What is the best text editor for opening large files?

4 min readDec 16, 2020

A highly specific question, and unlike asking “what’s the best text editor for programmers?”, this one we can answer with almost 100% objectivity.

If you would rather watch a video on this subject, I’ve got that covered for you.

To do this, we’ll need to do some stress testing, so let’s meet our competitiors.

Atom

It calls itself “A hackable text editor for the 21st century”. Up until recently, this was my text editor of choice. Free and open source. It’s only downside? Electron. It’s not as light weight as I like in a text editor. These things should be speedy, with just enough features to get the job done. If I wanted something bloated, I would just use Xcode.

Now I’m not saying Atom is bloated. Absolutely not. In fact most of the text editors on this list are perfectly fine. It’s just that, because Electron, you’ve already used up about 300mb of ram for just launching the app in an empty state. With no files loaded.

Let’s move on.

BBEdit

This is a favourite for a lot of people and has been around for a very long time. It’s almost the industry standard at this point.

Written in C, so it’s a native app, and super light weight.

It’s not free, and I’ve never purchased this app myself. I did download the trial for this article though.

Sublime Text

I used this app for many years. This was my number 1 text editor for a long time, and I’m sure that’s the same for many developers out there. It’s as close to a perfect text editor as you can get.

There’s really nothing for me to say about it.

Nova

This is a fairly new text editor brought to us by the same people who created Coda. Coda has been around for a long time, and was a great little editor you could get on your iPad.

I’ve been using nova for a little while now and not entirely sure how I feel about it. It has replaced Sublime Text and Atom for me, but I’m still working things out, and settling into a workflow that works for me.

Plus, it just looks really cool.

MacVim

Honestly? I’ve never used it since before writing this article. Vim isn’t something that is ever even mentioned in iOS development. All we really need a text editor for is opening a few config, script, or JSON files and that’s about it.

Vim has been around for a very long time. But, this app was very performant, and I can certainly see the appeal working in a mouse free environment, but it’s just not for me.

Xcode

We all know Xcode. I’m not even going to bother with a screenshot here. This thing is a bloated mess. If you already have it open, and the text file you’re editing is part of your project, then it’s fine to do just that.

However, for any smaller quick tasks, you could probably finish the job in any other editor before Xcode even wakes up.

TextEdit

Built in to macOS this editor is just plain fine. It works. No syntax highlighting, or code completion. No addons. Just plain and simple.

I’ve known a lot of web developers who use this, day to day, and nothing else. How? I have no idea.

Hex Fiend

This app will open anything. Instantly. Full stop. Is this the best text editor?

Maybe.

Results

I know you skipped past everything just to get to this point, and that’s okay. I would have done that too, and honestly, you didn’t miss much.

This is the script I used to generate the 10GB file I used for testing. It came out to around 11GB in total. Line breaks every 100 characters, and ASCII text only.

export LC_ALL=C; dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1000000000 count=30 | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' | fold -s -w 100 > ~/Desktop/10GB_text.txt