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Memory-efficient way of opening large files in Emacs read-only


From: Mikhail Pomaznoy
Subject: Memory-efficient way of opening large files in Emacs read-only
Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2022 09:49:26 +0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.5.1

Greetings!

In my daily workflows I commonly stumble upon a task of peeking into a header of a large (sometimes compressed) file. Those files can commonly be gigabytes in compressed form so can't fit into memory. I was wondering how can this be done in Emacs to leverage its search and navigate capabilities?

In a terminal this task is nicely accomplished with `less`, which loads file on demand while you scroll (memory-efficiently) and automatically detects at least gzip compression. However I am struggling to do something similar in Emacs for quite a long time.  I tried VLF (requires manually switching chunks loaded, encountered problems with compression), view-file (loads everything in memory), running less in Emacs terminals (I prefer outside-Emacs terminals) but for various reasons all this solutions are suboptimal and I usually end up with using `less`.

Is there something in Emacs I am missing? Is something like this makes sense to develop (I consider to write something for Emacs) ? I am using Emacs 28 and maybe in Emacs 29 there are novelties related to this issue?

Kind regards,

Mikhail




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