EmEditor : Fast Text Editor

Have you ever tried to edit a big file? I mean, a really big file, like 2GB or more. It should be easy, I mean, after all you just got that fancy new 64-bit Windows box with an 4- or 8-GB of memory. 2GB should be cake, right?

Wrong.

Try opening it with any run of the mill editor like Notepad or Wordpad, or even the normally great TextPad editor and it will take forever. And you can forget about using an IDE like Eclipse for big files unless you like to watch your tools run out of memory and die a painful but lingering death.

EmEditor to the rescue!

EmEditor is a smart editor from Emurasoft that can handle pretty much any sized file. 2GB? 20? 200? No problem. A billion lines? Sure. What about really long lines? Is 10 million columns enough, because EmEditor can handle that with ease. It's not just for programmers, but programmers can certainly appreciate and use many of its features.

The neat thing is that it can handle enormous files without using all that much of your memory. Here's a screenshot from the Windows Task manager showing the editor using less than 50MB of memory when editing a 7.18GB file on Windows 7.

When files get over a certain size (user configurable), EmEditor will start seamlessly spilling them out to disk. You can also edit sections of massive files if you like, for example the first or last 3GB. Most editors try to keep the whole file in memory, and they use algorithms that only work well when you have less than a few thousand lines. Even if you do manage to open a big file, typing or deleting characters can slow to a crawl. By contrast, EmEditor is tuned for speed even with ridiculously large text and binary documents.

EmEditor is one of the few editors I know that has been built for both 32- and 64-bit modes. If you have a 64-bit operating system, why shouldn't you be using a 64-bit editor? You can edit files larger than 4GB even on 32-bit Windows, but 64-bits makes the editor run even faster and keep more in memory before using temporary space.

EmEditor Professional Version 10 has a slew of new features including new compare modes, synchronized scrolling, smarter spell checking, vertical selection editing, and more. See the new features page for a full list. But the feature that makes EmEditor one of my favorites is its astonishing speed with large files. You have to see it to believe it.

DevConnection rating: 95%

Pros:

• Amazingly fast at opening and editing large files
• 64-bit capable
• Powerful vertical selection editing
• Scriptable macros
• Plug-in architecture
• Spell checking understands camelCase
• Multi-language syntax coloring, even in the same file

Cons:

• Not free (but cheap: $39 single seat, volume discounts available)

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