vim sucks at editing large files

Wednesday 29 March 2006 - Filed under Journal

This is techie rant.

We unix/linux/open source guys like to pretend that we use the highest quality software that exists. I believe in most cases this is true. I still get pissed off, though, every time I try to edit a large file with vim. Face it, folks, sometimes you need to edit large files. It shouldn’t be that damn hard. I am editing a 760k file. Mind you, it is a mysql dump and has very few very long lines. It is still a trivial amount of bytes in this day and age and yet I am sitting here watching it faithfully doing nothing for minute after minute.

Here is my vim process:


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31730 lolife 25 0 7552 4976 1576 R 99.9 0.5 6:45.26 vim


…using 99.9% of a nice fast dual-CPU box to edit a freaking 760k file!

Can some genius set me straight on this?

2006-03-29  »  lolife