Large Text File Viewer

Today I wanted to open an XML file which was 550 MB in size. Knowing that Notepad would be way too slow, I opened it with Notepad++ (my favourite source code editor). It sort of froze, so I tried WordPad instead – still pretty slow. I decided to give Notepad2 a shot: even worse, it crashed outright. So I googled “view large text files windows” and found a few links to Large Text File Viewer. I downloaded it and found these image files in the installer zip file:

Car1.jpg darkwatch.jpg madonna.jpg tulips.jpg

Anyway, I tried opening the 0.5 GB XML file with Large Text File Viewer, and it’s super, super fast. The reason for the image files? By default it uses Darkwatch as its background image, with the option to use any other image file, or no background image.

LTFViewr_darkwatch.jpg

Get Large Text File Viewer direct from the SwiftGear.com freeware site.

19 September 2008 | Applications | Comments

6 Responses to “Large Text File Viewer”

  1. 1 Ady 19 September 2008 @ 12:19 pm

    This post came right on time as I was analyzing a build log of 10M in size. Not as impressive as your 500M file but it managed to make my Notepad++ froze for about 30 seconds ;-)

    Thanks Rizal

  2. 2 dirn 19 September 2008 @ 12:36 pm

    Large Text File Viewer…Here I come…

  3. 3 fadzli 19 September 2008 @ 2:56 pm

    any explanation on this, on why it load faster?

    is it because it did not load everything and only dump data whatever user need to see? is this called paging?

  4. 4 Vasudev Ram 30 September 2008 @ 12:44 am

    Interesting about Large Text File Viewer …

    A while back I used Programmer’s File Editor a lot. This lets you not only view but also edit large files. IIRC, I used it on Windows NT or 2000, so it should probably still work now on XP and Vista. Pretty fast editor too.

    If anyone wants to check it out, Google for the name, or here is a link:

    http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/

    - Vasudev

  5. 5 Freek 27 October 2008 @ 5:46 pm

    Total Commander’s built in file viewer has supported this for a long time. It’s instant, supports text, hex, … and integrated in an orthogonal file manager. What more could you want?
    Get it at http://www.ghisler.com/

  6. 6 Rob 15 November 2008 @ 10:18 pm

    Total Commander is the best option. I had to open a 3GB text file. Large Text File Viewer and Programmer’s File Editor both hung my computer for several minutes before I manually closed them. Total Commander displayed the file and enabled scrolling pretty much immediately. Select the file and then press F3 in Total Commander to launch the viewer.

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