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

Answer 1

Instead of loading a gigantic log file in an editor, I'm using Unix command line tools like grep, tail, gawk, etc. to filter the interesting parts into a much smaller file and then, I open that.

On Windows, try Cygwin.

Answer 2

The question would need more details.
Do you want just to look at a file (eg. a log file) or to edit it?
Do you have more memory than the size of the file you want to load or less?
For example, TheGun, a very small text editor written in assembly language, claims to "not have an effective file size limit and the maximum size that can be loaded into it is determined by available memory and loading speed of the file. [...] It has been speed optimised for both file load and save."

To abstract the memory limit, I suppose one can use mapped memory. But then, if you need to edit the file, some clever method should be used, like storing in memory the local changes, and applying them chunk by chunk when saving. Might be ineffective in some cases (big search/replace for example).

Answer 3

Textpad also works well at opening files that size. I have done it many times when having to deal with extremely large log files in the 3-5gb range. Also, using grep to pull out the worthwhile lines and then look at those works great.

Answer 4

I have had problems with TextPad on 4G files too. Notepad++ works nicely.

Answer 5

HxD -- it's a hexeditor, but it allows in place edits, and doesn't barf on large files.

Answer 6

Why do you want to load a 4+ GB file into memory? Even if you find a text editor that can do that, does your machine have 4 GB of memory? And unless it has a lot more than 4 GB in physical memory, your machine will slow down a lot and go swap file crazy.

So why do you want a 4+ GB file? If you want to transform it, or do a search and replace, you may be better off writing a small quick program to do it.