Text Edit crashes when pasting many words

[retta283]

I have been looking for a way to preserve my Firefox history, and the easiest way I found is just copy all the text and paste it. There are about 13,000 entries. However, trying to paste this into Text Edit makes it beach ball for a while and crash. Does anyone know how to stop the crashing or another program I could use to save all of this data?

 

[chscag]

Are you copying the text with any of the machines you have listed in your profile? The beach balling could be due to a lack of memory although you should have enough memory in the 2009 iMac as it can take up to 16 GB. Another thing that would cause beach balling is a slow hard drive. Your iMacs probably have 5400 RPM drives unless you upgraded them. (I'm unfamiliar with your MacBook.)

 

[retta283]

Are you copying the text with any of the machines you have listed in your profile? The beach balling could be due to a lack of memory although you should have enough memory in the 2009 iMac as it can take up to 16 GB. Another thing that would cause beach balling is a slow hard drive. Your iMacs probably have 5400 RPM drives unless you upgraded them. (I'm unfamiliar with your MacBook.)

It has nothing to do with speed from what I can see. I don't think Text Edit can handle pasting over 1,000,000 characters at once.

All Intel iMacs made before 2012 have a 7200RPM hard drive. Only the current model uses 5400RPM. I am trying to copy the history on the 2008 iMac, and I can't transfer it to any other machine properly.

 

[Nigel Goodman]

Yes, I've had similar issues to this when I pasting text. In my case the text contained links to documents and video files and TextEdit was trying to paste the entire linked file!

Try the Paste and Match Style command (on the Edit menu) to see it that works. It did for me.

 

[retta283]

Yes, I've had similar issues to this when I pasting text. In my case the text contained links to documents and video files and TextEdit was trying to paste the entire linked file!

Try the Paste and Match Style command (on the Edit menu) to see it that works. It did for me.

Thanks, this worked, and it pasted within a second. It's a bit hard to read due to the formatting but you can still see what's what. I'll keep this in mind in the future.

 

[Nigel Goodman]

Thanks, this worked, and it pasted within a second. It's a bit hard to read due to the formatting but you can still see what's what. I'll keep this in mind in the future.

Of course, you can always change the formatting once the text is in the document to make it easier to read.

 

[chown33]

Consider making the document into Plain Text format before pasting.

Format > Make Plain Text

https://support.apple.com/guide/textedit/open-documents-txte51413d09/1.14/mac/10.14

If you want it formatted, then Format > Make Rich Text after pasting.