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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

UltraEdit is probably the best text editor there is. Not the best IDE or anything, just the best text editor. It seems thoroughly underappreciated, though, for some reason.

It's the only editor I'm aware of that can do do disk-based editing, that is you can open a file of multiple gigabytes quickly and edit it because it doesn't load the whole file into RAM.

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That's quite a claim. I'd put it up against EmEditor (https://www.emeditor.com/). Not only does EmEditor have amazing support for large files, it has Excel-esque GUI support for delimited files.

That’s pretty cool. I use vim for this particular need and it’s quick to search through big files too

Really? I've found Vim slows to a crawl on multi-GB files. Maybe that's changed recently or it was down to the plug-ins I was using?

It's probably from creating a backup copy. Compare performance when invoking 'view' instead of 'vim'.

It could be from your plugins if they're doing something goofy.

I use vim out of the box with no plugins and on windows. Not sure if that makes a difference. I’m also typically not editing the file but searching logs.

You need to turn off syntax highlighting before opening a really large file in vim. Otherwise the syntax parsing takes an age.

:syntax off

Another underappreciated editor is visual slickedit[1]

It will happily allow you to edit TB large files

[1] https://www.slickedit.com/

I've used slickedit for at least 20 years on windows. It's definitely a good editor as well

Neat. I use HxD for such a purpose.

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