An Application similar to NOTEPAD++ on Mac

[Tagbert]

Ah thanks for the link! The specialized features are geared towards programmers although the price is totally reasonable if not a bit low. I am surprised this company still in business 30 years later with 90% of the features free. They almost have no other app to sell.

Maybe I am noob, but I opened a text file and it seems that you can write infinitely horizontally.

Bbedit can handle text files that would choke most other editors. I'm sure it has it's limits (and not having line breaks usually pushes editors to that as that is how they segment their data) but it is what you want if you are working with large text files.

 

[Tagbert]

You can also turn word wrap off an on as you work on a file. There’s a menu item for that. I mapped a hot key to toggle it quickly since I do it a lot.

Yes, View/Text Display/Soft Wrap

 

[MacBH928]

thanks, what is the benefit of having infinite horizontal line? I am going to guess it has to do with coding where you have to write a long string of commands on 1 line before moving to the next

 

[MacBH928]

Bbedit can handle text files that would choke most other editors. I'm sure it has it's limits (and not having line breaks usually pushes editors to that as that is how they segment their data) but it is what you want if you are working with large text files.

when you say text files that choke other editors, my understanding are txt files are the lightest forms of files. How large are we speaking? Is it app source code that goes for millions of lines?

 

[svenmany]

thanks, what is the benefit of having infinite horizontal line? I am going to guess it has to do with coding where you have to write a long string of commands on 1 line before moving to the next

Just this morning I was looking at a large log file with long lines. Since there were no blank lines inserted between each entry, it was hard for me to figure out how many log lines I was looking at in the window. Was a new line on the screen a wrapping of the previous line or a brand new log entry? I just toggled off word wrap and I could see each individual line more clearly. If I needed to see content off to the right of the window, I just scrolled horizontally to expose that.

 

[Arctic Moose]

when you say text files that choke other editors, my understanding are txt files are the lightest forms of files.

A collection of bytes is a collection of bytes, it doesn’t matter what they represent, a terabyte of data is the same size regardless if it is a video or a text file. (Of course the resources required to parse or process the file can differ, depending on type.)

Log files are a great example, where each log entry can be represented by one very long line, and there can be a practically infinite number of entries.

(Although BBEdit will happily open any type of file, not only text files.)

 

[svenmany]

when you say text files that choke other editors, my understanding are txt files are the lightest forms of files. How large are we speaking? Is it app source code that goes for millions of lines?

You're right. When an application renders the image of the file's contents, it would have a much easier time doing so with plain text versus some other content. Nevertheless, some text files are still large enough to cause problems with some text editors. Even BBEdit used to have delays with my large files when I kept word wrap on. I haven't seen that in a while, though I can't say whether or not it would still delays with those same files.

I found an old 50mb log file with 205 thousand lines. BBEdit had no problems with it, even with word wrap on.