heh eclipse and netbeans cant keep up with my typing most of the time, and even emacs has problems with undo / redo in large files

really? I'm willing to bet that any file that would be "big" for emacs, would melt eclipse, word or any other text editor, except maybe for vim.

Actually, editing very large (hundred-megabyte) text files is hard. (Example of real world use: mysqldump files.)

Emacs thrashes. Vim thrashes. Eclipse? I laugh. However, the text-mode editor "joe" loads the file quickly and doesn't thrash.

That's why I love SciTE. I just tried it with 126 MB text file and it didn't break a sweat.

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

Bonus: you can use it in your own wxPython application. Some brave soul wrapped it and made available as wxStyledTextCtrl widget.

http://www.yellowbrain.com/stc/index.html

BTW that's what I finished using for my app I mentioned in my other comment in this thread.

EmEditor ( http://www.emeditor.com/ ) handles large files very nicely. It has a special 'large file controller' that lets you configure in real-time how to access a file. I've edited 4GB text files (global search & replace) and the only slow step is the final 'save' function.

TextPad handles gigantic files beautifully.

ed is one I assumed would be good. I downloaded a windows distribution of it last year for a problem involving massive files. Turns out that particular version of ed is not designed as efficiently as you might expect.

Meybe they were running it in a MacPro...

Well, in fairness, things haven't changed much since 1995.

It has scroll bars! :)