I’ve been using tail to watch my log files for years:

tail -f log/production.log

It works great all the time, until you want to search for something, then you have to ctrl+c and open the file in less or vi.

Maybe there is a better way? After some googling, I found less is the answer:

less +F log/production.log

less +F works exactly like tail -f, with more:

• Simply press ctrl+c to switch to editing model, so you can scroll backward and using any more/vi command, such as /pattern to search
• Press shift+f again to switch back to tail model

Anyway, just run man less to find some more information.