This program was designed for viewing large (>1GB) text files. It uses little memory and is able to open a gigabyte file instantly. Background file indexing makes browsing even faster.
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.
Any suggestions?
Free apple iphone recovery software. • on your Mac.
closed as not constructive by KevJan 27 '12 at 1:47
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
locked by MattSep 2 '15 at 20:08
This question’s answers are a collaborative effort. If you see something that can be improved, just edit the answer to improve it! No additional answers can be added here.
Read more about locked posts here.
Shortcut for pasting values only. Mac keyboard shortcuts By pressing certain key combinations, you can do things that normally need a mouse, trackpad, or other input device. To use a keyboard shortcut, press and hold one or more modifier keys and then press the last key of the shortcut. How can the answer be improved?
2 Answers
VS Code (Windows, macOS, Linux) - Free and Open Source with a nice GUI. Edited a 3.6 GB JSON file, loaded in a minute. You must have enough RAM to load the files.
Free read-only viewers:
- glogg (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Confirmed to handle multi-GB files. Its main feature is regular expression search. Has tabs, reads files directly from disk, can watch/follow files, and allows user to mark lines.
- LogExpert (Windows) – 'A GUI replacement for
tail.' Supports file following, searching, filtering, configurable highlighting, plugins, and external tools. - Large Text File Viewer (Windows) – Minimalist and has very small executable size. Supports split view, text theme customization, regex search, and file following.
- Lister (Windows) – Even more small and minimalist. It's one executable, barely 500 KB, but it still supports searching (with regexes), printing, a hex editor mode, and settings.
Free editors:
- Vim and Emacs (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Classic Unix editors. Steep learning curve, but brutally efficient. They have settings that can be tuned to make them even faster.
- Large File Editor (Windows) – Opens and edits TB+ files, supports Unicode, uses little memory, has XML-specific features, and includes a binary mode.
- HxD (Windows) – A hex editor, not a text editor; but it's amazingly fast and useful.
- 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 Unixmore. A console program that allows you to view a file, one screen at a time.
Web viewers:
- htmlpen.com – Can open and syntax-highlight TB+ files. Allows editing, except for very large files. Supports searching, regexes, and exporting.
- readfileonline.com – Another HTML5 large file viewer. Supports search.
Paid editors:
- 010 Editor (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens giant (as much 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).
And finally, have you tried opening the large file with your regular editor? Some editors can actually handle reasonably large files. In particular, Notepad++ (Windows) and Sublime Text (Windows, macOS, Linux) support files in the 2 GB range.
less
Why are you using editors to just look at a (large) file?
Under *nix or Cygwin, just use less. (There is a famous saying – 'less is more, more or less' – because 'less' replaced the earlier Unix command 'more', with the addition that you could scroll back up.) Searching and navigating under less is very similar to Vim, but there is no swap file and little RAM used.
There is a Win32 port of GNU less. See the 'less' section of the answer above.
Perl
Perl is good for quick scripts, and its . (range flip-flop) operator makes for a nice selection mechanism to limit the crud you have to wade through.
For example:
This will extract everything from line 1 million to line 2 million, and allow you to sift the output manually in less.
Another example:
This starts printing when the 'regular expression one' finds something, and stops when the 'regular expression two' find the end of an interesting block. It may find multiple blocks. Sift the output..
logparser
This is another useful tool you can use. To quote the Wikipedia article:
logparser is a flexible command line utility that was initially written by Gabriele Giuseppini, a Microsoft employee, to automate tests for IIS logging. It was intended for use with the Windows operating system, and was included with the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools. The default behavior of logparser works like a 'data processing pipeline', by taking an SQL expression on the command line, and outputting the lines containing matches for the SQL expression.
Microsoft describes Logparser as a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. The results of the input query can be custom-formatted in text based output, or they can be persisted to more specialty targets like SQL, SYSLOG, or a chart.
Good text editor app for mac. The best free and paid text editors for the Mac. But if you want to customize a text editor to do your bidding, Brackets is a good place to start. Free - Download now; TextMate 2. He said, but Apple's restrictions on how apps can work on the Mac App Store pushed him over the edge. So the Mac App Store's loss is your gain. What makes a good text editor? But Atom’s settings are probably the best example of where Atom defines itself more as a text editor and less as a Mac app. That doesn’t mean the settings are more difficult to use, though. For every checkbox or setting you can change, Atom includes a small bit of copy that explains — in relatively human.
