Re: default large-file-warning-threshold

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/01/2014 07:52 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I doubt that the speed of decoding could be significantly increased.

We don't need to increase decoding speed to make Emacs perform much 
better on large files.  When I first visit a file, all I need to see is 
the start of the file on my screen.  Emacs needs only to decode the 
initial part of the file to do that.  It can decode the rest of the file 
as I'm looking at the first part.  Although this sort of thing would be 
a nontrivial change to Emacs, it's doable and it would already be done 
if performance on large files were a priority for Emacs developers.

I'm not the only one to run into this problem; see the thread 
"Intelligently opening large files in emacs" 
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2014-03/msg00341.html> 
in this mailing list earlier this year.  There, the proposed solution 
was to use find-file-literally for files larger than a certain size.  
Perhaps Emacs should do this by default -- it'd be a nicer user 
experience in many ways than what we have now, and it should be easy to 
implement.