TextMate, the 21st Century and Large Files
During my windows days I’m always been a big fan of Ultraedit. Especially its capability to deal with large files was very pleasant. On my Macs I’ve been trying Smultron, Textwrangler and of course Textmate. The latter being the one I chose as my daily editor.
While Textmate is really a neat piece of software and has many useful features, I often miss the way Ultraedit deals with large files. Today I accidently clicked on a log file in my project drawer, which caused Textmate to stall. Out of curiosity I restarted Textmate and tried to open that log file on its own, now Textmate asked me:
Opening Large File
The file “xyz.log” has a size of 21.7 MB. Are you sure you want to load this as a text file?
My MacBook has 1 GB of RAM; according to MenuMeters more than 640 MB of it being unused. And my text editor, who wants code and markup bring to the 21st century, asks me if I really want to open a file as small as 21 MB? Or, even worse, stalls if I’m making one false click!
I also tried to open this gigantic file with Smultron. Smultron opens it without further ado, but scrolling or even editing the file is as lame as it is with Textmate. Of course the “natural” way to deal with such files are the Unix tools vi or less. But being in the 21st century I’d expect that a text editor should be able to open a 21 MB file.
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What about that!
I opened a 4MB SQL file and Textmate become like a slow motion misery worth to mention that all this happened on my fast macbook pro with 2gb of ram!!!
now I might use vi for that sql file