Re: Memory-efficient way of opening large files in Emacs read-only

[Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm>]

On 08/12/2022 09:49 +0700, Mikhail Pomaznoy wrote:

> In my daily workflows I commonly stumble upon a task of peeking into a
> header of a large (sometimes compressed) file. Those files can
> commonly be gigabytes in compressed form so can't fit into memory. I
> was wondering how can this be done in Emacs to leverage its search and
> navigate capabilities?
>
> In a terminal this task is nicely accomplished with `less`, which
> loads file on demand while you scroll (memory-efficiently) and
> automatically detects at least gzip compression. However I am
> struggling to do something similar in Emacs for quite a long time.  I
> tried VLF (requires manually switching chunks loaded, encountered
> problems with compression), view-file (loads everything in memory),
> running less in Emacs terminals (I prefer outside-Emacs terminals) but
> for various reasons all this solutions are suboptimal and I usually
> end up with using `less`.
>
> Is there something in Emacs I am missing? Is something like this makes
> sense to develop (I consider to write something for Emacs) ? I am
> using Emacs 28 and maybe in Emacs 29 there are novelties related to
> this issue?

Perhaps the best way is to report vlf bugs and fix them.

Filipp