A good Text Editor for Large Text Files

[s243a]

A need a text editor that works from a random access file on disk rather than ram. The reason being is that the file is large and large text files seam to crash geany.

[s243a]

The following thread from stack overflow suggets:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/28847/t ... -text-file
joe, glogg, lfhex, Hed and 010 Editor, kinesics, bless, wxhexeditor, nedit and NetBeans. I don't think that all of these of for linux. I'm going to start from the beginning of the list.

Let me know if anyone recommends any of these.

For fatdog64 on gsplat wxhexeditor is available, so I'll try that one first.

[phat7]

What's a "random access file on disk"? How large is large?

[s243a]

What's a "random access file on disk"? How large is large?

Currently it is only 808M but it could be bigger. It depends on how fine I tune the logging and what the logging interval is. Also how much memory I have depends on what I'm running.

[s243a]

So wxhexeditor seems to work but it is hard to read because it is a hex editor. Glogg is much better for my purposes. The slackbuild compiled with out issue on fatdog64 and is working. I might try compiling a few of the others then offering them for download.

I also was able to comple the slackbuild for nedit on fatdog64, it doesn't seem to render that well for me and it doesn't handle large files as well as glogg.

[jafadmin]

To be clear, do you want to EDIT extremely large files, or VIEW them?

[Colonel Panic]

Have you tried vi or one of its derivatives? I was able to edit a 6 MB text file in GVim without any problems.

[musher0]

To be clear, do you want to EDIT extremely large files, or VIEW them?

Excellent question, jafadmin.

@s243a:
If only viewing, the tail utility has the < -f > setting, which "prints data as
the file grows". There is also good old less, which can read files of infinite
length and has a feature similar to tail.

About editing that 808 Mb file, you know about the split utility, yes? If you
find no editor to edit this extra big file, make a copy of it and split it in
smaller sections your editor can load.

Also, from my experience, I can tell you that the bigger the file, the slower
it is to move through it -- in any editor. So splitting is a good idea.

About text editors --

Here's a relatively new text editor worth trying, IMO: cudatext
(I have put geany on the shelf and now use cudatext instead.)

It doesn't mention about editing huge files, but it has:

Binary/Hex viewer for files of unlimited size.

From your list, "joe" (acronym for "Joe's Own Editor") is for linux.
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io
I have proposed a pet archive of its 4.1 version on this forum:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 201#891122

If that doesn't work on your Pup, please don't say it doesn't work? Tell me
the version of your Pup and I'll compile a joe editor just for you and your
Pup.

Joe is as versatile as geany, and it's been around for over 20 years (IIRC).
The only reason IMO that the joe editor is not getting more exposure is
that it is a CLI app -- and people are snobs!

Also the less reader can easily be interfaced with some text editors by
typing v in less. If you need this feature, I already have available a wrapper
that interfaces less with joe (or Geany, or TEA, but NOT leafpad); just ask.
(Or search this bazaar of a forum a bit: it's already here somewhere!)

IHTH

[s243a]

To be clear, do you want to EDIT extremely large files, or VIEW them?

Excellent question, jafadmin.

@s243a:
If only viewing, the tail utility has the < -f > setting, which "prints data as
the file grows". There is also good old less, which can read files of infinite
length and has a feature similar to tail.

About editing that 808 Mb file, you know about the split utility, yes? If you
find no editor to edit this extra big file, make a copy of it and split it in
smaller sections your editor can load.

Also, from my experience, I can tell you that the bigger the file, the slower
it is to move through it -- in any editor. So splitting is a good idea.

About text editors --

Here's a relatively new text editor worth trying, IMO: cudatext
(I have put geany on the shelf and now use cudatext instead.)

It doesn't mention about editing huge files, but it has:

Binary/Hex viewer for files of unlimited size.

From your list, "joe" (acronym for "Joe's Own Editor") is for linux.
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io
I have proposed a pet archive of its 4.1 version on this forum:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 201#891122

If that doesn't work on your Pup, please don't say it doesn't work? Tell me
the version of your Pup and I'll compile a joe editor just for you and your
Pup.

Joe is as versatile as geany, and it's been around for over 20 years (IIRC).
The only reason IMO that the joe editor is not getting more exposure is
that it is a CLI app -- and people are snobs!

Also the less reader can easily be interfaced with some text editors by
typing v in less. If you need this feature, I already have available a wrapper
that interfaces less with joe (or Geany, or TEA, but NOT leafpad); just ask.
(Or search this bazaar of a forum a bit: it's already here somewhere!)

IHTH

I'll give both joe and vi a try. Glogg works for this purpose and I created a fatdog64 package for it (using the slackbuild) (see post)

[musher0]

Yes, but those are 64-bit apps.

About Glogg:
The Glogg welcome page says it is a combination of grep and less. (Hint, hint.)
Plus Glogg is a Qt app. Wow, the overhead...

Just my 2 ¢.

[s243a]

Yes, but those are 64-bit apps.

About Glogg:
The Glogg welcome page says it is a combination of grep and less. (Hint, hint.)
Plus Glogg is a Qt app. Wow, the overhead...

Just my 2 ¢.

Bless is worse for overhead because it depends on mono!

QT doesn't concern me because I install it on every puppy.

Thanks for the hints though Maybe we could make a gtkdialog version of glogg or maybe a geany plugin that does the same thing

[recobayu]

Cudatext is like sublimetext, isn't it?

[musher0]

Cudatext is like sublimetext, isn't it?

Nope.

[s243a]

I added a compiled version of bless for download on the fatdog64 contribute thead:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 83#1006083

As noted bless renders better than wxhexeditor but is likely heavier weight since it relies on mono. That said I recommend bless much more than wxhexeditor as a hex editor but it isn't as good as glogg if one just wants to view a large text file.

[step]

I would suggest vim (not vi, which is a link to busybox on most systems). Fatdog64 devx includes vim.
As a viewer: vim -R file (read-only)
As a binary editor: vim -b file
As a stream editor: cat file | vim -
vim (without complicated plugins) is very fast, works in terminal, and has a separate GTK version (gvim, in the Fatdog64 contrib repo).

[Colonel Panic]

I would suggest vim (not vi, which is a link to busybox on most systems). Fatdog64 devx includes vim.
As a viewer: vim -R file (read-only)
As a binary editor: vim -b file
As a stream editor: cat file | vim -
vim (without complicated plugins) is very fast, works in terminal, and has a separate GTK version (gvim, in the Fatdog64 contrib repo).

Vim is great I agree, but in its non-GUI form I fear it may be too intimidating for beginners (I really should send in my donation to Bram as I've been using it on and off for nearly 20 years now).

This tutorial tells you how to navigate a file in Vim;

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_03.html