Log file shouldn't be created or written to by default

[cole-h]

Describe your feature request

The log file should be truncated, and should only be written to when using one of the verbosity flags. I can see, some day in the (distant?) future, where some user writes a post about how their helix log file was taking up gigabytes of disk space because it's append-only and never cleaned up.

The verbosity flag should take a filename argument that will then be created (if it doesn't exist) or truncated (if it does) and begin writing its logging information to it.

[archseer]

Well, we went full circle on this. There was a bug that made us log continually every second when the LSP crashed. Which lead us to truncate the file each time. But then trying to open the logfile (or opening multiple helix instances) would wipe the file before you could read it.

[cole-h]

Which is why IMO it should write to stderr by default, or the specified file, and only when run with -v.

[archseer]

Logging only critical errors is helpful in the case of a crash though. Especially when we get bug reports from stripped builds that don't have a proper backtrace.

[cole-h]

In that case, I think a good first step would be to write to stderr by default (and continue logging even without -v). If the user wants to put it in a file, it's easy to redirect stderr.

[kirawi]

Maybe we could warn the user in Helix if their log is huge. Or maybe that's just lazy, idk.

[alevinval]

I looked into logging to stderr by default. If we do it, it's going to mess up the editor for most people, as it would force you to always redirect it, to avoid rendering issues as seen in [1].

However, as part of reviewing this ticket, I've opened a fix for the open-log command

[1] issue with logging by default to stderr