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 very 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

Copyright Ahmad Retha 2011 (GNU GPLv3)