I've recently learned basic (read: remedial) command line and VIM controls and have really gotten into text files. Following up on year-old post on 43 folders (http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-file), I'm intrigued by the idea of doing everything in big text files--dumping information into the file line by line, tagging it, and then relying on grep, sort, tr, sed and so on to manipulate and make sense of it. I can honestly say that I have never found a more powerful or flexible tool. (And just to think that it's been there all along, even when I shelled out big bucks for more complicated solutions. And don't even get me started on TeX. Yippee!)

But my main question is: how big can a plain text file become before it grows too slow or unwieldy? Is there a practical limit to the size of text files? Obviously, this depends on the power of the system and the software used. I'm currently using an iBook G4 and VIM 7.0 from the command line. I'd like not to split up the file, if possible, but I suppose I may have to archive older lines at some point if it gets too slow.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!