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Comment by snthpy | Hacker News Reader

Is there a vim with support for large files, i.e. only reading a chunk/window of data at a time as I browse?

My use case is that I sometimes need to inspect large CSV files and vim will take a long time and then abort saying that it couldn't complete loading the file.

I guess I could use

    head -n 100 data.CSV | vim

but it would be nice if I could scroll through the file in vim.

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I think less does exactly what you're asking for, unless you need to edit the file. less and vim have similar keybindings. For multi-gigabyte files, you may want to disable line counting and perhaps seek ahead via command line options to make startup instantaneous.

You don't even have to disable line counting explicitly, less is kind enough to tell you "counting lines is taking a long time, interrupt to disable". So you can just ctrl-c if the file is too long and you don't want to wait.

You could actually use ed [0] or you could split the file:

    split data.CSV; vim x*

[0] https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/actually-using-ed/

`vim -n` should avoid the initial swap file. Or was it `-b` that triggered in-place editing?

You might want to tune `set syn_maxcol=256` to avoid highlighting or disable syntax completely. It might help to set the filetype to something else for CSV. If plugins slow you down use `-u NONE`.

> I guess I could use

> head -n 100 data.CSV

You could do something similar with

    sed -n '101,200p' data.CSV | vim -

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