Open very large text files in Notepad and you'll probably notice a pause, perhaps several seconds, while the file is parsed and then displayed.

GigaEdit is a tiny text editor/ viewer which opens these files considerably faster, typically in just a fraction of a second.

The program's interface looks a little odd. There are no menus here, and GigaEdit doesn't respond to standard Windows keypresses (Ctrl+O to open, Ctrl+S to save); instead there are tiny buttons scattered around the main window.

You'll find some good ideas here, like "Find" listing all matches in a separate window, rather than taking you through them one by one.

But on the other hand, there's no case sensitive/ insensitive option, and no Find and Replace.

There are some more specialist tools here - like character frequency, repetitions and word positions tables - but these sometimes crashed the program in our tests.