I just tried it on a 35MB log file and it gave me an alert that said it was gonna be sluggish, then took about 20s to actually open the file I requested (I could navigate to other tabs in the meantime but there was no indication that anything was happening), and then once the file appeared, it took another 20s to become responsive. Searching for a string which appeared in the second line of the file took over 30s, probably because it was searching the entire file to highlight all matches, and all the while, it was completely unresponsive. Then when I tried to close the file, the entire editor hung and eventually gave me a "this tab is not responding" dialog. I clicked "wait" and it took another 10s and the window finally closed.
All in all I'd say the experience editing large files still completely sucks compared to every other editor I use.
Don't get me wrong, I still love and use Atom, but they really need to come up with a solution to this problem, because it's just ridiculous. The fact that I have to occasionally leave my text editor to edit certain text files is a huge black eye that many people won't put up with, and which I will eventually get tired of putting up with if they don't do something about it soon.
One thing I think they could do is take advantage of the fact that when you are editing a file that large, you don't expect to have a particularly good experience with the scrollbar. I don't open a file with 10 million lines and grab the scrollbar to get to the spot I'm looking for; it's just not practical. Over a certain size, they really don't need to have the entire buffer in memory at once, and maybe they don't even need a usable scrollbar so much as they need good relative navigation and search. It would be perfectly reasonable in my opinion to have a "large file mode" for the editor window that has subtly different behavior that makes it not so ridiculously heavy.
All in all I'd say the experience editing large files still completely sucks compared to every other editor I use.
Don't get me wrong, I still love and use Atom, but they really need to come up with a solution to this problem, because it's just ridiculous. The fact that I have to occasionally leave my text editor to edit certain text files is a huge black eye that many people won't put up with, and which I will eventually get tired of putting up with if they don't do something about it soon.
One thing I think they could do is take advantage of the fact that when you are editing a file that large, you don't expect to have a particularly good experience with the scrollbar. I don't open a file with 10 million lines and grab the scrollbar to get to the spot I'm looking for; it's just not practical. Over a certain size, they really don't need to have the entire buffer in memory at once, and maybe they don't even need a usable scrollbar so much as they need good relative navigation and search. It would be perfectly reasonable in my opinion to have a "large file mode" for the editor window that has subtly different behavior that makes it not so ridiculously heavy.