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Not too long ago had to search through a truly gigantic file (I believe it contained JSON logs?). Sublime Text slowed to a crawl and froze when attempting to open it, and I didn't even bother with VS Code. On a hunch, I tried opening it in Notepad - and it loaded quite quickly!

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Sublime and VS code might try to parse it for syntax highlighting, notepad simply read the text.

VSCode disables syntax highlighting on very large files.

vim does this too. If it hangs on you when opening a very large file, don't hesitate to press Ctrl+C. It does not terminate the whole process, but aborts the syntax highlighting, and the editor becomes very snappy.

To proactively turn off syntax highlighting, bracket matching, and so forth, I use

alias vi='vim -u NONE'

which makes it skip vimrc.

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