Re: Large files

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> All the professional text editors known to me are disk oriented.

I'm not sure what the "professional" above refers to.

> I always wondered that Emacs isn't.

Probably because it never seemed necessary.

Why would anybody edit enormously large files?  Such large files are not
written by hand (otherwise, they'd be smaller), so you'd only want to edit
them by hand in some rare circumstances.
Such circumstances are sufficiently particular that people are happy using
some other solution instead.

> Anyway, Emacs can't, and today in days large memory systems are less
> expensive, disk oriented editing appears to be less important - but
> only at the first glance, because modern Emacs features like
> auto-revert-tail mode, making viewing (not editing) logfiles easy,
> which really can be extremely large.

`tail -f' in a shell buffer works as well, and with comint-truncate-buffer,
it'll work even if your logfile grows to several GB.

> Or loading a large number of java classes may also cause a memory
> consumption which is significant larger than that of Windows text editors
> like UE.

It may but I've never seen people complain about it, so it looks like either
they don't suffer from it, or they silently switch to something else.
Emacs is not famous for being frugal, but Eclipse seem to "eclipse" even
Emacs on this front and that doesn't seem to prevent it from being used for
large Java projects.

> Therefore I support Stefan's proposal that someone could try to write
> an elisp package that does disk oriented editing.

Supporting it won't help.  You need to go and write it.


        Stefan