Text editor to handle extremely large files

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There is a graphical vim - gvim - that may be more acceptable to you than the less graphical versions. I haven't tried it on large files though.

But it really comes down to personal preference. vi could do the job, but you're not comfortable using it. That's fine, but you might not like anything suggested either. So just try a few until you find one that works both for your large files and yourself.

The problem you will find is that no editor will work well if it doesn't have the system resources available to do its job. There are limitations that may stop you no matter what editor you try - for example a 32bit system will cause problems for all editors past a couple of hundred meg. A lot of the better known editors will have tricks like disabling features, increasing swap space, etc, to allow large files to be edited.

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Lynob
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Lynob

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

  • Lynob
    Lynob about 1 year

    I generated 300mb text file, trying to edit it using sublime 3 on xubuntu 13.10 64 bit, it's so slow and crashing, I'm not a vim/vi user, what is the best editor to work with these kind of files.

    I only need to search for and remove duplicated text.

    • Admin
      Admin almost 10 years
      This possibly will lead to a lot of subjective anwsers. Could you narrow down your question, perhaps by specifying whether you want the text editor to have syntax highlighting, access to plugins, anything else ...
    • sourav c.
      sourav c. almost 10 years
      you can use emacs. From my experience I can say it is very good to handle large files. There is good support for syntax hilighting too.
    • Lynob
      Lynob almost 10 years
      @vasa1 i narrowed the question
    • evilsoup
      evilsoup almost 10 years
      It sounds like this is some sort of log file, so it's likely that you can achieve your underlying task with standard command-line tools rather than a text editor. When you say you want to search and remove duplicates, what do you mean exactly? Maybe post a few illustrative lines from your text file. These tools (sort, uniq, maybe sed or grep) are generally better suited for large-scale tasks like this. Otherwise... loath as I am to say it (being a vimmer), if you're turned off by vim's general weirdness then your best bet probably is emacs, as @souravc wrote.
    • Eliah Kagan
      Eliah Kagan almost 7 years
      Rather than being primarily opinion-based, this question is objectively answerable. And it has been answered, elsewhere -- this is really a duplicate of Text editor to edit large (4.3 GB) plain text file. I'd refer anyone who finds this question by searching to take a look at the answers there. This may help, too. See also Working with huge files in linux on Stack Overflow.