[Gllug] Opening a large text file in a text editor

[Nix]

On Sat, 6 May 2006, Chris Ebenezer murmured woefully:
> Emacs uses an internal type to index its position in each buffer, and
> as pre emacs 22 this was limited to 128MB, as of emacs22 it should be
> 256MB (both figures are for 32 bit machines) - you can see the local
> value using M-h v most-positive-fixnum

Indeed.

> Xemacs is a bit different - and I believe it's limit is around 1GB.

The limit depends on the wordsize of the machine: for 32-bit hosts
the limit is indeed 2^30 bytes: this is the limit on numbers XEmacs
can represent (32-bit bytes, minus two bits for the type tag).

Emacs is just the same, but XEmacs's type tag bits went on a diet some
years back, while Emacs's did not.

> I guess it's an argument for upgrading to a 64bit machine, or using
> some other mail backend format, or something.

Use nnmh or (if a Gnusist) nnml. :)

-- 
`On a scale of 1-10, X's "brokenness rating" is 1.1, but that's only
 because bringing Windows into the picture rescaled "brokenness" by
 a factor of 10.' --- Peter da Silva
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