Notepad++ – How to Open a Big File

notepadwindows

I tried opening a file of 800MB size in Notepad++. But i don't why Notepad++ showed only 269117242 chars 271450112 bytes . Neither it showed any alert message that it is unable to open such a big file. Then i used wordpad to open the same file, it worked like charm.

But why Notepad++ can't open 800MB file? I assume there must be some setting which says show only this much text.

P.S. Please don't suggest any other software which can open big files. I know they exist.

Best Answer

Notepad++ doesn't support huge files, according to this wiki documentation, the problem persists if the component (Scintilla) remains as the core of Notepad++ :

Older versions of Notepad++ may crash while opening very large files. Newer versions (5.2+) will deny opening the file and issue an error message. Why is that?

Notepad++ is based on a component (Scintilla) which is geared towards providing rich text viewing, with syntax highlighting and code folding, as opposed to bulk text services. There are necessary trade offs. Loading a 200MB file will require around 800MB of memory, and the OS may balk at the memory allocation request.

There are basically two ways out:

  • Split the huge file into manageable chunks, and keep only one of them in editor;
  • Use another tool which is tailored to handle massive text files.

If you still manage to open a large file, performance may not be optimal. Here is a couple things to think about:

  • Plugins which analyse and scan text will slow down NP++, disable them if possible
  • Parsing for clickable links on loading the document is slow if the document is large; disabling the clickable links has been reported to significantly help.

Another page on sourceforge also suggests that this problem persists throughout Notepad++'s life, as the community requested to solve this problem:

Why don't you try other software such as gVim? Is there any reason?

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