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.
Verdict:
GigaEdit has a quirky interface, and is too basic to be used as an editor. It does open even the largest files very quickly, though, so might be useful as a simple log viewer.
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