Best Free Text Editor Supporting More Than 4GB Files

Question

I am looking for a text editor that will be able to load a 4  Gigabyte file into it   Textpad doesn t work   I own a copy of it and have been to its support site  it just doesn t do it   Maybe I need new hardware  but that s a different question    The editor needs to be free OR  if its going to cost me  then no more than  30   For Windows

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EmEditor should handle this  As their site claims       EmEditor is now able to open even larger than 248 GB  or 2 1 billion lines  by opening a   portion of the file with the new custom bar - Large File Controller    The Large File Controller allows you to specify the beginning point    end point  and range of the file to be opened  It also allows you to   stop the opening of the file and monitor the real size of the file and   the size of the temporary disk available    Not free though

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Jeff Atwood has a post on this here  http   www codinghorror com blog archives 000229 html  He eventually went with Edit Pad Pro  because  Based on my prior usage history  I felt that EditPad Pro was the best fit  it s quite fast on large text files  has best-of-breed regex support  and it doesn t pretend to be an IDE

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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

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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

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HxD -- it s a hexeditor  but it allows in place edits  and doesn t barf on large files

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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

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Emacs can handle huge file sizes and you can use it on Windows or  nix

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glogg could also be considered  for a different usage     Caveat  reported by Simon Tewsi in the comments  Feb  2013      One caveat - has two search functions  Main Search and Quick Find    The lower one  which I assume is Quick Find  is at least an order of magnitude slower than the upper one  which is fast

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I ve had to look at monster runaway  log files  20  GB   I used hexedit FREE version which can work with any size files  It is also open source  It is a Windows executable

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Tweak is a hex editor which can handle edits to very large files  including inserts and deletes

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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

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I found that FAR commander could open large files   I tried 4 2 GB xml file  And it does not load the entire file in memory and works fast

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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

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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

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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

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

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Sorry to post on such an old thread  but I tried several of the tips here  and none of them worked for me   It s slightly different than a text editor  but I found that Beyond Compare could handle an extremely large  3 6 Gig  file on my Vista 32-bit machine     This is a file that that Emacs  Large Text File Viewer  HexEdit  and Notepad   all choked on   -Eric

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Opened 5GB file  quickly  with   1  Hex Editor Neo 2  010 editor

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I also like notepad

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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

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For windows  unix  or Mac   On the Mac or  nix you can use command line or GUI versions of emacs or vim     For the Mac  TextWrangler to handle big files well   I m not versed enough on the Windows landscape to help out there

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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

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Have you tried context editor  It is small and fast

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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

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

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

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

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