Settings:File handling:Temporary files

The File handling » Temporary files branch of Settings includes the following options.

Use of temporary file for editing (Provided for very large file handling)

One of the hallmark features of UltraEdit / UEStudio is the ability to easily and quickly open huge files, even files much larger than 4 GB in size. Unlike other editors, UltraEdit / UEStudio use relatively small amounts of memory to do this. By design, UltraEdit / UEStudio only load small portions of the file into memory at one time by creating a copy of the file (temporary file) and working with this temp file instead of the file directly on disk. With normal edit operations, on save, the changes you've made in the temporary file are copied back over to the original file on disk. On close, the temporary file is deleted. In some cases – usually with extremely large files – the creation and deletion of a temporary file may cause a delay on file open / close. The settings below allow you to control this behavior.

• Use temporary file for editing (normal operation)
  This setting will enable temporary files for all files you open, regardless of size. This may cause a delay when opening extremely large files.
• Open file without temp file but prompt for each file (CAUTION: Edits are permanent, decreases load time for large files)
  This setting will cause the editor to prompt you on whether or not to create a temporary file when you first open the file.
• Open file without temp file but NO prompt (CAUTION: Edits are permanent, decreases load time for large files)
  This setting will disable temporary files for all files you open, with respect to the threshold setting below.

It is extremely important to understand that with temporary files disabled, your changes to files are permanent and applied directly to the file on disk. This removes the ability to use "Revert to saved" as well as some other functionality that is normally available only when temporary files are in use.

Threshold for above (KB): 51200
This setting allows you to set a file size threshold in kilobytes for temporary file creation. Any file greater in size than the value you set here will be opened without temporary files. Setting this value to 0 would prevent temporary file creation for all files opened. This option is only applicable if the option Open file without temp file but NO prompt is selected.

You may also want to read over the temporary files power tip.

For a guide on maximizing performance in UltraEdit for very large files, read over the large file text editor power tip.