'less' is a great tool for browsing Rails log files, though you might not guess it if you try to view your "development.log" with it.

Take the colour back

Rails writes xterm control characters into log files to colour them. Usually 'less' escapes those characters, leading to an ugly display -- run 'less -R' to stop this escaping, allowing you to browse log files in glorious technicolour. (Set your $LESS environment variable to "-R" to make this the default.)

Follow the end of the log file

Shift-g will take you to the bottom of the log files (Use ctrl-c if less then pauses while calculating line numbers in a very large file).

Shift-F makes less work like 'tail -f' -- it watches the end of the file for new data.

Search for phrases or pesky backtraces

Use / to search forwards, and ? to search backwards.

To find the last Ruby stack trace in a log file, open the logfile in less, Shift-g to the end of the file, then search backwards using ?` (backtick) -- usually backticks are only found in Ruby stacktraces, at least if you're not using mysql.