From 50cdf204d4a4a444d36dff0bee859660b527b6a8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Marco Hinz <mh.codebro@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2016 14:26:05 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Quirks: editing huge files is slow

---
 CHANGELOG.md |  1 +
 README.md    | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 27 insertions(+)

diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 47b28b9..70afea2 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
 - Tips: [Saner command-line history](README.md#saner-command-line-history)
 - Debugging: [Verbosity](README.md#verbosity)
 - Debugging: [Debugging Vim scripts](README.md#debugging-vim-scripts)
+- Quirks: [Editing huge files is slow](README.md#editing-huge-files-is-slow)
 - Miscellaneous: [Easter eggs](README.md#easter-eggs)
 
 ## [1.1] - 2016-01-07
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 34e89b8..b1fe9bb 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -60,6 +60,7 @@ added every day. Things about to be added can be found here:
 
 #### [Quirks](#quirks-1)
 
+- [Editing huge files is slow](#editing-huge-files-is-slow)
 - [Newline used for NUL](#newline-used-for-nul)
 - [Bracketed paste (or why do I have to set 'paste' all the time?)](#bracketed-paste-or-why-do-i-have-to-set-paste-all-the-time)
 
@@ -1046,6 +1047,31 @@ looking at some distributions:
 
 ## Quirks
 
+#### Editing huge files is slow
+
+The biggest issue with big files is, that Vim reads the whole file at once. This
+is done due to how buffers are represented internally.
+([Discussion on vim_dev@](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/oY3i8rqYGD4/discussion))
+
+If you only want to read, `tail hugefile | vim -` is a good workaround.
+
+If you can live without syntax, settings and plugins for the moment:
+
+```
+$ vim -u NONE -N
+```
+
+This should make navigation quite a lot faster, especially since no expensive
+regular expressions for syntax highlighting are used. You should also tell Vim
+not to use swapfiles and viminfo files to avoid long delays on writing:
+
+```
+$ vim -n -u NONE -i NONE -N
+```
+
+Putting it in a nutshell, try to avoid using Vim when intending to write really
+huge files. :\
+
 #### Newline used for NUL
 
 NUL characters (`\0`) in a file, are stored as newline (`\n`) in memory and