BigEdit

A native macOS viewer for very large text, JSON, XML, YAML and Markdown files — many gigabytes, opened instantly.

macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon. Signed and notarized. No telemetry.

BigEdit is in beta. It might ruin your day, eat your files, or worse. Use at your own risk.

Memory-mapped access and a sparse background line index — the window opens immediately, even on a 50 GB file.

Background literal search across the whole file with live progress, case-sensitive or not. Jump between matches as they stream in.

Automatic colouring for JSON, XML, Markdown, YAML, SQL and shell scripts, picked from the extension or the file’s first bytes.

A deferred find-and-replace rule previews live in the viewport and writes to disk with a streaming, atomic save.

Open many files at once and switch between them from a sidebar — each keeps its own scroll position and search.

Go to line, word/character stats, soft-wrap for minified one-line JSON, and a copy that matches exactly what you see.