How can I open and edit large text documents on my Android device?

Question

I have a Galaxy Tab 10.1, rooted, running Android 5.1, that I'd like to use for editing simple text files. By "text file", I mean they are plain text documents, with a .txt extension. I do not need to edit .doc, .pdf, odt, or any other format.

I have seen this answer, and I have also tried a couple different apps, such as Jota, Turbo Editor, and others. They work fine for very small documents, but I have one text document that is about 300kB, and they all slow down and crash when I try to edit this file. Other files I have that are not quite as large seem to slow down just about any text editor, so it seems pretty clear there is a correlation between how big a document is and whether or not an Android text editor can handle it.

I'm confused as to why this is such a hard thing to do. I have games that I play on my various devices that seem to reference much larger resources and require more processing and RAM, so why should a simple text document under a megabyte be hard to work with?

In any case, is there a way I can edit a plain text document up to 500kB in size on my tablet device?

Answer 1

I'd suggest using ES file Explorer. I has a editor built-in that works pretty well for txt files. I have also tested with a file that's more than 900kb and worked fine.

Hope it helps!

Answer 2

I've been using QuickEdit and it works well. I just tested it by feeding a 1.5MB file (logcat output; 15995 lines) on a two year old device having a ridiculously slow external SD card. It took 1-10 seconds to load that file (this app loads the file completely) but after that things were smooth. You can edit wherever you want and saving took a second only.

The answer by dlh80 is also a good alternative. ES Note editor is a swift text viewer with bare bone editing feature. It is swift because it loads the file's content on-the-fly i.e. as soon as you scroll down to bottom the next page would load into the memory. It also means that if you decide to edit the file then you can only edit the file up to the point where you've scrolled.

If you've a word processor or a full-fledged office file reader app then you can give it a try as well. E.g. WPS Office opened that file quite easily but was sluggish in editing it. That may be the result of device's present condition.

Answer 3

I have tried many android text editor applications for opening and editing "relatively" large files (100 - 500kB), e.g:
- Jota
- QuickEdit(Lots of ads)
- Simple Text Editor
- Coastline
- 920 Text Editor
- Ted
- TextWarrior

From my research and testing TextWarrior Has been able to open/read and edit large text files faster than any of the other ones, with Simple Text Editor and Coastline following right behind.

Others are more full-featured (Jota and 920) but they are quite slow. Ted is simply not meant for large text files, and QuickEdit is hard to work with given the large number of ads.

A couple of tips:
- Use the lightest virtual keyboard (e.g. swipe slows down the editor) to increase editing speed.
- Disable heavy-processing helpful features features to increase speed.

One little Cons (potential for improvement) about TextWarrior:
- It seems the scroll bar can not be dragged which makes it a bit difficult when navigating large text files, but navigating via line numbers seems to get the job done.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

DroidVim immediately opened and edited a 30 MB file smoothly. I also think Termux will have options like nano.

Vim is an excellent editor for any system, imho. Just read a cheat sheet before running it. "i" for insert, "esc" gives command mode and ":wq" saves and exits etc. Most people here know that.

Google Play Store also had an editor with a dark ("hacker style") interface that read any file blockwise. It had a large image to pull in the slidebar. Can not find it now, though.