Editing Large Files on Windows

September 4, 2014 —John Koster

I haven't had much of a chance to publish any articles or tutorials lately (I do have some awesome ones planned and in the furnace, though!). For this post I'd like to make note of the newest text editor to join my arsenal (Sublime Text and PHP Storm): EditPad Lite 7.

#Why?

There's not a lot that you cannot do with Sublime Text and PHP Storm when it comes to development. I'd like to use them all the time. I use PHP Storm if I know I will be developing on a project for more than a couple of hours, and I use Sublime Text when I just need an awesome general purpose editor for various tasks (or side projects, where PHP Storm's power is not really needed). The problem is when I need to update or read very large text files, such as database dumps or server log files (some of these files are well over 200 MB, with millions of lines in them.

Editing Large Files on Windows | Opening a large file in Windows using EditPat Lite 7

I guess I haven't attempted to load them in PHP Storm. Sublime Text can do it, but it might take a good 5-10 minutes to load the text file, and its not like my development machine is that under-powered. So I went on a search and found EditPad Lite 7.

EditPad Lite 7 is really awesome for loading large files. The files open almost instantly, and have near-instant find and replace for very large files (I should note that this is not a paid endorsement, I just really like the program).

#Where?

You can grab a copy of EditPad Lite at http://www.editpadlite.com/ (opens in a new tab/window). its not very expensive (free if you're using it for personal, non-commercial use). A single license costs around $25 USD, which is not very much for me if it will save me almost 10 minutes every time I need to read through a log file (which seems to be increasing more these days, but I have plans in the back of my head for dealing with this - more on that later, though).

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