Text editor to open 4.3 GB plain text file

Question

Is there any text editor, which can open such file?

I've tried:

• gedit
• kate
• nano
• vim
• mcedit

without success.

Answer 1

another method is to use split. split the file in 8 pices and manipulate the files with a editor. After that you reassemble the files again.

split -b 53750k <your-file>

cat xa* > <your-file>


SYNOPSIS
       split [OPTION]... [INPUT [PREFIX]]

-a, --suffix-length=N
              use suffixes of length N (default 2)

       -b, --bytes=SIZE
              put SIZE bytes per output file

       -C, --line-bytes=SIZE
              put at most SIZE bytes of lines per output file

       -d, --numeric-suffixes
              use numeric suffixes instead of alphabetic

       -l, --lines=NUMBER
              put NUMBER lines per output file

Answer 2

Give it a go, if you like, but such big files become impractical if you want to do "normal" editing; eg, you don't want to go saving your edits too often; it will take too long :)

If it's for a one off, split and join would work quite well, and it is simple enough to chop it up into managable chunks, and then rejoin the pieces... Take note that many editors will add a newline character to the end of your edited file, and do it without informing you! For more info see How to stop Gedit, Gvim, Vim, Nano from adding End-of-File newline char?

Try Gvim if you really want edit such a big file.... I've just loaded a 3.9GB file into it, and all seems to be normal...

Here is an interesting link on the matter, at stackoverflow

Answer 3

you will not find them. If you want to replace some lines in this file, you can look at with less or grep and use sed to search and replace some lines.

like this:

sed -e 's/oldstuff/newstuff/g' inputFileName > outputFileName

on Wikipedia are some useful examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

Answer 4

According to this Wikipedia article Comparison of text editors VIM among others. I was going to suggest Geany but there is a ? in the field for large file support...

EDIT: I went ahead and tried with geany and gave up after waiting 10 minutes with 3 cores pegged and basically all my memory (virtual and physical) in use the entire time... Not conclusive since it might have managed to open it if I'd been more patient. I looked for and did not find any settings/preferences for handling large files differently as well.

I like fred.bear's answer best.

Answer 5

A really nice freeware that lets you open INSTANTLY and edit any file (I mean any iper-huge monster file) is HxD (http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/). You just need any copy of Windows to run it.