Re: Editing huge text files in NSTextView

FROM : Dustin Sallings
DATE : Tue Nov 12 10:26:07 2002

Around 09:43 on Nov 12, 2002, Douglas Davidson said:

# The Cocoa text system is not really designed as an ASCII text editor;
# it's a styled Unicode text editor that happens to be usable for plain
# ASCII text.  As such, it has a certain amount of overhead that
# something like vi does not.  For example, vi doesn't need to know
# global information like (to use the simplest example) how many lines

   Just nit-picking a bit, but you seem to have some misconceptions
as to what vi is.  vi does know how many lines are in a file, just type
``:set nu'' to see.  While above and beyond the standard, I use vim in
utf-8 mode almost exclusively.

# are in a file, because everything it does concerns only a small window
# into the file at any one time.  A text view, on the other hand, does
# need to know, if only because it needs to display a scroll bar to let
# you scroll through the file.

   This is gvim with a 40+MB file open (43,623,700 characters, utf-8
mode, scroll bar on the right):

28704 dustin    9  0 52448  50M  3320 S    29.6 20.5  0:01 gvim

# fairly easy too, if you ignored input methods.  You would still,
# however, have some overhead beyond that of vi, if you wanted features vi
# does not have, such as the ability to use a scroll bar to scroll through
# text, or to make selections with the mouse, or to make edits that affect
# more than one line at a time.

   I quite frequently make edits that affect more than one line at a
time in vi (and in vim, edits that affect more than one line of more than
one file at a time).  Although I usually let X take care of my selections
(when I use the mouse), it does have mouse support even in an xterm (i.e.
tag selection).

   Sorry for swaying off topic a bit, but I use vim for almost all of
my software development and feel that it's one of the most powerful text
management tools that exists today.  It's probably fair to assume that a
text display/edit widget can use at least no more memory than it does.

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