This wee morning I was forced to play around with a huge text file of geographic data. And just how big was it you say? 781 megabytes. This is not a job for Windows Notepad people! So I went looking for a capable Windows text editor that can load the entire text file without choking or running out of memory.
So the story goes that I was looking for some free geographical longitude/latitude data to do mapping. It happens that I found a nice database of such data and proceeded to download the beast. Now I knew my Windows text editor wasn't going to be able to handle the job so I had to look elsewhere.
After spending a couple of hours Googling, installing software, and testing, here is my roundup of Window text editors that I put to the test. It should be noted that very few text editors support large files of hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes in size. Most rely on in-core memory or use a fixed size memory block. Sophisticated text editors have their own custom memory management system built in.
Oh, and before I continue, just to make sure I was seeing the true end of the humongous file, I downloaded Paul Perkins' WinTail to show me the last few lines of the file.
Windows Text Editors
EditPlus
Price: $35
Version: 3.1
Result: Complained that the file was too big and ran out of memory.
J-Write
Price: Free
Version: 2.50
Result: Very fast page load. Took in the entire file, rendered it, and positioned scroll thumb correctly.
NoteTab
Price: $29.95
Version: 5.7
Result: Ran out of memory.
EditPad Pro
Price: $49.95
Version: 6.4.3
Result: No sense where the end of the file was. When dragging the scroll thumb all the way to the bottom, it chunks in the next page but shows no relationship between the current position to the real end of the file. Had to hit the bottom arrow to see one line at a time (gasp) to continue to see more of the file.
Notepad++
Price: Free
Version: 5.1.4
Result: Complained that the file was too big.
TextPad
Price: $32
Version: 5.20
Result: Took about a minute to load the file but did. Scroll bar thumb and scrolling reflected true file position.
And The Winner Is...
If you want a no frills text editor that can take in large files quickly, J Write can do the job. It isn't a pretty editor with all the bells and whistles but good enough to do simple text editing. And the price is right - free.
Second place goes to TextPad as it did load the file but was a lot slower.
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thanks for the text editor review
This saved me a lot of time. I went on a search for editors that could edit large text files but none of them could even do the job. Thanks for doing this. Much appeciated!
Other windows editors for large files
Jwrite is very fast and TexPad is an excellent editor but both have nags. I have used a couple of really FREE windows editors for very large files (say 700MB files):
1. PFE (Programmers File Editor) it is probably one of the best choices if you are not used to emacs-like key bindings. PFE is free and does not have nags.
2. If you like the emacs-like editors, for windows you have Microemacs Jasspa and Nanoemacs Jasspa both are extremely fast and open files of any size. (Although I had some problems with microemacs after copy/pasting huge chunks of text)
3. LISTER: Another possibility if what you want is just to visualize huge text files (not to edit) is using the built-in text file visualizer of the file manager TotalCommander (the visualizer is called "lister"). It is the fastest one I have seen opening huge files. TotalCommander is free, it has a nag when you start it, but I highly recommend it. Lister exists also as standalone free application without nags: it can be downloaded from http://www.ghisler.com/lister/
Hope this helps