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Older versions of BBEdit and TextWrangler used to be able to open enormous files (larger than entire system RAM) while remaining incredibly performant. I don't know how they did it, but it was magical and a killer feature.

Unfortunately, that stopped being the case since they refactored the text display UI somewhere around version 9.

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Are you sure it was that good with large files? I used to be a TextWrangler evangelist until I noticed it was mangling large files. You'd change one character but the saved file differed by far more than one character. Medium-sized nowadays, hundreds of MB TSV files. About 10 years ago.

Yup. About 15 years ago, doing search/replace on multi-hundred-MB log files and SQL database dumps.

About 3-4 years ago it stopped being nearly as performant with large files (even a couple MB).

I’ve never had a problem with either BBEdit or Textwrangler mangling files. I can believe there may have been such a bug at one point, but I must have sidestepped it - perhaps it was caught and fixed quickly.

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