From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Stefan Monnier Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Large files Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 23:21:54 GMT Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1105485601 32475 80.91.229.6 (11 Jan 2005 23:20:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 23:20:01 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Jan 12 00:19:55 2005 Return-path: Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1CoVIp-0003MG-00 for ; Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:19:55 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1CoVUO-00050U-N6 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:31:52 -0500 Original-Path: shelby.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!snoopy.risq.qc.ca!charlie.risq.qc.ca!53ab2750!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/21.3.50 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:8kTFWVtldLvaJ/cUcweVjVLY7UE= Original-Lines: 40 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 132.204.24.84 Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@umontreal.ca Original-X-Trace: charlie.risq.qc.ca 1105485714 132.204.24.84 (Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:21:54 EST) Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:21:54 EST Original-Xref: shelby.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:127808 Original-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:23285 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help:23285 > 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