Big Sur Beach Balls

[DWHH1]

Since 'upgrading' to Big Sur 11.0.1 from Catalina (on an iMac 27 inch, late 2017, 64GB RAM) if I try to open a large txt file (~5.5GB) with TextEdit it hangs every time I try to drag the slider, on the right hand side, down to the bottom of the window to read the end of the file. This NEVER happened under Catalina. I have tried opening the same file as a plain text file in Microsoft Word for Mac (ver 16.43) and the Beach Ball also appears then.
Has anyone else recently experienced Beach Balls in TextEdit, or any other App, running under Big Sur?

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do about this - I work on the ground floor so throwing my iMac out of the window will not be as satisfying as it may be for Mac users on higher floors.

 

[FNH15]

Have you tried Pages? Otherwise, sounds like a bug in the text handling system.

 

[DWHH1]

Have you tried Pages? Otherwise, sounds like a bug in the text handling system.

Just now. VERY VERY slow to open the txt file. TextEdit under Catalina was MUCH faster. Big Sur is broken either by accident or on purpose.

 

[FNH15]

In Activity Monitor, is your CPU, Memory, or Disk activity spiking? If so, what process?

 

[chabig]

TextEdit is a simple text editor. It really isn't the right tool for opening a 5.5GB file. You need something heftier. One popular editor is BBEdit.

‎BBEdit

‎BBEdit is the leading professional text, code, and markup editor for the Macintosh. As the "go to" tool for web site designers, web application developers, writers, and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching...

apps.apple.com

 

[DWHH1]

TextEdit is a simple text editor. It really isn't the right tool for opening a 5.5GB file. You need something heftier. One popular editor is BBEdit.

‎BBEdit

‎BBEdit is the leading professional text, code, and markup editor for the Macintosh. As the "go to" tool for web site designers, web application developers, writers, and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching...

apps.apple.com

Thanks for the link and the suggestion but the problem is that TextEdit worked under Catalina but under Big Sur it doesn't. Since posting my initial comment about TextEdit problems I have noticed that others are also reporting (different) problems with TextEdit eg insertion, deletion etc. Why Apple felt it necessary to make changes to TextEdit is not easy to understand. Did they release an early Big Sur Beta by mistake? Who knows, but this release is not what we normally get from Apple.

 

[Fowl]

I have had slowness problems with TextEdit under Catalina. It would be unresponsive for several seconds opening a very small file or a new blank one. Once it has opened them, it's back to normal, unless it has been closed or inactive for a while.
I looked for solutions, and the only thing I found that seemed to work for some people involved safe reboot and cache cleaning. I haven't tried any of that yet.