming: logs render above a bottom prompt line, and whatever you type live-filters the scrollback to lines containing every typed word, case-insensitively.

Backspace edits the query, Ctrl-U clears it.
Ctrl-L forces a redraw; the view also tracks terminal resizes.
Esc or Ctrl-D quits and restores your scrollback.

Pass --plain to get the original streaming output instead, e.g. for pidcat --plain com.oprah.bees.android | grep Foo. Piped input or output (adb logcat | pidcat com.oprah.bees.android, pidcat ... | less) always uses plain streaming, since there is no terminal to draw the UI on.

Requirements

Make sure that adb from the Android SDK is on your PATH. This script will not work unless this is that case. That means, when you type adb and press enter into your terminal something actually happens.

To include adb and other android tools on your path:

export PATH=$PATH:<path to Android SDK>/platform-tools
export PATH=$PATH:<path to Android SDK>/tools

Include these lines in your .bashrc or .zshrc.

Note: <path to Android SDK> should be absolute and not relative.

pidcat requires at least version 8.30 of coreutils. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS already ships with it, for 18.04 and below, coreutils can be upgraded from the focal repo by running the following:

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main restricted universe multiverse'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -t focal install coreutils