On a 2017 MBP with an i7 and 16GB of ram loading things over 500MB and then trying to search/edit them takes minutes per search term/edit. Frequently I get the spinning wheel and have to force quit and start over.

I thought it was the nature of dealing with large text files. I wonder why my experience with Sublime has been so bad.

The context of my use is dealing with gigantic log files/json files doing digtal forensics for the purpose of discovering malicious activity. I also use grep and a ton of other tools but sometimes when you aren't looking for a particular thing and you're just looking for weird stuff the best way to explore the data is with the raw files and a text editor. Unfortunately the editors I've used are painfully slow when the file sizes are large.

I've managed to make SublimeText lag unbearably by opening a log file that had a single line and a few thousand columns. Heh!

In Sublime 4 thread people were talking about UltraEdit, it is even probably the reason for this submission.

Anyway, there people mentioned UltraEdit has a "disk edit" mode, where it DOESN'T dump the file on the ram, and instead displays a chunk of whatever is on t he disk, this is how it allows the editing of gigantic text files, theoretically you can edit files of any size, maybe even infinite size.

I'm not sure your definition of big file. But, the last thing that I tried to edit a full Wikipedia dump (in 2014) the file was 65GB, and it was slow even in UltraEdit. I tried all the editors suggested at the time, including Sublime but notice that VS Code wasn't available at the time. People love their programming editors, but UltraEdit is much more than that. It was an editor for data manipulation. It was the best for managing what used to be considered big files before (and too many other features, including moving around columns of data like what you can do in Excel - try that on other editor), but now the bar for file size is much higher, and UltraEdit had not improved there. The fastest editor for big files according to my tests was EmEditor, and editor that like UltraEdit, is made for loading data files. However, EmEditor can load what in 2021 can be claimed to be big files. It can open filed of up to 248GB in the 32-bit version and 16TB in the 64-bits version of the platform. That (the 64-bits version) is what I call big files.

https://www.emeditor.com/text-editor-features/large-file-sup...