TextPad for Linux?

January 1, 2007 4:10 PM

What editor for Linux can edit LARGE files (like TextPad)?

I am in a situation where I don't have access to a Windows box and and I want to be able to edit any size file, like TextPad. Does any editor under Linux have this support? I would like a native editor and not have to use Wine.

posted by cowmix to computers & internet (16 comments total)

I've edited text files of up to about half a terabyte of size on linux using vim. It takes a while to open up, but it was pretty responsive. (Except when I asked it to skip to the end of the file. Then it took a while.)
posted by headlessagnew at 4:19 PM on January 1, 2007

Seconding VIM...for editing all text files. But do note the classic vi (not a problem on linux, but other unixes) can't handle big files at all, it just silently opens as much as it can, and doesn't tell you there is more.
posted by cschneid at 4:21 PM on January 1, 2007

I have yet to find a file so large that VIM cannot edit it.
posted by SPrintF at 4:30 PM on January 1, 2007

ok ok ok...

VIM is working for my gigabyte file..

:)

thanks!
posted by cowmix at 4:33 PM on January 1, 2007

4th vim/gvim. By far the best Linux editor around, IMO. emacs shouldn't choke on huge files either, but I find it to get slower than vim when editing very large files. Of course, last time I used emacs I only had 32MB of RAM, so that may have been part of the problem.

cschneid is right about other vis, including elvis not doing the job. Some distributions package elvis and have 'vim' as an alias for it, so be sure you're using the real thing.
posted by wierdo at 4:37 PM on January 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

With "vim", you might want to disable syntax highlighting (if it's on) and use the "-n" parameter so that you don't create a swap file that is Really Big.
posted by cmiller at 4:37 PM on January 1, 2007

You might also try nano/pico, which doesn't have as steep a learning curve and is pretty much as powerful as the other editors.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:03 PM on January 1, 2007

Emacs should also work.
posted by singingfish at 5:36 PM on January 1, 2007

Ok.. I just finished my editing and vim worked great.. I do wish, however, someone would like a more make it so 'gedit' can handle LARGE files also..
posted by cowmix at 6:53 PM on January 1, 2007

Not to derail...but half a terabyte of plain text? What the heck were you editing, the human genome?
posted by markcholden at 7:43 PM on January 1, 2007

markcholden, i think the human genome is about 3.something billion base pairs, so it is probably closer to 3GB worth of data.
posted by mulligan at 9:21 PM on January 1, 2007

No one puts the human genome into one text file to work with it. People work with smaller FASTA-formatted or other annotated files.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:24 PM on January 1, 2007

Emacs used to be the way to go for large text files, but it has a limit (around 1GB I think? probably because of elisp's integer representation). These days I actually run into that limit sometimes so I, like everyone else apparently, use vim for that.
posted by hattifattener at 11:31 PM on January 1, 2007

emacs has a relatively low filesize limit due to the elisp pointer representation. It used to be 128Mb in recent versions after 19.28, but I don't know what the limit in the current version is.
posted by pharm at 12:35 AM on January 2, 2007

OK, let the 'what's in half a terabyte of text' pool commence. I say headlessagnew is a corpus linguist.
posted by eritain at 2:31 AM on January 2, 2007

Genome data is very plausible. I occasionally work with files as large as 10 GB. As mulligan says, though, it's much more common to split these files up into a manageable size. Oh, and I'd never try to open files like that in a text editor. That's what scripts are for.
posted by chrisamiller at 9:02 AM on January 2, 2007