BigText v0.3.0

BigText is a free, open-source desktop text editor for huge files (1–50+ GB) that never loads a whole file into memory and never freezes.
Website: erkinbek.github.io/bigtext · Русский · O'zbekcha

What's new in 0.3.0

Logs

• Filter view. Ctrl+Shift+F (or Filter in the search bar) lists only the lines with a match, like grep over the whole file; with ! it lists the lines without one. Click a line to jump to it. Save lines… writes every kept line to a new file, Copy lines copies them (up to 100 MB). Find All results have the same two buttons.
• Highlights. View → Highlights… (or Mark in the search bar) paints patterns such as ERROR in their own colours in every document, and keeps them for the next session.
• Scrollbar marks show where Find All matches, filter lines, bookmarks and the differences from File → Compare are in the file.
• Go to time. Ctrl+Shift+T, then 14:32:05 or 2024-05-01 14:32:05: BigText jumps to the first log line at or after that time with a binary search, so it takes milliseconds even in a 50 GB log. ISO 8601, DD.MM.YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY, Apache and syslog dates are recognised. Select some lines and the status bar shows the time between them (Δt).
• Compressed logs. .gz and .zst files open directly: they are unpacked into a temporary read-only copy, with progress and Cancel.

Search and editing

• Selecting a word highlights its other occurrences on screen.
• Search history: the ▾ button next to the find field, or Up/Down inside it.
• A mistake in a regular expression is now explained in full under the search field, with a ^ under the problem.
• Column (block) selection with Alt+drag: copy it line by line, or type, Backspace, Delete and Tab on every row at once.
• Edit → Text on the selection: sort lines (A→Z, Z→A, by number), reverse them, remove duplicate lines, UPPER / lower case, trim trailing whitespace, tabs ↔ spaces, and format or minify JSON (key order and numbers stay as written). Ctrl+Z undoes each operation.

Files

• File → Export lines… saves a range of lines (say 100,000–200,000) to a new file, and Save selection as… saves the selection.
• File → Split file… cuts a file into name.part001.ext, name.part002.ext, … of a given size or number of lines, always at line breaks.
• File → Save with encoding saves a copy as UTF-8 (with or without BOM), UTF-16, Windows-1251/1252 or ISO-8859-1.

CSV tables

• Right-click a column header to sort the rows by it, see Statistics… (rows, empty cells, distinct values, sum, mean, minimum, maximum and the most frequent values), filter rows by this column, rename or move the column, or export the selected columns to a new CSV.

Your way

• Command palette: Ctrl+Shift+P, type part of a command's name, Enter.
• Help → Keyboard shortcuts: click a shortcut and press the keys you want.
• View → Font…: any monospaced font installed on your computer, or a font file.
• View → Language: English, Русский or O'zbekcha.
• The status bar shows how many lines, characters and bytes are selected.

Command line

• bigtext app.log:120 opens at line 120. --find TEXT searches right away, --follow follows the file like tail -f, and - reads standard input: journalctl -f | bigtext -. bigtext --help lists everything.

Which file do I need?

Platform	File
Windows 10 / 11 (recommended)	bigtext-setup-windows-x64.exe — installer with “Open with”, the Explorer context-menu entry and a Start menu shortcut
Windows, portable	bigtext-windows-x64.zip — unzip and run bigtext.exe
Linux x64	bigtext-linux-x64.tar.gz
macOS, Apple Silicon	bigtext-macos-arm64.tar.gz — unsigned: run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine bigtext once
macOS, Intel	bigtext-macos-x64.tar.gz — same as above

Upgrading

BigText 0.2.0 offers this version itself (or use Help → Check for updates…). From 0.1.x, run the new installer or replace the portable bigtext.exe. Settings, recent files and open tabs are kept.

The full list of changes is in CHANGELOG.md.

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.3.0