Dealing with Large Files in Vim
Vim is fast, that’s one of its main selling points. In general, it can deal with very large files easily.
But there are ways to ruin your Vim experience, and it’s not especially hard:
- opening LARGE files, with syntax highlighting
- opening generated files (uglified JavaScript, for example), and letting ALE run a linter on the contents
That second case is the one that has burned me recently: it pegged my CPU to 100% for a few minutes and completely blocked Vim while it tried to flag everything. The file itself wasn’t particularly large, it was less than 250KB.
The solution for these cases is to turn off everything: highlighting and plugins:
$ vim -u NONE filenameman vim says:
-u {vimrc} Use the commands in the file {vimrc} for initializations.
All the other initializations are skipped. Use this to
edit a special kind of files. It can also be used to skip
all initializations by giving the name "NONE". See ":help
initialization" within vim for more details.
If Vim is stuck, I haven’t found a way to fix that directly; ctrl-c or
ctrl-\ won’t help in this case. I’ve had to kill Vim, although 15/TERM is enough, to
make it stop.