Text editor recommendation
Hi List. My favorite console text editor is mcedit - I don't subscribe to the vi/emacs debate. But occasionally I need to edit rather large files, and mcedit borks at a few megabytes. When this happens I turn to vi (only because its always available while emacs is a non-default installation option - I really don't do the whole vi vs. emacs thing) and at several dozens of megabytes when vi becomes problematic I find that nano sometimes deliver. But now I'm looking into text files several gigabytes in size, and every attempt to open such files in any of the aforementioned options always ends in me having to kill the process after it brings my (not state of the art but still rather capable) computer to its knees. Does such a beast indeed exists ? A text editor that can handle several gigabytes worth of text (hopefully by not trying to load everything into main memory) ? A console based editor would be preferable, but I don't mind X. it doesn't have to be pretty or support funky text handling commands - it just needs to work. Thanks. -- Oded = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Text editor recommendation
On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 10:38:05AM +0200, Oded Arbel wrote: Hi List. My favorite console text editor is mcedit - I don't subscribe to the vi/emacs debate. But occasionally I need to edit rather large files, and mcedit borks at a few megabytes. When this happens I turn to vi (only because its always available while emacs is a non-default installation option - I really don't do the whole vi vs. emacs thing) and at several dozens of megabytes when vi becomes problematic I find that nano sometimes deliver. But now I'm looking into text files several gigabytes in size, and every attempt to open such files in any of the aforementioned options always ends in me having to kill the process after it brings my (not state of the art but still rather capable) computer to its knees. Does such a beast indeed exists ? A text editor that can handle several gigabytes worth of text (hopefully by not trying to load everything into main memory) ? A console based editor would be preferable, but I don't mind X. it doesn't have to be pretty or support funky text handling commands - it just needs to work. nvi -F nvi is a near-copy of the original vi, unlike vim which has many more features, and which is probably what you get when running 'vi'. It does not read the file to memory. I wouldn't be surprized to find out that both vim and emacs have options to behave so too, I just do not know them. '-F' tells it to not copy the file first to /var/tmp, which it does by default. But are you sure what you really need is an editor? No real editor you'll ever find will be very fast and comfortable with such large files. I'd personally use dd to cut the parts I want to edit first, but of course that's not always relevant. -- Didi = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Text editor recommendation
On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 10:38:05AM +0200, Oded Arbel wrote: Does such a beast indeed exists ? A text editor that can handle several gigabytes worth of text (hopefully by not trying to load everything into main memory) ? A console based editor would be preferable, but I don't mind X. it doesn't have to be pretty or support funky text handling commands - it just needs to work. For starters, if you just need to view and search for text, use less. There's a nice little emacs clone called qemacs. As the 'q' suggests, it was written by Fabrice Bellard (of Qemu). It has not been developed since 2003, but is still available as a Debian package. I've just tried it, and it has opened a large test file quite fast. Just as well as less. I seem to have hit a bug when trying to search backwards (ctrl-R). forward-search is ctrl-S and thus seems to hang the terminal until ctrl-Q is pressed. -- Tzafrir Cohen | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's [EMAIL PROTECTED] || best ICQ# 16849754 || friend = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]