How do I convert mp3 to text on Mac? Update Cancel. Ad by GitKraken. What are good Git GUI clients for Mac? GitKraken is cross-platform, has a beautiful UI, is easy to setup/use, has smooth integrations & is free. Download at gitkraken.com. How do I convert audiobooks to MP3 for free? Audio to text converter free download - MediaHuman Audio Converter, Switch Audio and Mp3 Converter Free, Text Converter, and many more programs. Text for free yahoo. Here's how to transcribe.MP3 audio files to text. All you need is a Mac, some open source software and these instructions. How to Transcribe.MP3 Audio from Podcasts or.MP4 Movies to Text on Mac OS. Posted on 4 May 2016 11 June 2017 by Bill Freedman.
Example usage:
The relativity of sizes
100 MB isn't too big. 3 GB is getting kind of big. I used to work at a print & mail facility that created about 2% of U.S. first class mail. One of the systems for which I was the tech lead accounted for about 15+% of the pieces of mail. We had some big files to debug here and there.
And more..
Feel free to add more tools and information here. This answer is community wiki for a reason! We all need more advice on dealing with large amounts of data..
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged windowsxmleditortext-editorlarge-files or ask your own question.
- By
One of the most common mistakes WordPress-newbies make is using a word processor (like Microsoft Word, Pages, and WordPerfect) to edit server-side source-code files (such as .html, .css and .php files, etc). The problem here is that word processors need to embed a lot of extra data in the file (behind the scenes) in order to define various things like font styles, etc — data that is almost always both specific to the word processor being used AND completely incomprehensible to the kind of server-side systems required to run websites (be them powered by WordPress or otherwise). The solution, however, is extremely simple: when creating and/or editing server-side files (such as those used with WordPress) be sure to only ever use a purpose-built Text Editor. Let’s take a look at a few of the best options created specifically for the task: both free and premium — for both Macs and Windows:
Premium Text Editors:
Looking for more than just a basic text editor and got the cash to spare? Then go for one of these (note: scroll down for some excellent free alternatives)…
Sublime Text (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)
Publicly released in 2008, Sublime Text is now one of the most popular and highly-regarded text editors available! One of the most notable things that sets this particular software apart is that it works across all three major platforms (Windows, OSX, and Linux) — on top of which it also supports a huge range of languages, has extensive customizability via JSON settings files (including project-specific and platform-specific settings), and offers a huge range of features including column selection and multi-select editing, auto-completion, snippets, in-editor code building and a particularly handy navigation system that lets users open files with only a few keystrokes and instantly jump to specific symbols, lines or words.
(click to enlarge)
Price – $70 (note: free trial available).
BBEdit (for Macs)
Designed specifically for software developers and web designers (and with over 20 years of history), BBEdit contains powerful multi-file text searching capabilities including strong support for Perl-compatible regular expressions and GREP. It includes FTP and SFTP tools, integrates with various code management systems, supports version control, shows differences between file versions and allows for the merging of changes. Also noteworthy is the fact that the same company that makes BBEdit, also offer an entirely free version named ‘TextWrangler’ (see below) — which may very well suffice if all you’re looking for is a top-notch text editor to edit (or even create) a few source files from time to time!
(click to enlarge)
Price – $49.99 (note: free trial available).
TextMate (for Macs)
Billed as ‘the missing editor’ and awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, TextMate is a much-loved text editor with a number of notable features, including declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. In short: it’s both a joy to use and highly-capable — what’s more, it’s also particularly well-documented — heck, it even has its own book! If you’re a hardcore coder developing on the Mac, be sure to check this one out!
(click to enlarge)
Price – $54 (note: free trial available).
Free Text Editors:
Although the above premium text editors are all very very nice, if you’re only a basic/beginner developer then you may well find one of these free options will more than suffice…
Atom (for Windows, Macs and Linux)
Released on June 25th 2015, Atom is the newest text editor on this list — and a choice that professional coders everywhere will likely want to seriously consider! Written in CoffeeScript and Less, Atom is a completely free and open-source text editor with support for plugins written in Node.js — referred to by its creators as “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”.
