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I'm looking for a simple and light weight text editor that is capable to open and edit text files from >=2GB quickly and is also capable to process find and replace operations in such files quickly.
Requirements
Already tried, but not appropriate
Any ideas? Thanks. Bunjip.
CudaText editor can open/edit big files, up to avail memory size (better use x64 version).
Default max size is 1Gb. To allow max file size of 2Gb, call "Options / Settings-user" and write such option to "user.json":
"ui_max_size_open": 2048,
Thunderpad (formerly TEXTPAD), is really fast, regarding file size limit It can handle big files easily.
The only downside I see is that it is not clear how big of a file it can handle, it just says "It can handle file sizes up to the largest contiguous chunk of 32-bit virtual memory", I haven't had a problem with >2gb log file, but it will depend on your hardware/memory/disk structure.
The problem with editing large files is that if you delete or insert anything, then the file will have to move data around; for example, when you insert a line of text, the editor has to move the lines after it to make room for the new line.
However, if you know what you are doing, you can use a hex editor; it doesn't move anything, but it lets you overwrite parts of the file, byte by byte. I have used it to edit in the middle of a huge text file (600GB) created by mysqldump.
WARNING Hex editors are very powerful, and you can easily cause irreparable damage, so consider everything you do very carefully, and make sure you understand the structure of the file in sufficient detail.
