Sorry, I view that link you gave as less of a bug report than a Twit Alert. Seriously, when was the last time you ran across a 2.7 GB file of nulls and thought of it as a text file to be edited?

The relevant section of the Vim docs explains that the maximum length of a line and the maximum number of lines per file depends on the local size of long integers, typically 32 bits. So if your box is limited to 2G lines per file and 2GB per line, is it any wonder there's an error message upon encountering 2.7 GB of nulls?

This evening I edited a 3.1 GB text file (generated from the dictionaries on my Ubuntu 8.04.2, AKA Debian Linux box) without any problems at all. 334M lines of text, averaging what, 9 characters per line? So to run into vim's limit I'd have to be editing close to 20 GB of dictionary words. Or for 90-character log file line lengths, somewhere in the vicinity of 200 GB of text.

So. no, I don't think that special case of a null file warrants real-world concern.

Tyler

A perfectly good point, unfortunately marred by the remarks that follow.

You're assuming conditions not previously specified. What if the poster only changes hamburger to cheeseburger depending on the values of relish and pickle on nearby lines? Are you one of those manly men who use sed to repair mismatched braces in your source files?

My point being that if the previous posters in the subthread find vim satisfactory for the problems they're thinking of, it might be because they understand their typical problems better than you do.

Yes, if they're bulk edits. But it depends on the context. The last time I looked through the sed man pages I missed the part that covered "query changes" and "undo".

Finally, your experiences with the performance of vi are pretty much irrelevant to a thread on vim. I just used vim on a 3.1 GB text file this evening in a test. Loading and saving the file took a while, but once the file had loaded moving from one end to another, searching for strings, making edits, etc. were pretty damn fast. Not appreciably slower than I've experienced with 100k text files, in other words.

Tyler