EmEditor

Description

EmEditor is a Guinness World Record Holder. In 2015, Emurasoft submitted the text editor for verification as the largest text file opening capacity in the world, and Guinness confirmed it: EmEditor opened a file that weighed 900GB and had 2.1 billion lines. The record set a point of difference that the marketing for most text editors never has to deal with — most editors crash or refuse to open files larger than a few hundred megabytes, and developers who work with server logs, database exports, and huge CSV files meet that limitation on a regular basis. EmEditor engineered specifically past that boundary.

The Japanese developer Yutaka Emura created EmEditor and founded Emurasoft to develop and sell it as a commercial product. The editor’s target audience is Windows developers, system administrators, data analysts, and writers who require a fast and capable text editor that can handle files of any size, with good regular expression support for text processing, and support for multi-language text including right-to-left scripts and CJK character sets without the encoding problems that Western-developed editors often cause with Unicode edge cases.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

Emura released the first version of EmEditor in 1997, which was a Windows text editor market where Notepad didn’t have much functionality and paid text editors such as UltraEdit and EditPlus were in the professional category. EmEditor was competitive in performance and Unicode support from the early stages of its development, and was aimed at users that worked with international text and required reliable encoding detection and conversion.

The editor achieved version 10 in 2011 with the introduction of the large file handling architecture that eventually led to the Guinness record. Traditional text editors read file contents into memory, and this restricts the file size to a fraction of the installed RAM. EmEditor’s large file mode reads chunks of a file into memory as needed instead of loading the entire file into memory at one time, enabling it to display, search, and edit files that are any size larger than available RAM – a 1 TB file opens just as well as a 1 KB file, with the system reading only what is on screen.

Emurasoft launched a subscription pricing model in addition to perpetual license options, with subscriptions entailing all major version upgrades and a portable USB version. The free EmEditor Free tier eliminates the file size limits and most of the premium features but leaves the core editing experience intact.

KEY FEATURES

Large File Handling

EmEditor streams large files instead of reading them into memory, so large files can be opened quickly. Searches, replacements, and navigation are performed over the entire file instead of just the part that is loaded. The editor shows line count and file size in the status bar. Binary files open in a hex display mode. This ability makes EmEditor the practical choice for developers and administrators who work frequently with application logs, database export files, and large data sets that other editors won’t load.

Syntax Highlighting

Customizable syntax highlighting covers more than 150 file types including programming languages, markup formats, configuration files and script formats. Users can write their own syntax definitions for proprietary file types or internal configuration formats. Colour schemes are global or file type specific. The syntax engine deals with nested syntax — the syntax of an embedded CSS and JavaScript within an embedded document, for example — using layered syntax definitions.

Regular Expression Search and Replace

The search engine implements perl-compatible regular expressions with support for named capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind assertions, and Unicode character class matching. Multi-file search searches all open files or in a directory tree, and gathers results in a search results pane with links to matching lines. Regular expression replace with capture group references is used to rewrite text programmatically over large files or over entire project directories in a single operation.

Multi-Caret and Column Selection

Multiple carets are used simultaneously at various places in the document, so that the same text can be typed at multiple places simultaneously. Column selection (rectangular selection) selects a vertical block of characters over multiple lines instead of whole lines, allowing editing of fixed-width data formats where a particular column position must be consistently changed over hundreds of lines.

CSV and TSV Editing

A special CSV mode is a column-aligned display of comma-separated and tab-separated files, similar to a spreadsheet, with each column visually separated for readability. Column sorting, column-specific search and replace, and freezing of the header row work in CSV mode. This makes EmEditor a working editor for data files too large to be opened by spreadsheet applications.

Macros and Automation

EmEditor supports JavaScript and VBScript macros that automate editing tasks: batch text transformations, file format conversions, automated search and replace sequences, and custom workflow operations. Macros execute in an interactive or scheduled manner, and the macro recorder records manual editing steps as executable scripts.

Plugin Architecture

A plugin system is used to extend the editor with external tools such as a file browser, snippet manager, HTML bar and project manager. Third-party developers have released other plugins via the EmEditor community.