Compare
NomiPad and VS Code
Keep coding in VS Code. Open the 2 GB log in NomiPad. The two are built for different files, and they work well side by side.
By the NomiPad team · Updated
What VS Code does with a large file
VS Code loads the whole file into its text model. For files of 20 MB or more, or with 300,000 lines or more, it shows “tokenization, wrapping, folding … have been turned off for this large file” and switches those features off1. Much bigger files take a long time to open and a lot of memory, because every byte is held by the editor.
That is a sensible trade-off for an editor built around projects of source files. Logs, data dumps and exports are a different shape.
What NomiPad does instead
- Opens without loading: the file is memory-mapped, the first screen of a 1 GiB log is ready in about a millisecond, and the lines are indexed in the background.
- Keeps the colors: above 64 MiB, code is highlighted by Tree-sitter in NomiPad’s Rust engine, for 18 languages including JSON, YAML, SQL and Bash.
- Searches the whole file: plain text at up to 11.8 GiB/s, or regex with case and whole-word options.
- Edits and saves safely: only the changed part is rewritten, in the file’s own encoding and line endings; if something else changed the file, NomiPad asks first.
How to split the work
| File | Open it in |
|---|---|
| Source code in a project, with debugging, extensions and Git | VS Code |
| A log, CSV, JSON or SQL dump of hundreds of MB or more | NomiPad |
| A file in UTF-16 or Windows-1252 that must stay that way | NomiPad |
| Quick notes and Markdown you want rendered as you type | NomiPad |
On macOS, right-click a file and choose Open With › NomiPad; on Windows, Open with. Settings › Files in NomiPad can make it the default app for plain text, Markdown, log, JSON and CSV files; your source files stay with VS Code.
What NomiPad isn’t
It has no extensions, debugger, terminal or project search. It is a notepad, not an IDE, and doesn’t try to replace VS Code.
Sources
- VS Code source: largeFileOptimizations.ts and textModel.ts (20 MB / 300,000-line thresholds)
Checked September 2026.