title: A Java advanced text logging pane for large output
body: <p>Mathematica comes with a simple java program that allows to inspect the communication between front end and the kernel. It's called <a href="http://reference.wolfram.com/language/JLink/ref/java/com/wolfram/jlink/util/LinkSnooper.html" rel="noreferrer">LinkSnooper</a> and in general it works quite nice. It looks like this</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/sw4Yd.png" alt="enter image description here" /></p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>I think I can improve the behavior and usability of the program to some extend, but to do this, I need to reimplement some parts. One fundamental piece that I need is a text pane, which has the following properties:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>it can receive a lot of data and it probably should use a fast ring-buffer so that the very first log-lines are removed when the data grows too much. Another possibility is that it automatically starts to write data to disk and possibly reloads it when the user scrolls up to see the first entries</li>
  <li>it should be able to handle colored text. I plan to use a simple highlighter (the log-data is actually real Mathematica syntax) on each arriving line to make reading more easy</li>
  <li>it doesn't need to be writable. It's OK if the text pane is read-only.</li>
  </ul>
  <p><strong>Question:</strong> Does something like this already exist? Currently, LinkSnooper uses a <code>JTextArea</code> underneath and before I start do write my own version, I wanted to ask whether someone has already done this.</p>
  <h3>Edit:</h3>
  <p>What I planned to do was to use some Logger framework because it seems natural to me that those libraries should be able to handle a lot of data. Additionally, they often provide interfaces to format the messages and you can define different handlers that can take care of different messages. What I was hoping for was that someone already has combined this with a neatly working text window that can handle large output.</p>