If it was configurable, what value would you set it to?

And, if your desired value is larger, would making it easier to activate highlighting be a reasonable alternative approach? Currently you can highlight with:

View Options → Highlight As...

...but this is a minimum of three clicks. We could do this instead:

Syntax highlighting is disabled for this enormous file. Highlight File

Or, more broadly, is your codebase littered with >256KB source files which routinely need human review, or is this just cumbersome for the handful you have?

(I'm also assuming you want to increase the limit rather than lower it, although I could imagine that also being the case..)

@jhurwitz - please don't forget https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/feature_requests/#describe-problems in light of your new powers. :D

Sorry, I'll make sure to describe problems in the future!

Problem:

Previously, differential would syntax highlight all files. Now, syntax highlighting a large file is a 5-click process. (Selecting "use default" doesn't seem to work, so we actually have to select a language -- that's why I'm getting 5 clicks and not 3.)

I searched across our main repos, and we have 10 files that are edited and reviewed by humans and are >256KB. Our largest is 537KB. So, not terribly common, but for some of these files there are teams that edit the files daily, and this issue is causing a lot of frustration on these teams.

In an ideal world, would the regularly edited human-facing 537KB file still be a single 537KB file (rather than, e.g., a collection of smaller files, or a code-generated file, or some other kind of resource)?

That is, is this exacerbating an existing architectural/code-quality problem where some projects have 20K-line "Spaghetti.java" files, or are these files basically pretty reasonable and my assumption that 256KB is well above the upper size bound for a reasonable source file just not holding up well in the real world?

(Our largest human-facing source file is PhabricatorApplicationTransactionEditor.php and weighs in at a paltry 78KB.)

Ideally these large files would be collections of smaller files, and we have made progress towards this, but I suspect it will be a while before all such cases are completely fixed.

That being said, this isn't the first time large files have caused us pain on Phabricator. Cf T7776.