Which GUI text editors can handle files over 100 MB?
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MellowCedar42
I'm looking for a graphical text editor that can reliably open and work with large plain-text files, around 100 MB or more. Several editors I've tried either become extremely slow or fail to open files of that size. Ideally, I'd like something suitable for reading and making occasional edits without loading the file painfully slowly or becoming unstable.
Answers
For simply viewing a large file, `less` is often the best choice because it doesn’t need to present the entire document in a full editor interface. For actual editing, Vim or GVim work well for files in the hundreds of megabytes, although they typically load the whole file into memory and rewrite it when saving.
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Sublime Text has handled files as large as 2 GB for me when other editors failed. Kate is another good free, open-source option to try.
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Kate, Gedit, KWrite, and GVim can generally open files around this size without much trouble. GVim can also be started in a more modeless style with `gvim -y`. That said, if you’re processing large files regularly, scripting or command-line tools may be more practical than editing them manually.
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If you need specialized large-file support, UltraEdit and Liquid Technologies’ Large File Editor are worth looking at. Emacs also has VLF mode for working with very large files, while tools such as CudaText and Oryx may be useful depending on your platform and editing needs.
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