Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by teddyh 2250 days ago
> Sublime Text, no other editor can AFAIK open a 200+MB file without freezing and/or crashing.

Just last week I opened, edited, and saved, a 4 Gigabyte SQL dump file, in Emacs. It was a bit slower than usual, but still well usable, and certainly no crashes.

2 comments

You're right, I just opened a 1.2gb file (obtained with base64 -b 60) in fundamental mode, and it actually works decently enough.

I tried the same with Sublime Text: it took a long while to open the file but, once opened, navigating the file was very slick, I could scroll from top to end and vice versa in a breeze, so I would say that Sublime Text still wins this one.

[edited to clarify: Emacs opened the file in just a few seconds, but then going to the end of the buffer, to the beginning, to line 100.000 is quite slow.]

Large files seem fine in emacs as long as the lines are not too long. A 100MB file is no problem if there are less than a couple of hundred characters per line. If the average line is 2K characters, emacs will be unusable.
As long as you turn off syntax highlighting, it's fine. But it's annoying that you need to do that.
I didn’t. I kept syntax highlighting on. And it was still fine.