Opening and editing files larger than 3 GB is very challenging because most regular text editors (like Notepad, Notepad++, Sublime, VS Code) will crash or freeze due to memory limitations.
Here are the best tools/editors for handling very large files:
Specialized Large File Editors
- Large Text File Viewer (LTFViewer) – Free, lightweight, and made for gigabyte-sized files.
Works well up to 10+ GB. - Glogg – Open-source log file explorer, fast searching in huge files.
Great for log analysis, not full editing. - EmEditor (Windows) – Paid but excellent, handles files over 200 GB.
Advanced search, editing, column mode, regex support. - UltraEdit (Windows/Linux/Mac) – Paid, optimized for large files, very stable.
Handles multi-GB files smoothly. - 010 Editor – Hex + text editor that can handle huge files.
Useful if you want both binary and text operations.
For Viewing Only
- Less (Linux/Unix) –
less bigfile.txt
lets you scroll without loading the whole file into memory. - Vim (with special configs) – Can open very large files but editing may be slow.
- LogExpert – Windows tool for live viewing big log files.
Alternative Approach (if editing not mandatory)
For searching/filtering instead of full editing:
- Use grep, awk, sed (Linux command-line tools).
- Split file into smaller chunks with:
split -b 500M bigfile.txt chunk_
and then open only the needed part.
My Recommendation:
- If you need editing → EmEditor (best overall, but paid) or UltraEdit.
- If you just need to view/search → Large Text File Viewer (free) or glogg.
- If you are on Linux → use
less
,vim
, or command-line tools.