Re: Maximum buffer size exceeded

[Marco Gidde]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > From: Marco Gidde <marco.gidde@tiscali.de>
> > Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> > Date: 05 May 2004 07:53:04 +0200
> > 
> > I was in the same situation a few days ago, a large file with more
> > than 200MB. It's sad, but vim did the job without complaining.
> 
> Why ``sad''?  

Simply because I couldn't use Emacs for that.

> OTOH, why would someone need to load such a huge file into an
> interactive editor like Emacs or vim?  Sed sounds like a perfect tool
> for the job (faster, too).

In my special case it was a log file, that I had to modify in a
special way and defining a kbd macro in Emacs was much faster than
writing a perl/awk/sed script for the same purpose. After that I had
to compare the file with another log file and this was just about the
time when I first tried ediff and found that it is great.

And what if the modifications you want to make are not specific to
lines but to paragraphs? I think that would be a problem with sed. And
although I like hacking I don't like to write parsers that must (since
they work without any help from my side) handle all edge cases just to
throw it away after one use. 

So I think that interactive editing is not constrained to the case of
files with a few thousand lines of text or code. And interactive
editing requires an interactive editor.

> In other words, there's the best tool for every job, ...

Sure.

> ... and Emacs (nor vim) is not the one for this job.

What I doubt.