Tom Porter wrote:

> 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.

...snip...

I would personally also enjoy something like that. It's something that
had already been discussed, at least in this thread:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03165.html

Being able to open a file quickly would be great.  Rather than the
extreme solution of loading pages of the file in memory,  I would not
mind if the file got loaded entirely in memory, as along as it's done
in a lazy way, i.e. pressing G to go to the end for example could
cause to wait until the file is entirely loaded (fine, doesn't "less" do
just that?). But browsing the top of the file could become
instantaneous. Perceived time when opening the file (to show the
top of the file) can be more important to users than actual time to
load the entire file.

Unfortunately, it's probably not so simple to implement in Vim,
and there are other priorities.

It probably also opens lots of questions. For example,
say I have this in my ~/.vimrc...

  set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1

.... so that Vim selects the encoding based on file content.
The top of the file might be valid-utf-8, but near the end, there
might be invalid utf-8 sequences.  If Vim loads the file lazily,
it can't figure it out, so it can't select the encoding automatically
until it has read the entire file. It could be a documented limitation
when turning a lazy file loading option. But I'm sure there are
many other issues like this.

I don't think this idea even appears on the already huge todo list
anyway. I searched in ":help todo.txt" and could not see anything
like that.

In the mean time, there are settings which can help to speed
up Vim significantly when using large files.  See:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip343

Regards
-- Dominique

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