Re: opening large files (few hundred meg)

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

>> What about a large-text-mode: sed reads chunks of text
>> in, one by one, letting Emacs forget the rest. Than
>> only the line-no matters, sent to sed.

> Such solutions have been proposed before, but the likely way that a
> user will navigate through such a huge file is by searching, so just
> paging parts of the file in and out is only part of the solution, it
> must also offer searching to be useful.

But now that isearch is able to do things like switch buffer when it
reaches the end of a buffer, we could write a large-file-mode which
"transparently" loads the various chunks while isearching.


        Stefan