Question

Are there any text editors/viewers (preferably on windows but other platforms are also ok) that can handle files of 500 MB or more?

The editors I checked so far (Notepad++, Notepad, Eclipse) all choked on files of that size.

Edit:
Many thanks for the great suggestions.
I tried gvim as it was the top voted and was available on Windows. I opened the file in a reasonable time. After that scrolling and searching was very smooth as long as syntax highlighting was turned off.

From the other editors mentioned TextPad and EmEditor both claim to be able to handle large files very well. EmEditor seems to be built exactly for editing large files.
I'll probably try both and report back.

Answer 1

I have used gvim for files larger than 1 GB of NASTRAN output. gvim handles large files very well. In fact that was the main reason I switched from Emacs to vim.

Emacs is a great editor but it can handle files only as large as 128 MB, at least the 32-bit version. If you decide to use Emacs I recommend to configure it to turn syntax highlighting off for large files.

Another way to deal with large files those days was heavy usage of less, head, tail and split.

Answer 2

Under *unix less it is incredibly fast reading huge txt files. It depends on what you mean for inspect tough.

I've just tried to generate a huge txt file (700mb). less opens that file instantaneously.

If you want to read only the starting/ending part of a file you could use head/tail. An useful thing about tail is the follow option, you can follow a changing file, just like a big, growing log.

Answer 3

vim will handle it. Not necessarily terribly speedily, but it won't choke (assuming your system has enough memory to give it). Windows version works fine.

Answer 4

On Mac, I use TextWrangler, you can open really big files (last test I did was a 270 MB file) in a few seconds and scroll with no problem. Saving is a bit longer, though.

Answer 5

I haven't tried it on a 500mb file, but Textpad usually handles large files pretty well.

Answer 6

For viewing and search, use the internal viewer from total commander. It's instant on files of any size (several GB).

Answer 7

I use Notepad++ on anything up to about 250MB. Beyond that it fails, but the search facilities make it well worth using for those files it can open.

Answer 8

I've used baretail as a text viewer. It's intended purpose is to watch log files, so it will constantly scroll down as text is added to a file by some other program. It's very fast.

Answer 9

On Windows, I use EmEditor, which has excellent support for large files. I absolutely love it!

Well worth the $40.

Answer 10

In a prior life I opened relatively large (~200mb) reader files in vim. Worked much better than eclipse =)

Answer 11

Not UltraEdit, apparently. I just tried it with an 85MB .txt file and it slowwwed to a crawl (though at least didn't crash).

Answer 12

LTF Viewer (Large Text File Viewer) from swiftgear was designed for this.

Answer 13

If it's logfiles or something similar you're examining, you can often glean what you need from it by using head to dump the first few hundred lines into an editor or text file. Otherwise gvim, as Ludwig mentioned, would be my choice.

Answer 14

I like WinVI, it usually handles large files fairly well.

Answer 15

I am using Far which, of course, isn't just a text viewer/editor (although you can probably say the same of emacs and vi). The editor, however, will have to read the complete file, although 500 MiB is hardly large these days.

However, I've been using the self-compiled svn version for some time due to some bugs in the latest stable on Vista and lack of Unicode support.

Answer 16

I use EmEditor on Windows. It' give control over large files and what bits of the file you want to load.

Answer 17

And the list continues... LTF Viewer (Large Text File Viewer).

Answer 18

PilotEdit, you can edit files large 500MB with PilotEdit easily. But it may take several minutes for PilotEdit to open/save a huge file. After the file is opened, you can edit it smoothly.