UwView Pro User Guide — View & Edit (UVPE)

A hands-on guide to UwView Pro, split into viewing & search (View License) and editing (Edit Upgrade). For basics shared with the free edition see Help; for pricing and purchase see the product page.

▶ The basics in one minute (instant open, search, color highlighting, rectangular save)

1. Registering your license (activation)

After purchase or trial signup, Polar sends you a license key. There are three kinds:

Paste the key into Settings → License. Edit Upgrade is an add-on to the View License, so for editing you register both UVP-… and UVPE-… (or a single trial key).

2. Opening and viewing

• The whole file is browsable the moment it opens. The index is built in the background; line numbers appear when it completes (while building, jump by percentage such as 50%).
• On first open, the index and a compressed cache are saved as a single .uwvz file. From the second time on, files open instantly with line numbers (measured 0.02–0.07 s).
• Multiple files open as tabs. Drag & drop, multi-select, and session restore (reopen last session’s files) are supported.
• Character encoding is auto-detected (UTF-8 / Shift-JIS / EUC-JP / UTF-16), with manual override on the toolbar (no re-indexing).
• Long lines can be read to the end with horizontal scrolling (scrollbar, swipe, Shift+wheel, ←/→; line numbers stay pinned on the left).

3. Search basics

• Literal and regex. Hits are highlighted in the text and plotted on the minimap (click to jump).
• When a search completes, the results popup opens. Double-click / Enter jumps to the line in the file. The ±N context lines are freely adjustable in Pro.
• Results can be saved to a file (with or without line numbers; from v1.5.0 you can also include a header line and the ±N context, and your last choices are remembered).
• Search history autocomplete, plus “★” to save frequent searches as named filters.

Refine-bar options (in the results popup, v1.5.0+): Regex / Ignore case / Whole word (distinguishes ERROR from ERROR_RETRY) / Exclude (drop lines containing the term; stages 2+).

4. Drill-down Search (v1.3+)

Refine your results with another term, then another — the GUI version of grep -C N w1 | grep w2 | grep w3.

1. Run a normal search; results appear in Tab 1.
2. Type the next term in the refine bar and hit Refine → a new tab appears, re-searching only inside the previous stage’s ±N context (up to 8 stages).
3. Each tab shows term (count), and ±N is independent per stage (keep middle stages at ±1, open the last one to ±10 to read).
4. Stages after the first are instant — they only scan the previous stage’s blocks.

Real example: Tokyo 94,979 → Nerima 184 → Saitama 54 on a 51 GB / 892-million-line file. See the announcement.

5. Sequence Search (v1.3+)

Switch the same tabbed UI to “Sequence” mode to find only the places where w1 → w2 → w3 appear in that order (think “login → timeout → restart” in a log).

• If an earlier word reappears mid-match, matching restarts from it — only clean, uninterrupted flows survive.
• Right-click a result and open History (refinement path) to list every line that formed the flow and jump to any of them.
• Each stage takes about as long as a full-text search (unlike Drill-down, stages are not instant).

See the announcement.

6. Frequency ranking (Tally, v1.5.0+)

Enter a regex in the tally bar above the results and press Tally: the first capture group’s value is counted across the hit lines and shown as a descending ranking with counts and percentages (the sort | uniq -c | sort -rn of the GUI).

• Example: k="([^"]+)" → a ranking of tag names. Top-N (default 20), CSV export.
• Click a row to drill down into a stage containing only that value.
• A value is counted once per line. Details in the announcement.

7. Color highlighter & rectangular selection

• Color highlighter: keep multiple patterns permanently colored. 32-color palette, named sets, .uwvhl export, bundled industry presets. Select a word and right-click → color swatch for instant coloring.
• Rectangular selection & copy (Pro): turn on Rect select in the toolbar, then drag to select a rectangle (a single click keeps its normal behavior; in edit mode use Alt+drag). Extract the “vertical column” of a fixed-width log and copy or save it; auto-scroll at the view edge lets you build rectangles millions of lines tall.

8. Archive workflow (.uwvz)

.uwvz is a single file holding the index and compressed cache (about 1/9 of the original, checksum-protected per block).

• Even after deleting the original, the .uwvz opens directly (standalone mode — pick it in the file dialog or drag & drop).
• Keep huge logs on the shelf at 1/9 size and open them instantly only when needed.

9. Editing — Edit Upgrade (UVPE, v1.4.0+)

Registering Edit Upgrade reveals the Edit button and enables non-destructive editing that never touches the original file.

• Replace: from the replace bar — replace next, replace all, delete matching lines. Replace-all confirms the count first, and a single Undo reverts the whole operation. Measured: 21,994 replacements across a 10 GB / 100-million-line file in 16.8 s (write-up).
• The diff file (.ewvz): every edit accumulates in file.ewvz (a few MB even for a 100-million-line replace). The original and the .uwvz stay untouched.
• Stop and resume: close mid-edit and pick up tomorrow. Undo/Redo works across sessions, including edits from previous days.
• Committing: when you’re done, write the edited result out as a new .uwvz or as plain text.

10. More

• Bookmarks: toggle any line, jump back and forth, shown in blue on the minimap.
• Japanese/English UI switch, identical rendering on Windows / macOS / Linux.

11. Known limitations

• Lines display up to the first 8,192 characters (the rest is elided — a deliberate speed-first design; horizontal scrolling covers those 8,192).
• Line endings: LF / CRLF (bare CR unsupported). Primary encodings: UTF-8 / Shift-JIS / EUC-JP.
• Editing (Edit Upgrade) operates on .uwvz files (plain text is converted to .uwvz automatically on open).
• Real-time tail (the tail -f style follow mode) is not in Pro. Following a growing file is available in the free UwView. Pro keeps edits in a separate journal (.ewvz), which does not sit well with an original that keeps changing underneath it. Use the free edition to follow a log as it is written; reopening a file to read up to the latest content works in Pro.

12. Need help?

See Support. Feature requests are tracked on GitHub Issues.

Feature deep-dives

• Drill-down Search — from 94,979 hits to 54 in two clicks
• Sequence Search — find only “Tokyo → Yokohama → Nakamachi” in that order
• Tally — sort | uniq -c in the GUI
• 21,994 replacements across 100 million lines in 16.8 s — Edit Upgrade, measured
• An honest, complete feature comparison with klogg

From the developer: My apps, Kindle books, and open-source projects are listed at GitHub: amru195704.