I am currently working on a project where I communicate with hardware via a com port on its respective pc(win xp or 7) It is a fairly large project and sifting through the log file can be a bit of pain.

This is my current setup. I use putty to do the actual serial communication, and write it to a log file. Then using MinGW Msys I filter it using

tail -f "puttyLog" | grep -i "search term"

Is there a better way to do this? I mean specifically filtering the input in realtime.

Not that mine is terrible, but it still involves having to read from a log and sometimes there have been hangups where it will be delayed for a minute or 2. I have used software in the past with a main io window and then internal filter panels, but can no longer remember or find it.