Not only that, but zcat is standard on every system I've tried (which, admittedly, isn't very many) and vim reads gzipped files as if they're plaintext. Last t

Not only that, but zcat is standard on every system I've tried (which, admittedly, isn't very many) and vim reads gzipped files as if they're plaintext. Last time I was writing a logging system the only reason I couldn't write directly to gzipped files was that I couldn't append to a gzipped file using Python (fairly important in logging). It looked like the reason was a Window's specific workaround having to do with seeking from the end of the file.