Hi,

I sometimes need to work with large data files: containing numeric and other data. By "large" I mean larger than the available memory, say a few GB. Note that there are many editors around that compete in solving the problem of editing files in memory. Surprisingly, I could not find even a simple tool that solves a different problem: does what can be done in reasonable time with a large text file on disk.

I would like to find or make a tool to edit a file with no limit on file size, like a disk-based editor. Specifically such a tool could:

(1) quickly view parts of a file
(2) edit a small part of the file in memory (taking appropriately long to commit changes)
(3) search and replace some text through the file (making one full pass through the file)

I've searched these fora and, judging from a discussion in 2004, jEdit does not seem to support editing large files.
Are there any plans for a "large files" editing mode with limited functionality?
Could anyone point me to a (free or low cost) tool that already does that?
I am totally new to jEdit, but have some programming background. Do you think it is doable to adapt jEdit to perform such a task?

Thanks in advance for help,

Maciej.