Show HN: Portable Giant File Viewer
10 comments
·April 12, 2025zemlyansky
A browser-based alternative made with JS and streams: https://statsim.com/preview/
sunny41
I was excited to hear about this and had a try. It seems it is not possible to jump to the end of the file.
quyse
As an alternative, on Windows I've always been using Far Manager [1], it supports viewing files of arbitrary size without loading them in RAM. Supports encodings, search, doesn't explode on binary files, etc.
knowitnone
Everything that is viewed is loaded in RAM or am I wrong? Perhaps it can load partial file? This looks like midnight commander.
cmiller1
The linked page appears to be down, I get an "Access to this site has been restricted" error.
sunny41
Do you still get this error now?
sunny41
As AI is hot recently, there is also some AI in this tool -- the app icon is made using AI.
knowitnone
Less can be downloaded but I apprecaite you for this tool
atmanactive
What about the colors? Dark mode? Is that hard-coded or adjustable?
sunny41
Dark mode will be available in a week. The colors are hard-coded currently, but I can make it adjustable.
I’ve been dealing with huge log files lately, several GBs in size, and got frustrated with common tools such as Notepad++ freezing and crashing a server with limited RAM. I wanted something fast, relatively lightweight, and install-free for Windows. I have been searched around the web for a while but couldn't find an equivalent, so I built Giant Log Viewer.
Features:
- It is an equivalent of the Linux' `less` pager tool for Windows, but works on Linux and macOS too
- Opens multi-GB UTF-8 unstructured log/text files instantly (without loading everything into memory)
- Navigates through the file using keyboard shortcuts -- jump to the end of the file, go to previous line, etc.
- Limited text/regular expression searching
- Portable -- just unzip and run
- Open-source -- welcome to contribute or fork
Would love your feedback, and if it’s useful, feel free to star it, suggest improvements or even contribute! Depends on the needs of myself and other users, more features might be added.