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GNU Midnight Commander

midnight-commander.org

171–180 of 317 posts

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#171

I love Midnight Commander so much; I install it on every system I use. It's so much more efficient/pleasant when in comes to navigating the filesystem and doing basic operations, especially when you learn the shortcuts and learn how to use it along with other command-line tools (hint: if you press Ctrl+O in MC it will switch to a normal shell command prompt it the directory you're in, and you can press Ctrl+O again t…

I have loved it since '99, when my friends used to tell me that to be a linux admin you have to stay up late because midnight commander works only after midnight ! Slackware 7 <3

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#172
post #90

I been using mc since mandrake days, coming from dos looking for a norton commander replacement. Still use mc in 2025 :-)

I still remember how I installed Slackware in 1996 and then found about Midnight Commander by accidentally typing in 'mc'. I LOLed hard as I saw the name "midnight". Still using it today too!!

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#173
It's an interesting file browser, the default "blue" colors gives old-school vibes nowadays.

If you wonder how to quit (if started from a terminal):

It's `ESC 0`. Or "exit" like from a shell. Took me some time I have to admit (q, ctrl-c, ctrl-q, F10, ESC all did not work).

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#175

I've been using `mc` for decades... In fact, in my early professional days as a software dev, I've written entire systems with PHP using `mcedit` (the built-in editor), because I didn't know `vim` then, and `mcedit` had syntax highlighting...

Mostly used Notepad++ or SciTE ( https://www.scintilla.org/ ) over the years, as the number of languages/platforms I traverse made it a consistent option for dealing with various document encodings etc. I thought mc and mcedit was cool, but needed something small and portable within a fairly locked-down environment ( "No [root] for you!" as the admin would say.) =3

Many years ago, I used UltraEdit. It was fast, light weight(ish) and supported huge files.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#176
post #104

Midnight commander is a great tool, although I think most younger users do not realize that we lost something along the way. Norton Commander was fantastically fast for common file operations not just because of the dual-pane design, but because of several things working together. Thoughtful design of software while thinking of hardware. To get the most out of it, you were supposed to use the numpad on your keyboard.…

> ESC was supposed to work immediately, not after a delay. It's not mc's fault, the Escape delay is added by the terminal emulator, to correctly handle escape sequences. You can probably configure it, but the most portable way that works everywhere is to simply press it twice quickly. It's only barely slower than the DOS way of doing it, and much faster than pressing and waiting for a second.

[deleted]

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#177

It's an interesting file browser, the default "blue" colors gives old-school vibes nowadays. If you wonder how to quit (if started from a terminal): It's `ESC 0`. Or "exit" like from a shell. Took me some time I have to admit (q, ctrl-c, ctrl-q, F10, ESC all did not work).

F10 always worked for me, but some terminals use F10 for some other functionality.

If that fails, you can click on "10 Quit" with the mouse (not ideal, but an immediate solution).

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#178
post #177

It's an interesting file browser, the default "blue" colors gives old-school vibes nowadays. If you wonder how to quit (if started from a terminal): It's `ESC 0`. Or "exit" like from a shell. Took me some time I have to admit (q, ctrl-c, ctrl-q, F10, ESC all did not work).

F10 always worked for me, but some terminals use F10 for some other functionality. If that fails, you can click on "10 Quit" with the mouse (not ideal, but an immediate solution).

Ah I see, thx, it's a pretty default configured "gnome-terminal", which probably captures the F10.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#179
post #73

I never used MC (not very much into TUIs) but ages ago I wrote a graphical file manager in the same vein. For me the inspiration came from Directory Opus [1] on the Amiga, which was just awesome. When GTK+ was released in the late 90s, combining my love of C programming with a newfound home in Linux and GTK+'s ability to make complicated graphical interfaces resulted in a dual-pane file manager. It was a great projec…

I find it a little sad that you haven't released a new revision since 2016 [0]. It has not declined in usefulness. Edit: Incorrect:(I'd guess the biggest requested change would have been to update it from using GTK 2 to GTK 3, but I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to...) 0: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gentoo/

Wow, massive ego boost, thanks a lot!

I thought I had released the GTK 3.x version, but I guess not, then. It might have been that there was something I just couldn't get to behave right, gentoo is somewhat picky about its UI and tries to make it do the right thing in ways that GTK sometimes isn't ready for.

Today I guess the target would be GTK 4.x, I tried to align with the latest main version back when I was maintaining it more.

Oh and 2016 makes sense, had my first kid in 2015 ... :|

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