Decent Text Editor For Large Files?

I’ve been working with large text files above 100MB in size and they take an eternity to open in Notepad, while in Wordpad and Word they have to keep loading as I scroll through the file.

I’ve been using PrestoSoft ExamDiff to compare the files and that can open and compare two files in a fraction of the time it takes for Notepad to simply open one file. This made me realise there's probably much better text editors out there than notepad so I was wondering if anyone could recommend a simple text editor that can open large files quickly?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Take a look at SciTE. It's my personal favourite. Fast, simple with some pretty nice features for a developer (like syntax highlighting, code completion and integration with a lot of compilers and interpreters). And apart from being a great tool for writing small applications it's also a good notepad-like text editor. Only 100 times faster.

Try Emacs. It opens huge files in the same amount of time than an hex editor, and the search function is faster than hex workshope search function!

And, for small files (a few hundred kilobytes), Metapad is a very good alternative to notepad.

If you need this for Windows, try Notepad++.

Thanks a lot for the replies. I'll give those three a try now.

Edit:

Emacs and Notepad++ seemed to be a bit more sophisticated than I need so I've gone for SciTE which does everything I want. I can’t believe how fast it opens the files compared to Notepad – 3 seconds versus 74 for a 105MB file. It will save me a massive amount of time and has a lot of features that will be very useful. Wish I’d looked into this sooner.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

I need to open a text file of 2.12 GB (2,281,435,124 bytes). Any idea about how to go about it? Now don't ask me how I got a text file so large!! Its a log file. :rolleyes:

I tried out Wordpad, and it works but takes such a hell lot of a time, I just cant wait for it to fully load. It takes atleast 20 minutes to load the first few pages at least.

Notepad++ was taking such a long time to even start displaying at least some text from the file before it froze my system & Windows starting throwing the Low Virtual Memory warning message.

Please help.

I did a google search, there are some solutions offered for the search string "open a 2gb text file", I guess it is a more common problem than expected.

However, I had a scan through some of these solutions and they basically offered more of the advice given above, i.e. trying different text editors, getting more RAM (theoretically more than 2gb?).

The solutions looked flakey, so if I were you I would be looking for a file splitter application in google and try separating it into four chunks or something.

There are a lot of file splitters on google or sourceforge if you have a look.

If you just want to view the file I guess the file viewer in Total Commander is up to the job. www.ghisler.com

If you have access to a linux box, you could always use 'split' to split the file up into smaller pieces.

Viggy

Ultra Edit. By far the best text editor I have ever used for anything.