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GNU Midnight Commander

midnight-commander.org

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Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#191

Post by Findecanor »

unwind wrote: post #179
Findecanor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maint…

> thought I had released the GTK 3.x version,

My bad. You had. Sorry.

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

Much congrats!

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#193

Post by andyferris »

I used to use XTree Gold, which was... golden. I always heard of Midnight Commander but never really got around to using it. I should probably fix that.

What I never got was why this style of TUI (MS edit.com, qbasic, etc) isn't really carried through in modern tradition? I really enjoyed these when when I was younger... yet even textual or ratatui apps don't really bring this interface to the terminal. (Or why screen-coordinate-based terminals aren't the norm to base TUI apps upon... this aspect just seems "obvious" but in this aspect modern terminal emulates seem lightyears behind MS-DOS, of all things).

Perhaps the rewrite of edit [1] will spawn a ressurgence of this TUI style?

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-...

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#194

Post by unixhero »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #185
unixhero wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midnight Commander is available under Brew. https://brew.sh/ The command to install it is: brew install mc

Thanks, your comment was the one I was looking for, even though I had guessed that ‘brew install mc’ would work. I am curious how mc will fit in with tmux and emacs-nw.

With tmux it is seamless, screen as well.

I don't know anything about Emacs =)

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#195

Post by ptspts »

homebrewer wrote: post #166
jwr wrote: 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.

This should have been solved in the last 30 years on Linux console, X terminal emulators and through SSH.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#197

Post by ramses0 »

yuvadam wrote: post #87

For anyone looking for more modern terminal file managers: my favorite is yazi since it has great preview capabilities out of the box and requires zero config, but other alternatives are nnn, ranger, walk and lf.

...and a tip for `ranger`: `alias r='source ranger'`

See `cat "$( which ranger )"` for what it does, but TLDR lets your shell `cd` (navigate) to the directory where you've navigated to within ranger. (ie: you can use the alias `r` as a lazy man's `cd`).

It has to be done as a shell alias b/c `$PWD` is exclusively a shell concept, can't be modified by a mere program that you're running (thankfully).

Other useful bits are sometimes `F2` for interactive file-rename (eg: backspace `.txt` to `.csv` or whatever), mark/tag support so `'d` goes to `~/Downloads`, `'g` goes to `~/Git`, `'t` for `/tmp`, etc.

Overall if you're decent at vim there's a lot to love, and otherwise the basics pretty much work like you'd expect with keyboard/gui conventions (arrows, f2, etc).

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#198

Post by Aspos »

bvrmn wrote: post #184

I have fond memories for mc during my transition from Windows and trying to replace DOS Navigator and Far Manager with something similar. Started to use ranger a long ago though and never came back.

Far Manager works in Linux and Mac OS and works great.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#199

Post by arevno »

eviks wrote: post #144
jwr wrote: 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.…

> every fraction of a second matters That was not true otherwise you wouldn't get stuck with the most unergonomic keys mandating moving your hands off their resting place. > selecting all files ... : one flick of the right hand The common Ctrl+A is better, no flick, just shifting a single thumb > F6 with the left hand followed by another Enter immediately with the right hand Or still same single hand Ctrl+Shift+X (or…

> the most unergonomic keys mandating moving your hands off their resting place

Touch typists always have to get their dig in.

I've been using vim for 5 years now and still use up/dn/lf/rt - it's easier to find in a tactile manner with the right keyboard and makes MUCH more sense to the brain than hjkl. It's like 80ms travel, worst case.

Even the gaming community got this more correct with wasd, in terms of key positions that make sense to the brain.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#200

Post by 11mariom »

axiolite wrote: post #51

I never could use mc. None of the keyboard shortcuts were at all intuitive to me, who had been using many different GUI file managers over the decades. Which is a shame, because I use SSH a LOT and doing normal file housework via pure CLI is super tedious and error-prone... Fortunately, I went looking more recently, and found the nnn file manager, which works properly with the basic keyboard commands I would expect,…

Same feeling… but. For me fastest and easiest way to manage files are coreutils (sometimes with help of rsync/zmv/zcp). And that way I always have exactly same toolset no mather where I am logged in (local pc, server, router, etc).

I'm using GUI File Manager only for multimedia (photos, movies, pdf files).

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