On Wed, 23 May 2007, fREW wrote: |Someone recently was emailing the list about looking at a small |section of DNA with vim as text and it was a number of gigs. I think |he ended up using other unix tools (sed and grep I think), but |nontheless, text files can be big too ;-) | |-fREW |
A maxim that comes up here is "A lack of imagination doesn't prove anything." The fact that Condoleeza Rice couldn't imagine the degree of chaos that would ensue if we invaded Iraq does not prove that Iraq is not currently in chaos! I use vim for _structured_ text files, largely because regular expression search is much more useful than word search when the text is structured. Whether those files are large or not usually depends on whether I'm editing programs (small) or viewing/editing their output (often quite large). Emacs also provides regular expression search, but I find vim's commands simpler and easier to type--and therefore faster to use. I happen to be working with DNA sequences now, however I've used vim for the same things working on compilers, sonar data, seismic data, and databases. The larger the file, the more likely I am to choose vim to look at it. Max
