I'll also add I used lnav more recently for viewing logs from many small lab devices centralized via syslog, it was extremely lightweight and effective.

Can you elaborate a little more? lnav behaves like a pager with the conventional hotkeys for basic stuff. I'm not sure what else you are expecting.

> Also a nitpick but the colors are quite garish

I enjoy colors, so there's a lot going on by default. There are several themes builtin. You can configure the "grayscale" theme by running:

    :config /ui/theme grayscale

This one, on the other hand, is cleaner and lets you find what you're looking for quickly. And, last but not least, is much lighter.

> but there is no obvious way to exit. I tried Q,q

It's not very responsive during initial indexing, which is something I need to improve. Pressing `q` should work to exit in general, though. Pressing CTRL-C three times in quick succession will force quit it.

It would help to know which version you tried. Things have gotten better over the years.

> I tried `man lnav` in separate terminal - but no man page is provided.

A man page exists, but only contains basic information. The builtin help text is much more extensive and can be viewed by running:

    lnav -H

> `ps` shows 3 processes which would not die with SIGTERM, have to `kill -9`.

Older versions of lnav would use readline for the prompt and had to run it in a separate process because of "reasons". More recent versions have a custom prompt and don't require the extra processes.