Atom is a text editor that’s modern and extremely user-friendly — a tool you can customize to do just about anything with. It features cross-platform editing, a built-in package manager, smart auto-completion, a file system browser, four UI and eight built-in syntax themes, multiple panes and — of course: handy find and replace features.
(click to enlarge)
TextWrangler (for Macs)
The free alternative to BBEdit (see above), TextWrangler differs to its premium counterpart in a number of ways — all of which are detailed in a nice table on the official Bare Bones website here (notably lacking various HTML markup tools, text completion and file organization features). Whenever I find myself having to recommend an entirely free text editor for the Mac (or when I need to use one on someone else’s computer etc), I almost invariably go straight for this one — mainly because it’s just so darn simple to use!
(click to enlarge)
Komodo Edit (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)
The free and Open-Source counterpart of Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit allows user customization through plug-ins and macros, and boasts a range of different features, including auto complete, multiple selections, smart snippets (view a complete list). The downside of all this free power though is because of its IDE roots, it perhaps isn’t quite as user-friendly as some of its simpler rivals. By all means give it a go (especially if you’re more of an advanced user), but if all you’re wanting to do is edit a few individual source files, then this one might just be a bit too daunting to start out with!
(click to enlarge)
Notepad++ (for Windows)
Text Editor For Large Text Files
Regarded by many as the best free text editor available for Windows (and with over 28 million downloads to date), Notepad++ is a robust, powerful and highly capable text editor that gets the job done! It supports over 50 programing languages, opens large files significantly faster than the default Windows Notepad (mentioned below) and boasts a range of impressive features, including tabbed editing (thereby allowing you to work with multiple open files in a single window), split screen, auto-completion, macros, syntax highlighting, syntax folding and a whole host of other handy functionality!
Plus two more (the Default Mac & Windows Text Editors):
Although sometimes completely overlooked, both Mac and Window operating systems both come with their own default text editors built in — and whilst they’re certainly not the best (having none of the refinements of their more fully featured counterparts), they’ll certainly do the job if all you’re looking to do is make a few simple edits…
Notepad (for Windows)
Large Text File Viewer
Offering only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding and replacing text, Notepad (not to be confused with WordPad — which is NOT a text editor) is by far the most basic text editor listed in this article — with almost none of the handy features (syntax coloring, code folding, regular expressions, macros, block-select, etc, etc) found in just about all of its 3rd party counterparts!
TextEdit (for Macs)
Large Text Generator
Mac’s default text editor, TextEdit, combines features of a text editor with those of a word processor, such as rulers, margins, and multiple font selections — allowing it to be used as both a text editor AND a basic word processor — depending on the settings/preferences. Similarly to Notepad (mentioned above), it has almost none of the numerous features found in its 3rd party rivals. While it may well do the job for a basic edit or two, if you’re intending to edit server-side files on a regular basis, you’ll do a lot better with one of the free or premium options mentioned above.
(click to enlarge)
Wrapping up: How to Choose? Which is Best?
Well, first off: all seven of these text editors are built for coders and all seven are pretty darn awesome! What’s more, every one of them is available as a free trial — meaning you can give each a carefree whirl before deciding. If you’re a hardcore coder working in multiple languages you’ll probably appreciate some of the specific software development tools and high-end functionality (like multiple selections, split editing and project organization features) found only in some of the premium options (if this sounds like you then be sure to check out about the most popular premium text editing software available: Sublime Text) — update: serious coders should also be sure to check out the newest on this list: Atom — however, if you’re only a casual coder looking for a top-end text editor with basic features like syntax highlighting, macros and spell-checking, etc, then maybe start with say TextWrangler (a personal favorite of mine) if you’re on the Mac or Notepad++ if you’re a Windows user and see how you get on — after all, there’s really no need to pay top-dollar for features you’ll perhaps never use/need!
Note: For a comprehensive list of just about all the different text editors currently available check out this Wikipedia article.
Top tip: before editing any files, ALWAYS make a quick back up of them first: because there’s usually no going back once things have been overwritten without one!
Know of any other top text editors for Macs and/or Windows? Any preferences?
Mac Files On Windows
TOP DEALS
Mac Program Files Location
Save a handsome 25% on MaxCDN!
Programs For Large Text File On Mac