Hello all,
I'm the developer of Caxton. Part of my job is consumer data processing, so multi gigabyte logs, giant CSV exports, SQL dumps, and JSONL are a normal week for me, and for years my fix was keeping a Windows machine around because the standard tool for this (EmEditor) never shipped a Mac version.
The thing I actually wanted was for a huge file to not automatically mean some crippled read-only large file mode. You should still be able to search it, regex it, filter it, Replace All across it, tail it, diff it against another copy, and edit it like any normal file.
It memory maps the file instead of loading it into RAM, so the file stays on disk and only what's on screen gets materialized. Numbers from the benchmark harness, M1 Max with 64 GB:
- 10 GB log (80,610,954 lines): usable immediately, full line index finishes in the background in 19.5s
- literal search across the whole 10 GB, 1,613,344 matches: 1.3s
- Replace All across all 1.61M matches: 1.7s, and it lands as one undo step
- filter 80.6M lines down to the matching 1.61M: 1.3s
- 1 GB CSV, 2,022,947 rows by 50 columns: working grid in 2.6s, numeric sort across all rows in 8.2s
- memory stays under 200 MB with the 10 GB document open
Those are my numbers on my machine, the harness and methodology are published on the site, so check them against yours.
The CSV side is a real editable grid, not a preview. Typed sorts, value filters, dedupe, fill series, split and combine columns, fixed width conversion, and it saves back to the same plain file. On the text side there's regex search, multi condition filtering, follow tail, Batch Replace with pair lists, Find and Replace across folders with previews and backups, bookmarks, folding, multi cursor, side by side compare with copy changes across, 13 encodings, workspaces.
Native AppKit and Swift, no Electron, Apple Silicon and Intel. Everything happens locally, files are never uploaded anywhere, no telemetry.
It's commercial: 7 day trial, no card, then $9.99/mo, $99.99/yr, or $179.99 lifetime. If the trial or a sub expires it drops to read only rather than locking you out, opening, searching, filtering and copying still work, editing and saving is what requires the license.
Mostly I'm here for feedback from people who regularly get handed huge logs and exports from other machines.
caxton.app