Teodor Muraru

I had a problem with viewing/editing a 370 Mb SQL file in Windows (7) on a machine with 4GB of RAM.

I searched some solutions:

• Google – large sql file text editor
• StackOverflow – Text editor to open big (giant, huge, large) text files [closed]
• StackExchange SuperUser – windows – Is there a text editor for very big files?
• …

Common candidates:

• Notepad++, Notepad, Wordpad
• SublimeText – my personal favorite (it surpassed Notepad++ in 2011 when I first read about it)
• TextPad, UltraEdit, EditPlus (v3)
• TheGun (“For 6k in file size, it is fully drag and drop enabled, it supports wordwrap and it has a separate accessory to change some of the startup settings. TheGun does not use any additional runtime DLLs and is coded in Microsoft Assembler (MASM) using the Windows API functions. TheGun does not have an effective file size limit and the maximum size that can be loaded into it is determined by available memory and loading speed of the file.”)
•  Programmer’s File Editor
• gVim (a port of vim for Windows), Cream (a wrapper/configuration editor over gVim)
• some usual programming IDEs: PHPStorm – my personal favorite (it surpassed NetBeans in 2012), Netbeans, Eclipse – they all failed miserably 🙂
• Large Text File Viewer 5.2 (its last What’s new record was on 6/5/2009)
• SlickEdit, 010 Editor, PilotEdit;
• VEdit

Results:

• Notepad++ (6MB kit/portable, open-source) – memory: 6MB at start, 785MB when editing, open in ~5 seconds, save in ~4 seconds, search in 6-11 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file (after an initial pause ~38 seconds); But, sometimes it won’t open it (Error: the file is too big)
• SublimeText2 (6MB kit/portable, evaluation version – 30 days) – works, but VERY sluggish on all operations: open, find, save, undo; memory: 18MB at start, 2GB when editing,
• Programmer’s File Editor (650K portable, open-source) – memory: 7MB at start, 420MB when editing, open/save in ~10 seconds, search in 2-3 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file; But: it said it cropped too long lines, which is kind of unacceptable (maybe there are settings to avoid it, but I tried the solution just as-it-was)
• Large Text File Viewer 5.2 (500K portable, open-source) – memory: 1.5MB at start, 5MB when viewing, open in ~10 seconds, search > 150 seconds, NO edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file; Only viewer, no editor;  NO syntax highlighting;
• TheGun (6K portable, open-source) – memory: 1.5MB at start, 792MB when viewing, open in ~20 seconds, save in ~10 seconds, search in 2-3 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file; NO syntax highlighting;
• Cream [gVim] (8MB kit, open-source) – memory: 4.5MB at start, 420MB when viewing, open in ~4 seconds, save in ~10 seconds, search in 2-3 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, sluggish when moving inside the file; NO syntax highlighting;
• TextPad (4MB kit, evaluation version – 30 days) – memory: 4MB at start, 22-26MB when editing, open in ~22 seconds, save in ~4 seconds, search in 1 second, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file; But it has a start warning about converting unknown characters to the system default code page 1252 (though it keeps its UTF-8 character set and saves it the same); NO syntax highlighting;
• UltraEdit (33MB kit, trial version – 30 days) – memory: 19MB at start, 22-29MB when editing, open/save in ~10 seconds, search in ~5 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, sluggish when moving inside the file; NO syntax highlighting;
• EditPlus 3 (2MB kit, evaluation version – 30 days) –  won’t open it: “Out of memory”, Warning at opening: File is too large (recommends max file size: 323MB)
• SlickEdit ( 78MB kit, trial version – 30 days) – memory: 54MB at start, 795MB when editing, open instantly, save in ~3 seconds, search in 1 second, instant edit, NO undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file (after a short initial pause ~3 seconds) ; NO syntax highlighting; When editing a file larger than 100MB, SlickEdit will turn off Undo/Redo capabilities for all files to improve performance.;
• 010 Editor ( 13MB kit,evaluation version – 30 days) – memory: 9MB at start, 12-25MB when editing, open in ~4 seconds, save in ~4 seconds, search in 5 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file; NO syntax highlighting;
• PilotEdit (10MB kit, trial version – 30 days) – memory: 12MB at start, 17-22MB when editing, open in ~32 seconds, save in ~1 second, search in 5 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, very fluid when navigating inside the file, Syntax highlighting;
• vEdit (2MB kit, trial version – 30 days) – memory: 3MB at start, 3MB when editing, open instantly, save in ~2 second, search in 2-3 seconds, instant edit/undo/redo, constantly (~2 seconds) waiting for disk operations when navigating inside the file; NO syntax highlighting; weird (old-ish) interface;

Testing conditions:

• The search was made for some words at the end of the file, with the cursor positioned at the beginning
• Syntax highlighting was needed for SQL
• Navigation was tested using the mouse on the scrollbar, not the keyboard]
• The test file was an SQL export (370MB)
• I haven’t tried the suggestions on StackExchange – disable temporary file, syntax parsing and undo/redo functionality, though some of the programs offered to do some of these changes automatically for this kind of big files and eventually only for the current session – a thumb up for UltraEdit!

So, my winners are:

• Free/Open-source: Notepad++, TheGun, Programmer’s File Editor, Cream [gVim], Large Text File Viewer
  
• Trial/Evaluation: TextPad, PilotEdit, 010 Editor, vEdit, UltraEdit, SlickEdit

Backup inainte de instalare:

• Messenger(s):
  • Yahoo Messenger: Copy and paste the text below into the Run command (Windows Logo+R) | then click OK: %ProgramFiles%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\ (WinXP) sau %LocalAppData%\VirtualStore\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\ (Win7/Vista)
• Browsers & Mail:
  • MailBrowserBackup – review on addictivetips
  • FavBackup – review on addictivetips
• Other apps:
  • Total Commander: wincmd.ini andwcx_ftp.ini in %COMMANDER_PATH% folder
  • FileZilla: File->Export->SiteManager & Settings, or %APPDATA%\Filezilla (C:\Users\<myusername>\AppData\Roaming\Filezilla).

Apps:

http://www.allmyapps.com/easy-setup/windows-7/ – sau pt windows-xp – salvare a aplicatiilor instalate, pentru urmatoarea instalare

freenew.net (aplicatie ‘semi-offline’) / ninite.com – imediat dupa instalare sistemului, se descarca si se executa de pe acest site un downloader al aplicatiilor selectate din lista de pe site, instalarea facandu-se automat.

Utils:

• Iconico Calipers – Screen Measurement Pack
• BlueStacks – Run Android Mobile Apps on Windows

Browsers:

• The BEST:
  • Chrome family (Chrome (portabil) & Chromium (portabil) & Comodo Dragon & RockMelt & CodeWeavers & SRWare Iron);
  • Firefox, Flock, Opera (beta), Comodo IceDragon
• The REST: K-meleon, Safari, Maxthon, FastBrowser, Tor Browser

Mail:

• Zimbra Desktop, Mozilla Thunderbird

Sharing:

• uTorrent, Deluge, Vuze
• Dropbox – http://db.tt/vixUcuzr
• Teamviewer

Media:

• Audio Player – Aimp3
  
• Media Player – KMPlayer, VLC

—–

Media Plugins:

• Flash (failsafe page), Shockwave
• Silverlight
• Sopcast
• Cooliris ( pentru Chrome)

Runtime libraries:

http://www.alexnolan.net/runtime/

Optional Windows components:

XPLite (also, you can replace Windows On-Screen Keyboard with Hot-Virtual Keyboard)