XSH is a powerfull command-line XML editing tool/programming language in the manner of Unix shell interpreters and line-oriented text editors like ed which can be used either interactively or for batch-mode XML processing. EditiX is a powerful and easy to use XML editor, Visual Schema Editor, XQuery Editor and XSLT debugger for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X designed to help web authors and application programmers take advantage of the latest XML and XML-related technologies such as XSLT /.

There are plenty of 'heavyweight' tools such as XmlSpy, which are good for prodding around in xml docs - but often (very often in some cases!) you just want to quickly open and browse an xml doc, and have it pretty printed. Possibly with some basic search functionality (textual is probably fine).

I usually use a browser such as IE of Firefox for this, but they tend to break down for larger file sizes (I'm often opening files in the 10s of MBs or more).

I have some ideas about how such a viewer might be implemented, so I'm sure there must be something out there that can do it, but my google-fu is letting me down.

So I thought I'd put it to the hive-mind that is SO to lead the way.

Thoughts?

closed as not constructive by KevOct 31 '12 at 0:39

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9 Answers

firstobject's 605k download lightweight native Windows free XML editor opens a 50MB file in 1.3 seconds and provides text editing, search, syntax-colored printing, plus tree view and additional XML features including formatting and full-blown CMarkup scripting built in. You can reformat an entire 50MB XML document to a different indentation (takes 3 seconds on a nothing special 2.3GHz/2GB machine).

XML Copy Editor is perfect for this type of thing.

I like the viewer of Total Commander because it only loads the text you actually see and so is very fast. Of course, it is just a text/hex viewer, so it won't format your XML, but you can use a basic text search.

I have tried dozens of XML editors hoping to find one which would be able to do some kind of visualization. The best lightweight viewer for windows I have found was XMLMarker - too bad the project has been dead for some years now. It is not so useful as an editor, but it does a good job of displaying flat XML data as tables.

There are tons of free editors that do XML syntax highlighting, including vim, emacs, scite, eclipse (J2EE edition), jedit, notepad++.

For heavyweight XML features, like XPath support, XSLT editing and debugging, SOAP/WSDL there are some good commercial tools like, XMLSpy, Oxygen, StylusStudio.

JEdit is open-source and also has plugins for XML, XPath and XSLT.

Word-2003 is fairly good for visualizing (but don't use it for editing). Excel-2003 and up also does a good job at visualizing flat XML data and can apply XSL transformations (again, no good as an editor).

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http://www.firstobject.com/dn_editor.htm is so far the best and lightest editor available with handful of utilities. I recommend using it - tried with up to 400 MB of files and more than a million records :)

I like Microsoft's XML Notepad 2007, but I don't know how it handles very large files, sorry.

TextPad has a free xmltidy plugin that pretty-prints your XML. Nice and fast, although TextPad is shareware.

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