Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

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The largest file I have to hand is the hacked Gawker database. (~75MB) Let's see how SubEthaEdit does with it concatenated with itself 6 times? (450MB)

Hmm, it never seems to open a window from that, though it remains responsive. (I can still open other files.)

Good old gedit can read the 450MB file handily, after a few seconds delay.

Aquamacs (Aqua emacs) asks me if I'm sure I want to open the file, then when I press Ok, it tells me it's too large to open a few seconds later.

If you just want to open a very large file with a GUI text editor, just continue to use your editor of choice, then download gedit for the very large files. It's small, respectably multi-platform, and free in both senses.

EDIT: Downmodded for reporting facts! Nice one, HN!

I don't think you're being downvoted for reporting facts. The article was about an editor that you're not even mentioning. And on top of that, what you're talking about is very obscure. Why would I ever want to open a 450mb file in a text-editor?

What tipped you off to start talking about large files in a thread about UltraEdit?

EDIT: Just saw the thread about large files further down. Maybe you meant to make a reply?

Back when I was working on the VS editor team, we had to worry about things like users opening multiple-gigabyte XML files in the editor, expecting text to immediately display, and for the little scroll nubbie to immediately size to the correct proportional size (the size of the nub is proportional to the number of lines displayed in the window versus the overall number of lines in the file, with some thresholding). And be able to start clicking immediately on the scroll bar, expand/collapse regions, etc.

It's a hard problem that requires pretty serious engineering, especially when your user expectations are that you should be at least as fast as emacs and vim, but also support all of your other features.

And yes, people open large files all the time. Log files; autogenerated "component configuration" babble; registry text dumps; debugging diagnostic output...

UltraEdit is discussed below as the only text editor that can open 500MB files.

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