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From: jham@mcs213e.cs.umr.edu (John Ham)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: editors for huge files
Keywords: sprint, epsilon, swap
Message-ID: <2039@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>
Date: 29 Jan 91 08:16:13 GMT
References: <1991Jan28.201452.27323@athena.cs.uga.edu> <1991Jan29.023726.11519@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
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Organization: University of Missouri - Rolla
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I tried many editors before settling in on Brief.  It is by far the
slowest of the lot, but so far I have never had an error (v3.0) while
working with large files.  Sprint is faster, but the line numbers
go crazy after 32768, so you can't jump to line 99999, for instance.
I tried the Sage Professional Editor, and while it is very fast and
has the best user interface, if you even look at it funny it crashes.
They do have nice technical support and do fix all reported bugs in
time (kind of like Word Defect does), but who has time?  As for the
macro language, etc, I don't know.  I only use Brief when a file
won't fit in memory for Qedit, but when I need BIG file editing,
Brief never lets me down.  Editors which won't work: Qedit, Blackbeard,
Galaxy, PC-Write, Tech-Edit (it does files larger than ram, but
crashes rather severely with SHARE.EXE loaded and lines > 32768,
at least on my machine...makes me wonder if they're using FCB's).

The bottom line: Brief with do it every time, but it is slow and
expensive.  Qedit has a file on the registered distribution disk
called CHUNKER.EXE that will split a file into pieces for editing,
then join them back together when you are done.  Don't use this
for binary (non-TEXT) files, obviously, since it searches for eoln's.
Hope this helps - jham@cs.umr.edu