Why jumping around in text is hard [LWN.net]

Why jumping around in text is hard

Posted Feb 26, 2008 15:25 UTC (Tue) by anand21 (guest, #38076)
In reply to: Why jumping around in text is hard by eru
Parent article: Emacs news: new maintainer, version 22 pretest

If you do need to browse a large log file, less is your friend.

Editing is a hard problem. Modern editors do a lot of formatting and storing that information
takes a lot of space. Concurrent access could be solved by locking but it wouldn't help
because the editor must still load the whole file, and then parse it and store temporary
information, for providing a consistent view.

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Why jumping around in text is hard

Posted Feb 28, 2008 20:03 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Locking text files is *really unfriendly*, too. Shades of Windows.

(Note that less also sucks the whole file into RAM, so if it's huge less 
won't do the trick either.)

(Emacs doesn't do a lot of *formatting*, as such, but both the Emacsen 
*can* attach properties/extents/whatever to regions of buffers, and both 
also have to handle multibyte support to the extent of having single 
buffers with many encodings in. All of these things push up the memory 
consumption somewhat, especially the latter.)