Software: Big File Line Reader (BFLR)

It is not uncommon in bioinformatics and in general computing to come across huge datasets, often bundled into files. The typical text editor on most operating systems is a simple program but it takes forever to open large files and often becomes unresponsive and crashes. You do not have an option to choose how much of the file you wish to see and this is a seriously annoying limitation.

So I decided to write simple text editor in Java called Big File Line Reader because it gives you the option to choose which lines of the file to view and consequently this makes it much faster than opening the whole thing with the default text editor.

BFLR has these features:

• Choose which range of lines to see, e.g. 50 - 500
  
• Choose which lines to display from, e.g. 1000 - end
• Display the whole file, e.g. all
  
• Save a file from the displayed text
  
• Edit, Copy, Cut, Paste and Select All.
  
• Search strings
• Search next occurance of string
  
• Line, Letter and Character numbering *
  

If you need more memory to open large files, for example 500MB of RAM, you should open up the executable jar file via the command line with a command like this:

java -Xmx500m -jar bigfilelinereader.jar

Here's a screenshot showing the first 7 lines (verses) from my Quran.txt file (6236 lines, 880KB):

It's not a perfect program - there's the occasional bug here and there but it does what I need it to so it should be useful to most people. You can get the source here:

http://code.google.com/p/big-file-line-reader/

You need to build the project first then run it by double clicking the executable bigfilelinereader.jar file in the dist folder.

*(line numbering includes wordwraped lines)