I'm interested to access large log files on a unix server with textpad. (textpad for history reasons, i personally prefer ofcourse less awk grep etc) but I have many personal who rather be using textpad they have years of experience with it and can tweak it to do whatever they want.
The problem is that if i connect for example with winscp to get the log files to textpad it first fetches the full log and user needs to wait and it bloats etc. I would rather the textpad to somehow access the unix machine and get only the relevant segment of the log file (large log files could be GB) anyone knows how can this be achieved?
Rotate your logs on a smaller interval so that they don't get so big. You can't use a GUI text editor to only load/display/edit parts of a text file. That's what ed and sed are for.
If you were to set up Samba, this would allow you to share parts of your linux filesystem with your windows systems. The samba share acts just like a windows share so only the portions of a file in use get pulled across the network. There are lots of HowTos available on setting up Samba but as you don't say which linux distribution you're using I can't point you at one.
I 've seen that Eclipse's editor ( kate in linux) is capable of dealing with large files. It does not prefetch it. Of course the performance is a little limited it has to load segments on its scroll.
Generally, if you want to access a large file it's better to disable the line indicator (which can cause too much overhead).
you may have a look at http://forums.dzone.com/eclipse/2159-editor-large-text-files-1-gig.html (it's a bit old and probably for windows)