- Extremely large log files

Why not use less? Because it's ugly and does not allow me to edit or copy specific sections out. I like having the full power of a good text editor at my back.

I have brought this concern up before, and the excuse I heard was, "Well, you should not have to work with files that large." Seems someone in emacs-land disagrees; now you can play with files up to 512 MB on a 32-bit system! If there is a legitimate use case for, oh, 500 MB, we can imagine a use case for 2 GB. The world is moving on; we aren't playing with 64 KB systems any more, and data keeps growing.

In 2010, our text editors still have hardcoded memory limits? (I understand emacs's architectural reasoning for it -- and that is a choice.) IIRC, DOS 6.2's Edit could handle large files; it accomplished this with a partial-loading/paging trick, rather than actually loading the entire file in memory.

So yes, I would like to and have enjoyed opening files of large size. Admittedly, I have to wait a bit for the I/O to catch up! :) I also have to be conscious of my memory usage, since I am unaware of any paging mode in vim (or emacs). I expect, on average, to have the option to open a file of at least 3 GB size -- and that is without taking advantage of swap. Next year, I expect more.

I know it is not a common desire, so I do not blame anyone for imposing an arbitrary limit other than to say "nyah nyah; I am free".

Edit: it's possible I used "less", I can't remember.