SlickEdit (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens large files.
010 Editor (Windows, macOS, Linux) – Opens giant (as large as 50 GB) files.
A console program that allows you to view a file, one screen at a time.
MORE (Windows) – This refers to the Windows MORE, not the Unix more.
Notepad (Windows) – Decent with large files, especially with word wrap turned off.
Lets you view text files of practically any size.
less (macOS, Linux) – The traditional Unix command-line pager tool.
But it's buggy – with large files, it only allows overwriting characters, not inserting them it doesn't respect LF as a line terminator, only CRLF and it's slow.īuiltin programs (no installation required):
GigaEdit (Windows) – Supports searching, character statistics, and font customization.
Large File Editor (Windows) – Opens and edits TB+ files, supports Unicode, uses little memory, has XML-specific features, and includes a binary mode.
In particular, Vim (Windows, macOS, Linux), Emacs (Windows, macOS, Linux), Notepad++ (Windows), Sublime Text (Windows, macOS, Linux), and VS Code (Windows, macOS, Linux) support large (~4 GB) files, assuming you have the RAM. Modern editors can handle surprisingly large files. The free version can not: process regex, filter files, synchronize timestamps, and save changed files.
loxx (Windows) – Supports file following, highlighting, line numbers, huge files, regex, multiple files and views, and much more.
It's one executable, barely 500 KB, but it still supports searching (with regexes), printing, a hex editor mode, and settings.
Lister (Windows) – Very small and minimalist.
Also supports file following, tabs, multifiles, bookmarks, search, plugins, and external tools. and display in a spreadsheet format) and the highlighter (show lines with certain words in certain colors). But its killer features are the columnizer (parse logs that are in CSV, JSONL, etc.
LogExpert (Windows) – "A GUI replacement for tail." It's really a log file analyzer, not a large file viewer, and in one test it required 10 seconds and 700 MB of RAM to load a 250 MB file.
But from a UI standpoint, it's rather minimal. It supports monitoring file changes (like tail), bookmarks, highlighting patterns using different colors, and has serious optimizations built in. Its main feature is regular expression search.
klogg (Windows, macOS, Linux) – A maintained fork of glogg.
Very fast, simple, and has small executable size. Also support file following and regex search. Supports horizontal and vertical split view.
Large Text File Viewer (Windows) – Fully customizable theming (colors, fonts, word wrap, tab size).