[TUHS] xvi

[John Cowan]

I was involved in some work about five years ago where I had to keep a
small number of files (about 5) open all the time for examination as
needed. Each was 100-500 GB.

I opened them all in vim instances running in the background at login time,
and then I read email until they were all loaded. I then put the process
with the file I needed into the foreground, examined it, and returned to
the shell with :stop (which all command line editors should have) when I
was done. Worked like a charm.

On Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 7:46 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> 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.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>
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