: These classic Unix-based editors are extremely efficient and can be tuned to handle large files rapidly, though they have a steeper learning curve.

: If you are on a Unix-like system (or using WSL/Cygwin on Windows), running strings yourfile.mkv will extract all sequences of printable characters, which is effective for finding metadata or embedded subtitles without loading the whole file as a "text" document.

: Specifically designed for large file handling, it can open and edit files well over 4GB by loading only small segments into memory at a time.

: You can use tools to split the large file into smaller chunks (e.g., 50MB each). This allows you to use standard editors to inspect specific sections.

If your goal is to extract readable text or specific data patterns from the MKV binary:

: This is a fast hex editor rather than a traditional text editor. It is "amazingly fast" for viewing the raw binary data of large files like MKVs and uses very little memory.