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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft engineers rewrote the notepad.exe app. You can load a 10GB text file. Something you can’t do in almost any other text editor.

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I just tried opening a 10 GB zip file in notepad.exe and it told me it can't open files this large. And then a second message box "Operation completed successfully." (lol). How can I tell whether I have the rewritten version?

(It also hangs on opening a 500 MB file, too. Version dialog just gives me my Win10 version.)

yardie said text file, not binary files. Not sure what text editor doesn't bark at a 10GB binary file. Probably Sublime would be alone in handling it, but don't have it in front of me right now to test.

>text file, not binary files

there is a difference?

For most intents and purposes, yes.

Some editors choke on long lines. A binary file can have long stretches without newline.

A text file only contains data that represents characters on the screen, while “binary file” is used to refer to any other file that isn’t meant to be viewed or edited as text.

If you open a (small) image file with notepad you will see a lot of gibberish. This is what happens when you try to view a binary (in other words, non-text) file as text.

How do you distinguish a text file from a binary file? It's just bytes. But for the sake of it, I created a 10 GB .txt file containing the same ASCII-only line repeated 100 million times. Unsurprisingly, notepad.exe still says the file is too large. And it also hangs with a 1 GB version.

Notepad, at least the version included in Windows 11 on an up to date install, refuses to open any text file bigger than 1,073,741,823 bytes.

The error is cute:

> The test_1073741824_bytes.txt file is too large for Notepad.

> Use another editor to edit the file.

followed by:

> The operation completed successfully.

Source? Disclosure I work at soft-micro

Presenter at the last in-person MS Ignite (so, 2019?). He mentioned to the audience they rewrote Notepad.exe and showed the memory usage of NP++ and Notepad.exe while opening a 10GB CSV.

But if you're saying it's not included in Windows 10 it might be a sysinternals branch.

I will look into it when I am back next week. Thanks!

Does it support more than one undo step now?

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