A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algorithm. Quoted from Wikipedia

The goal of this section is to bring to your attention the shortcomings of your common text editor for use as a tool to explore a text file.

One of the core problems with the common text editor is that it is based on the illusion that you have all the lines from the file at your disposal through the display your looking at. Simply move the scrollbar where you want to go in the file. Perform a simple text search looking for something of concern. For smaller files, these operations are fast and stay in cadence with your thoughts.

For files that are too large, too large to even fit into main memory, most editors will simply let you know and exit. A couple editors use file virtualization so the program behaves as if the whole file is in memory. This works in principle, but starts to break down as real memory is consumed. Unfortunately, any kind of mental cadence you had will be gone. The only processes getting any CPU time is the operating system, disk operating system, and the file virtualization. Things start to get slow and sluggish.

Below is a screenshot of a file opened in a common text editor. To explore a file using this tool, you mentally process the text in the display, make cognitive notes in your mind, then scroll to a new position. This is a very good analogy of how the saccades and fixations work discussed in The Jig section, at turtle speed.

To perform this look and scroll exploration in the file shown below, it would take 3000 scrolls and the next couple of days to do it. The only comprehension you would get is by using your own cognitive skills and memory system. Humans are not good at this and they are very error prone.

The sample file below is only 22 megabytes and 89,000 lines. It would take months for the gigabyte files shown in the other screenshots shown.

Now lets take the case where you scroll more than a page at a time, say half the file. For a large file, that means you have to scroll through half the lines in the file to get there. Seems like the wrong road to get somewhere. It literally feels like the text file is on tape in a Turing Machine. Only one way to get to the other end is to traverse the entire tape. Can’t imagine how big the tape would get for large files.

Consider a file with 20 million lines of text.  Given a display is something around 2000 pixels in height, that would mean each pixel movement of the scrollbar would represent 10,000 lines.  This generally leads to a jerky at best scrollbar movement.

A common text editor digesting a large text file.

Other Scroll Stories

Complexity

When you open a common text editor, you are confronted with a screen that gives you every option possible under a barrage of menus, dialog boxes, and multiple windows. There are probably an infinite number of user interface interaction paths. It can be very visually distracting. If you open Notepad++ for the first time, it will take a bit of time to figure out how to search the file. It will take a lot longer to figure out how to save results. It will take a some more time to figure out how to run a search on the results. And once you are done, how readable is the display.

Text File Explorer is one click away from performing all those steps listed above. And then readies you for your next click instantly. The cognitive strength you gain in using Text File Explorer is that exploring is instant.

A Moving Target

Exactly what kind of visual cognition are you achieving by scrolling lines of text in front of your eyeballs. Your instinctive visual behavior is on overdrive trying to make sense of text in motion. I told myself to look dead center in a screen of scrolling text. You can’t not notice flashes of instinctive targets flooding your conscious visual processing. In addition, you can’t keep your eyes centered.

An Evolutionary Tale

Not so way back in time, drawing symbols on cave walls that were manifestations of deep mental images became the popular norm.  Must have been an exciting time for them.  Over more time, they figured out that writing those symbols on something a little smaller than a cave wall, like a piece of limestone, would make those symbols transportable. Transportable through space and time. This was a game changer in the Darwinian natural selection process and the beginning of these are the rules.

Now lets leapfrog to the timeframe around 1980.  Text files arrived at about that time. The world went from stacks of cards fed to computers to these files that contained all sorts of information. The way for a human to look at these text files was through a scrolled based window.  The idea and assumption was that the files were small enough for the user to take a visual stroll and gain an understanding of the file.