We currently use an old version of the crisp editor (running in read- only mode) on our solaris boxes to view extremely large files, in some cases approaching 2G. The nice thing about crisp is that it will pull a small chunk of the file into memory and immediately display it, then as you scroll through the file, it will pull discard the first chunk and load another. You see the first screenful of data immediately, no matter what the file size, and you can limit the amount of memory that crisp uses without affecting the size of file you can load.
We are switching to mostly linux boxes and have not found a way to run vim in a similar mode: using vim -R file causes vim to apparently freeze until either the file is loaded into memory, or you hit Ctrl-C to interrupt the load. I do not know how to interrupt this load behavior if I try to open two files at the same time using vim -R -o file1 file2. I believe there is a way to limit the amount of memory vim uses on startup, but have not hit the magic command options for this yet. less is not an answer because our files are often wider than 80 chars and we require horizontal as well as vertical scrolling. We currently have a kludge wrapper that does a head -10000 on the file to a temp file and them lets us look at the results using vim, but in the cases where data being sought is not in the first 10000 records this does not help. I know a scripter/unix geek approach would be to grep for the desired data in such a large file and look at the results, but many of our users are not so unix savvy, and prefer the simple read-only file browser with arrow key navigation that crisp gives us. Any sugggestions? Thanks, Tom Porter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
