Need a text editor that can handle huge files

[Sir Fredrick]

Hi guys, I need to open up a 120MB text file, word, excel, and netscape all choke when doing this, largely because they try to read the entire file into memory, I'm guessing.
Anyone know of a text editor capable of doing this in a way that won't bring this computer to its knees?
I'm working on a Dell P4 1.5GHz w/256MB of RAM in Win2k (I know, the system needs more memory)

Thanks.

 

[CodeJockey]

You might want to look into either Visual SlickEdit or CodeWright, both of which are programming editors (they seem to be competing against each other, and both contain lots of great features). I have used CodeWright briefly, and use VSlick constantly.

So far, I haven't found a limit to the file size that VSlick can handle (apparently it caches 2MB internally, and swaps the rest in/out from disk). I have edited (viewed and searched, actually) some fairly large log files, but nothing like 120MB, so I can't say for sure.

You might also want to do a search for windows versions of vi...it may be able to handle such a task.

 

[MustPost]

I seem to remember opening huge 1/2 gig mistake files in emacs/xemacs, but Im not entirely sure.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Thanks guys. I ended up just writing a program to extract the data I needed. It only took about 70 lines of code.
Once I did that the file was only ~40MB, much easier to handle. I'll keep those other programs in mind if something like this scomes up again.

 

[GigaCluster]

For future reference, TextPad and possibly UltraEdit can open and manage a text file of ANY size.

 

[KB]

The best small fast and free text editor is Metapad. It can handle very large files, but I have never tried anything that big.