On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 06:57:03PM -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Actually, Xvi is now maintained at https://codeberg.org/martinwguy/xvi.
>
> I'll bow out of the editor discussion now, since I think we're pretty
> far from the original topic.

I can pull it back to something potentially useful.  As I mentioned, years
and years ago, on small memory machines, I used to vi $BIG_ASS_LOGFILE
and because editors tend to malloc each line, the vi session got really
slow (started swapping) when the file was bigger than roughly 1/2 of mem.
My changes were to teach the string library, and whatever else operated
on a line of the file, to treat \n the same way you would treat \0.
Then you change the code that read in the file to just mmap() it.

I don't think I went so far as to make changes to the file work, not
sure, it may have just worked but I was looking at log files, I don't
think I modified them.

I'm pretty sure the answer is no, the laptop I'm typing on has 64GB and
I suspect everyone else is the same.  But can anyone imagine a use case
where having a vi that could read really large files (and quickly, no
parsing/mallocing each line) would be useful?

I'm pretty done with programming but if someone said "here is an important
use case where that would help" I'd go find those changes and see if I can
port them forward. 
--
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat