Code Editor Review - Which One is the Best for Opening Large Files?

Let's find the best text editor for opening large multi-gigabyte files by testing a few of the most popular text editors on macOS!

These tests were done on a 2018 mac mini i7, 32GB RAM.

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It's been a few weeks since I've been able to get a video out due to work and some recording issues. This is about the 4th attempt on this video, and even though it's not up to the quality I was after, I HAD to get it out.

I think for future content I'll record myself and screen separately rather than trying to do it all with OBS.

I know I missed out on Visual Studio. I did test it, but it performed about as well as Atom.

I also wrote a quick article on this test with a table of all results that you can find here:

0:00 Intro
0:36 File Creation Script
1:04 Atom
1:50 BBEdit
2:42 Sublime Text
3:06 Nova
3:32 MacVim
4:03 Xcode
5:04 TextEdit
5:50 Talk
6:40 Secret Weapon
7:17 Outro

#codeeditor #texteditor #performance

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[tiannahl]

The comparison I didn't know I needed. Another great video.

[jesusalfredohernandezorozc]

Great video and thanks for the recomendation!

[macsmola]

This test file looks rather random. How about testing more real-life scenario? Try to open 10 GB log file! Even though you could open the file with some of them you couldn't do much more than that..

[AtomLabX]

This is a great idea, and the editing is nice, plus the audio is amazing!
And I had high hopes for my tool of choicem sublime text, but I hope NOVA won't fail me... which Im looking at.
But by the end of the day 10GB?
Ahhhh nah xD

[alanm]

UltraEdit works like a champ for unlimited size files and even does syntax highlighting and such. I routinely use it to review output files, and you don't have to do it in hex.

[mrayasin]

great work.. but didn't got the name of app it's like hexnamed... could you please reply with proper name
Thanks again for Great work

[kevinhayes]

Did the text file have many line breaks in it? I believe a lot of editors load things line by line, so if the file is one large line without line breaks, it’ll fare worse than one with many line breaks.

I believe that’s why HexFiend is so fast. It doesn’t care about lines. It likely loads a screenful of bytes at a time (or an arbitrary buffer size) and just loads more as you scroll. HexFriend is probably more dependent on disk speed for that reason.

[cheesygerit]

6:00
i with my 35gb password database file which i wanna extend: 😑

[michaelyang]

Can HexFiend reformat the json file to make it more readable?

[almuaz]

we windows and linux users are feeling sad

[SBSanook]

I shouldn't love this as much as I do...this is so good. Particularly love the zooming in on TextEdit's ram usage! 
Sort of surprised BBEdit didn't do better, though given the enormous file size I suppose it isn't surprising. Interesting that the older editor's seem to do better (?) than the newer ones, with the exception of Nova. Really wish Nova was better with Swift, maybe a later version.