Text editor to open big (giant, huge, large) text files [closed]

I mean 100+ MB big; such text files can push the envelope of editors.

I need to look through a large XML file, but cannot if the editor is buggy.

2 Answers 2

Free read-only viewers:

• Large Text File Viewer (Windows) – Fully customizable theming (colors, fonts, word wrap, tab size). Supports horizontal and vertical split view. Also support file following and regex search. Very fast, simple, and has small executable size.
• klogg (Windows, macOS, Linux) – A maintained fork of glogg, its main feature is regular expression search. It can also watch files, allows the user to mark lines, and has serious optimizations built in. But from a UI standpoint, it’s ugly and clunky.
• LogExpert (Windows) – «A GUI replacement for tail .» It’s really a log file analyzer, not a large file viewer, and in one test it required 10 seconds and 700 MB of RAM to load a 250 MB file. But its killer features are the columnizer (parse logs that are in CSV, JSONL, etc. and display in a spreadsheet format) and the highlighter (show lines with certain words in certain colors). Also supports file following, tabs, multifiles, bookmarks, search, plugins, and external tools.
• Lister (Windows) – Very small and minimalist. It’s one executable, barely 500 KB, but it still supports searching (with regexes), printing, a hex editor mode, and settings.
• loxx (Windows) – Supports file following, highlighting, line numbers, huge files, regex, multiple files and views, and much more. The free version can not: process regex, filter files, synchronize timestamps, and save changed files.

Your regular editor or IDE. Modern editors can handle surprisingly large files. In particular, Vim (Windows, macOS, Linux), Emacs (Windows, macOS, Linux), Notepad++ (Windows), Sublime Text (Windows, macOS, Linux), and VS Code (Windows, macOS, Linux) support large (

4 GB) files, assuming you have the RAM.

Large File Editor (Windows) – Opens and edits TB+ files, supports Unicode, uses little memory, has XML-specific features, and includes a binary mode.

GigaEdit (Windows) – Supports searching, character statistics, and font customization. But it’s buggy – with large files, it only allows overwriting characters, not inserting them; it doesn’t respect LF as a line terminator, only CRLF; and it’s slow.

Builtin programs (no installation required):

• less (macOS, Linux) – The traditional Unix command-line pager tool. Lets you view text files of practically any size. Can be installed on Windows, too.
• Notepad (Windows) – Decent with large files, especially with word wrap turned off.
• MORE (Windows) – This refers to the Windows MORE , not the Unix more . A console program that allows you to view a file, one screen at a time.

• 010 Editor (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens giant (as large as 50 GB) files.
• SlickEdit (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens large files.
• UltraEdit (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens files of more than 6 GB, but the configuration must be changed for this to be practical: Menu » Advanced » Configuration » File Handling » Temporary Files » Open file without temp file.
• EmEditor (Windows) – Handles very large text files nicely (officially up to 248 GB, but as much as 900 GB according to one report).
• BssEditor (Windows) – Handles large files and very long lines. Don’t require an installation. Free for non commercial use.

Edit big files windows

UltraEdit’s file handling is designed to prevent it from using all the available memory, which would stop other applications from running. What does this mean to you? UltraEdit has no real limit on file size — and can easily open, edit, and save large text files in excess of 4 GB!

I love how it easily handles large text files.I have a db log file that is several GB, and UE quickly opens the file, and I can search the entire document very easily. It also searches the entire file surprisingly fast. I also love how IDM is continuously maintaining, and updating UE to keep up with the constantly changing IT world. John S.See more reviews

There are several configuration settings that can be configured to optimize the editing of large files. We will take a look at the following:

1. Disable temp files

This is probably the most important tweak you can make to improve performance when opening very large files.

As mentioned above, UltraEdit is a disk based editor, which means it only loads small portions of the file into memory. As UltraEdit uses 64-Bit handling for the file it has no real limit on file size, and does not use excessive RAM for editing. However, when opening the file with a temporary file, UltraEdit must first create a copy of the file in your temporary directory. Copying the file can cause the initial loading to be very slow, especially with huge multi-gigabyte files. By disabling temp file creation on load, UltraEdit will not first copy the file to your temp directory.

This setting may be accessed in Advanced » Settings » File handling » Temporary files. Enable the option to «Open file without a temp file.»

Important note: This does mean you are directly editing the original file so any changes will be permanent.

We recommend that you set a threshold for the temp file setting for files above a certain size (specified in KB). The threshold will set a limit for using temporary files on files that are over the specified amount. For example, if you set this to 51,200 KB (which is a good threshold for most), UltraEdit will not use temporary files when you open a file that is more than 51,200 KB (50 MB).

Note: for more information on how UltraEdit uses temp files, please see our temporary file power tip.

2. Disable line numbers

Disabling line numbers on large files will help make navigation much quicker. You can access this setting in Advanced » Settings » Editor display » Miscellaneous: «Disable line numbers«.

If you plan to edit and move around quite a bit in large files, make sure to enable this option. UltraEdit requires more processing to calculate line numbers when moving to different places in extremely large files. This option disables line number calculation, and thus, improves performance.

3. Disable line terminator conversion

If you’ve set UltraEdit to automatically convert line terminators to DOS format, you will want to disable this, as this will take a very long time for very large files. You can access this setting in Advanced » Settings » File handling » DOS/Unix/Mac handling.

This option is designed to allow you to determine if the editor should automatically detect and convert Unix (LF only) or Mac legacy (CR only) files to DOS (CR/LF) format on open.

