Opening first lines of large files in VIM

Question

I run Windows XP and gvim7.2. I want to inspect a large (130 MB) XML file with VIM. Is it possible to simply open the first 1000 lines of the file?

Answer 1

the main problem of vim is not the file size, but the syntax highlighting of the file. i use the 'large file' script to disable such timeconsuming things when working on large files.

Answer 2

Also you can just:

head -1000 large_file.xml | vim -

Answer 3

You may use head or tail to cut specific parts of the file and then open them in vim. In your specific example, you could do:

head -1000 large_file.xml > small_file.xml

Then you would be able to open small_file.xml in gvim.

This, of course, you have the head and tail utilities installed.