BigView

Huge file viewer for VS Code — open, search, filter and tail multi-gigabyte logs, JSON Lines and CSV files without loading them into memory.

VS Code Marketplace:

Open VSX:

Screenshots

Log

A 1 GB log with 5 million lines — a regular expression search across the whole file, levels and timestamps highlighted.

JSON Lines

Field filter, syntax highlighting in your theme's colors and a details panel for the selected line.

CSV

Table view with a header row and resizable columns; matches are highlighted inside cells.

Features

• Any file size — opens multi-gigabyte files right away; the first page appears in tens of milliseconds while the file is indexed in the background
• Low memory — keeps a compact line index, never the file itself; only the lines on screen are read
• Instant reopen — the index is cached on disk and reused until the file changes
• Whole-file search — plain text, match case, whole word or regular expression, with streaming results, progress and a results panel
• Filter — show only the matching lines, or invert to hide them; switching is instant
• Export — write the filtered lines to a new file
• Log files — lines colored by level, timestamps recognized, time range filter
• JSON Lines — syntax highlighting in the colors your theme uses for JSON, a details panel with fields and pretty-printed JSON, field filters like level=error
• CSV / TSV — delimiter detection, header row, table view with resizable columns
• Tail — new lines appear as the file grows; the view follows them when scrolled to the end, and an active search or filter keeps up
• Log rotation — renamed, truncated, deleted or recreated files are detected and indexed again
• Theme-aware — adapts to any VS Code color theme
• Read-only and offline — never changes your file and sends nothing anywhere

Performance

Measured on an Apple M-series laptop with an SSD. Your numbers depend on the disk.

Getting Started

1. Install BigView from the Marketplace
2. Open a .log, .jsonl, .ndjson, .csv or .tsv file — BigView is the default editor for them
3. Or right-click any file in the Explorer → Open File in BigView

To open one of these files in the regular text editor, use Reopen Editor With… → Text Editor.

Supported Formats

The format is detected from the extension and the first lines of the file. Change it with BigView: Change Format… or by clicking the format in the status bar; the choice is remembered per file.

Field filters (JSON Lines)

Click a field in the details panel to filter by its value.

Commands

Keyboard Shortcuts

Limitations

BigView is built for reading and searching. It does not do the following:

• No sorting of lines or CSV columns — sorting a multi-gigabyte file needs a copy of it
• No editing — the file is read-only
• Local files only — no remote, SSH or virtual file systems yet
• UTF-8 only — UTF-16 and other encodings are not decoded; files with NUL bytes in the first 4 MB are treated as binary and not opened
• Timestamps without a time zone are taken as UTC — unusual timestamp layouts may not be recognized by the time range filter
• CSV fields containing line breaks are shown as separate lines — BigView's unit is a line
• Search works line by line — a pattern cannot match across a line break
• Very long lines are cut at 16 KB in the view (search and export still see the whole line); the JSON details panel reads up to 1 MB of a line
• Legacy .tmTheme color themes — JSON Lines highlighting falls back to default colors
• Index cache lives in VS Code's extension storage — at most 500 MB in total, entries unused for 30 days are removed

Build

npm install
npm run build              # extension, workers and webview bundles
npm run watch              # dev mode with auto-rebuild
npm test                   # unit tests
npm run test:integration   # VS Code integration tests (BIGVIEW_LARGE=1 / BIGVIEW_HUGE=1 add 1 GB / 5 GB files)
npm run bench              # memory and speed per phase

Press F5 in VS Code to launch the Extension Development Host.

License

MIT