gedit slow with a 1.5Mb text file
I grabbed a 1.5MB text file from Windows (converted using dos2unix, not that
it appears to make a difference) and tried to open this in gedit and it
takes about 45 seconds to open the file. That is a whole lot slower than I
was expecting. To make things worse the performance within gedit is very
sluggish and searching the text file is not possible; it simply locks up the
gedit process (maxes out the CPU).
I did some research and attempted to use gvim (no performance issue per se,
but it just gives me weird output when trying to navigate the file). I got
similar weird output with vi. Search functionality seems to work at least.
Navigating the file seems to work as expected in gedit, but the performance
stinks. So it's performance and weird output (vi/gvim), or completely slow
to the point it's unusable, and expected output (gedit). Neither option
works for me. I didn't think that I would ever have fond thoughts of
Notepad, but right now... well I digress.
I have noted discussions on-line where people are complaining that gedit
can't handle text files of the order of 100's of MB, but the file I am
dealing with here is 1.5MB. I tested this on two Debian systems (one
virtual, one real) and got the same result.
I know dealing with text files under Linux is a topic of great discussion
(whereas under Windows you never need to think about it), but surely it
cannot be this painful to deal with a plain text file?
One thing I have noticed under vim is that if I turn on line numbers the
document is showing as several large chunks of text on a handful of lines,
as opposed to a large number of short lines. Would this be tripping up
gedit performance wise perhaps? (And vi/gvim, presentation wise?)
Any advice or tips on this, especially from Windows to Linux converts, would
be gratefully received.
Right now it looks like I have to use two text editors to get what I want
(gedit, as painfully slow as it is, to read through the file) and vi/gvim to
search it.
Cheers.
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