VSCode is my go to for large text file interaction on macOS.
TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.
TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.
In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."
Should be noted that the linked post is almost 15 years old at this point too, so perhaps not the most up to date either.
But, you can go faster depending on your usecase:
- If you're trying to manually look through the file, use `less`. You can scroll up and down, go quickly to the top and bottom of the file, and also search the file for strings quickly
- If you already know the string in the file that you're looking for, use ripgrep
- If you're trying to do a search and replace, and you already know what the strings are, use sed. (macos' built-in sed isn't good, so get the proper gnu coreutills through homebrew, and you can access the good sed through `gsed`)
In fact, I believe that is what vscode uses.
Apparently there’s been a neglected issue about bringing it to Zed. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4560
You can actually disable it in the settings if you want it to try and render the entire thing at once