How to open large text files (>5 GB) on a Mac ?

A month ago, I downloaded a large dataset from Twitter. The .txt file consisted of around 1.5 million tweets in JSON and weighed at 5.5 GB. I wanted to look at the structure of the JSON in order to design a parser for processing the tweets. I was then working on a Sentiment Analysis project. As I attempted to open the file in Sublime Text 2, my powerful Mac just gave up. 

Not so powerful after all. Well, Sublime Text 2 wasn’t designed to handle large files, nor is TextEdit or Text Wrangler. I looked around the web-o-sphere and found HexFiend. I tell ya, it was a great ‘find’. HexFiend is able to handle files as large as >100 GB. That’s a lot of data. As soon as I downloaded HexFiend, my text file just took 1 second to open. I was in complete awe. There it was, I was staring at 1.5 million tweets right in front of me.

You can tap into the power of HexFiend, too. Just click here.