Best Free Text Editor Supporting *More Than* 4GB Files? [closed]

Answer 1

I Stumbled on this post many times, as I often need to handle huge files (10 Gigas+).

After being tired of buggy and pretty limited freeware, and not willing to pay fo costly editors after trial expired (not worth the money after all), I just used VIM for Windows with great success and satisfaction.

It is simply PERFECT for this need, fully customizable, with ALL feature one can think of when dealing with text files (searching, replacing, reading, etc. you name it)

I am very surprised nobody answered that (Except a previous answer but for MacOS)...

For the record I stumbled on it on this blog post, which wisely adviced it.

Answer 2

It's really tough to handle a 4G file as such. I used to handle larger text files, but I never used to load them in to my editor. I mostly used UltraEdit in my previous company, now I use Notepad++, but I would get just those parts which i needed to edit. (Most of the cases, the files never needed an edit).

Why do u want to load such a big file in to an editor? When I handled files of these size, I used GNU Core Utils. The most common operations i performed on those files were head ( to get the top 250k lines etc ), tail, split, sort, shuf, uniq etc. It's really powerful.

There's a lot of things you can do with GNU Core Utils. I would definitely recommend those, instead of a new editor.

Answer 3

My favourite after trying a few to read a 6GB mysqldump file:

PilotEdit Lite http://www.pilotedit.com/

Because:

• Memory usage has (somehow?!) never gone above 25MB, so basically no impact on the rest of my system - though it took several minutes to open.
• There was an accurate progress bar during that time so I knew how it was getting on.
• Once open, simple searching, and browsing through the file all worked as well as a small notepad file.
• It's free.

Others I tried...

EmEditor Pro trial was very impressive, the file opened almost instantly, but unfortunately too expensive for my requirements.

EditPad Pro loaded the whole 6GB file into memory and slowed everything to a crawl.

Answer 4

When I'm faced with an enormous log file, I don't try to look at the whole thing, I use Free File Splitter

Admittedly this is a workaround rather than a solution, and there are times when you would need the whole file. But often I only need to see a few lines from a larger file and that seems to be your problem too. If not, maybe others would find that utility useful.

A viewer that lets you see enormous text files isn't much help if you are trying to get it loaded into Excel to use the Autofilter, for example. Since we all spend the day breaking down problems into smaller parts to be able to solve them, applying the same principle to a large file didn't strike me as contentious.

Answer 5

f you just want to view a large file rather than edit it, there are a couple of freeware programs that read files a chunk at a time rather than trying to load the entire file in to memory. I use these when I need to read through large ( > 5 GB) files.

Large Text File Viewer by swiftgear http://www.swiftgear.com/ltfviewer/features.html

Big File Viewer by Team Walrus.

You'll have to find the link yourself for that last one because the I can only post a maximum of one hyperlink being a newbie.

Answer 6

What OS and CPU are you using? If you are using a 32-bit OS, then a process on your system physically cannot address more than 4GB of memory. Since most text editors try to load the entire file into memory, I doubt you'll find one that will do what you want. It would have to be a very fancy text editor, that can do out-of-core processing, i. e. load a chunk of the file at a time.

You may be able to load such a huge file with if you use a 64-bit text editor on a computer with a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit operating system. And you have to make sure that you have enough space in your swap partition or your swap file.