That brings me to my question. I have noticed that when
editing large files (millions of lines), deleting a large
number of lines (say, hundreds of thousands to millions) takes
an unbelieveably long time in VIM--at least on my systems.
The issue of editing large files comes up occasionally. A few
settings can be tweaked to vastly improve performance. Notably,
the 'undolevels' setting can be reduced to -1 or 0 for improved
performance. If your lines are long, it can also help to disable
syntax highlighting as well. You can drop in on one such thread
here:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-editing-large-file-p3665161.html
or the associated vim-tip at
http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=611
Another option might be to use a stream-oriented tool such as sed
to edit your file:
sed '100000q' < infile.txt > outfile.txt
Fortunately, Vim has oodles of knobs to twiddle, so you can
monkey with 'undolevels', 'swapfile', and the 'bufhidden'
setting, as well as turning off sytnax highlighting, all of which
can improve the performance of vim under uncommon load.
This struck me as so odd, I looked you up (for the first time
in all my years of use) so I could ask why!
Welcome aboard...the list is friendly, informative, on-topic, and
an all-round example of what a mailing-list should be. :)
-tim