4. Disable code folding

Code folding requires parsing of the entire file on open in order for UltraEdit to calculate where a fold should begin and end. As your file grows in size and more and more nested folding sections of code occur, the amount of system resources (RAM, CPU) required to display code folding increases as well. For very large files, it’s a good idea to disable code folding.

You can disable code folding by going to Advanced » Settings » Editor display » Code folding. Uncheck «Enable Show/Hide Lines and Code Folding» here.

5. Disable the function list

Like code folding, the function list parses an entire file when it is opened in order to locate and display functions. You can disable (hide) the function list by pressing F8 or in the Layout tab.

6. Set a large file threshold for the XML manager

The XML manager is another feature which will parse your entire file on open. You can prevent the XML manager from automatically parsing files larger than a specified size in Advanced » Settings » XML manager. Set the «Auto parse XML documents less than» value in MB here.

7. Disable syntax highlighting

To really free up resources for extremely large files, disable syntax highlighting completely (if your large file is source code with syntax highlighting). Disabling syntax highlighting will also automatically disable code folding and function listing as well.

You can completely disable syntax highlighting before opening a large file by going to Advanced » Settings » Editor display » Syntax highlighting and unchecking «Enable syntax coloring«.

You can also disable syntax highlighting for the active file only, which in the case of large files is only helpful if done very quickly after open, by selecting «No Highlighting» under «View » View As (Highlighting File Type)» or, in UE v19.00/UES v13.00 and later, selecting «No Highlighting» in the status bar control (if the basic status bar configuration setting is not enabled).

8. Disable the Line Change Indicator (LCI)

If you plan to make changes and edit your large file after you open it, it is a good idea to disable the LCI for the file. The LCI records saved and unsaved changes per line into memory.

To disable the LCI, go to Advanced » Settings » Editor display » Syntax highlighting and uncheck «Enable line change indicator (LCI).»

Как открыть большой текстовый файл

Если вы попытаетесь загрузить текстовый файл в несколько гигабайтов и больше в текстовый редактор, то поймете, что программы, поставляемые с ОС Windows, для этого не подходят.

В то время, как большинство пользователей ПК могут никогда не сталкиваться с огромными текстовыми файлами, некоторые же действительно нуждаются в надежной программе, способной открывать такие документы.

Ни Блокнот, ни Wordpad не открывают очень большие текстовые файлы, и даже любимые сторонние альтернативы, такие как Notepad ++, не могут открыть файл превышающий 100 мб.

Большинство программ отказываются загружать 30-гигабайтный хэш-файлы. Это касается так же и больших лог-файлов размером в десятки гигабайт.

В этой статье я расскажу о нескольких текстовых редакторах, которые вы сможете использовать для открытия очень больших текстовых файлов в операционной системе Windows.

Программы для открытия больших текстовых файлов

На сегодняшний день существуют как платные, например, Ultra Edit, так и бесплатные программы, позволяющие не только открывать, но и редактировать текстовые файлы больших размеров. Я считаю, что в данном случае нет необходимости платить деньги, т.к. и бесплатные программы хорошо справляются с этой задачей.

Рассмотрим некоторые из них:

• EditPad Lite — имеет ограничение в 4 гигабайта, но поддерживает просмотр и редактирование. Редактор в версии Lite распространяется бесплатно. Есть также русский интерфейс.
• EmEditor — редактор EM, согласно списку функций на официальном веб-сайте, поддерживает файлы размером до 248 гигабайт, интерфейс программы переведен на разные языки (в том числе русский). Я открыл 30-гигабайтный текстовый файл без проблем, хотя для загрузки документа потребовалось некоторое время.
• Glogg — это кросс-платформенная программа, которая быстро загружает большие текстовые файлы. Это приложение для просмотра, поддерживающее просмотр и поиск текстовых файлов. Есть версия как для 32 так и для 64-бит архитектур.
• Large Text File Viewer — бесплатная программа для Windows, которая просто открывает большие текстовые файлы. Программа загрузила 30-гигабайтный текстовый документ. Однако это приложение для чтения, что означает, что вы можете использовать его для просмотра и поиска текста, но не для его редактирования.
• Universal Viewer — программа загрузила текстовый документ 30 гб быстрее, чем любой другой. Это приложение предназначено так же только для просмотра и поиска.

Большинство программ в нашем списке поддерживают только просмотр и открытие, и не поддерживают редактирование текстовых документов. При необходимости вы так же можете разделить документ на несколько частей для лучшей доступности. Это работает, но только в том случае, если вам не нужно искать по всему архиву, так как разделение файла только усложнит эту ситуацию.

Итак, если вам нужно просматривать или редактировать текстовые файлы размером в несколько или десятки гигабайт, то описанные в статье программы помогут в этом.

Я конечно согласен, что неудобно использовать дополнительные специальные программы для открытия больших текстовых файлов. Хотелось бы, что бы они открывались обычным блокнотом Word или хотя бы Notepad++. Надеюсь, это новшество не заставит нас долго ждать, и мы вскоре напишем и о нем.

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

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Closed 5 years ago .

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.

24 Answers 24

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.

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.

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.»

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.

Have you tried context editor? It is small and fast.

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.

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.

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.

My favourite after trying a few to read a 6GB mysqldump file:

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HxD — it’s a hexeditor, but it allows in place edits, and doesn’t barf on large files.

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

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..

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.

Opened 5GB file (quickly) with:

1) Hex Editor Neo

2) 010 editor

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.

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).