text file explorer

I often work with large text files in which the file extension (.txt, .dat, .csv, .tab) doesn’t always indicate what type of delimiter is used in the file. When the file is small, I’ll typically just “pop” it open in SciTE / Notepad. Large files (anything over 20 megs) often take a fair amount of time to read and very large files ( a gig or more) will often run into out of memory issues.

On top of wanting to know the delimiter, I also frequently want to know what fields / Headers are in the file. This normally means I have to open it in a text editor or Excel and review. I wrote the below Text File Explorer in AutoHotkey script to simplify the above. I can highlight a file from Windows Explorer and quickly detect the type of delimiter plus display headers if I care to.