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GNU Midnight Commander

midnight-commander.org

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Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#231

Post by zahlman »

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.

In gnome-terminal, I have yet to succeed in inputting an escape sequence manually without the escape key being interpreted separately.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#232

Post by rererereferred »

varjag wrote: post #186
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,…

It's a heavily GenX-coded tool. If you never used Norton Commander there's no point really.

Midnight Commander was coded by a Gen Xer, but Norton Commander was coded by a Baby Boomer ;)

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#233

Post by zahlman »

arevno wrote: post #199
eviks wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 posit…

Even the gaming community got this more correct with wasd

esdf would be better (using stronger fingers). I don't like hjkl either and would use ijkl if I were non-lazy enough to figure out rebinding. I can remember many games for the Apple ][ used ijkm.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#234

Post by pantulis »

unixhero wrote: post #127
pantulis wrote: post #36

The killer feature in mc was the popup menu that you could configure to run several commands on the selected files. And if memory serves it could be customized on a global or directory specific way.

Which menu is that? I never tried it. Been an MC user since 1997.

It is bound by default to F2, look at the "Edit Menu File" section here:

https://source.midnight-commander.org/man/mc.html

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#235

Post by tracker1 »

ptspts wrote: post #195
homebrewer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's more of a "just in case" thing for the most part... the actual risk of an escape as part of a sequence showing up over TCP without the rest for over a fraction of a second today is highly unlikely. That said, so many systems seem to add a delay well over half a second like we're using dialup.

I'd probably tune the delay to 100-200ms if I ever really felt it and have the option to change it.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#236

Post by rob74 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #230
rob74 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Krusader for years, then (after installing Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu) I discovered Double Commander ( https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd ), which is also free software, but more cross-platform (and developed using Free Pascal/Lazarus, which makes it old-fashioned in even more ways - it even used to be hosted on SourceForge, but it looks like they moved to GitHub now).

I just tried it now. Any way to get it to not show all of my docker volumes as disk drives above the panes? There's hardly any room for a file-manager below that.

Yeah, I noticed that too, but I have fewer docker volumes, so it didn't bother me as much. As far as I can see, you can only disable the "drive buttons" completely under Configuration/Options/Layout/Show drive buttons". If you should need it, there is also a "drives list button" which shows a menu containing all available "drives".

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#237

Post by [deleted] »

glax wrote: post #196

I used Far manager( https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php ) a lot back in the days, clone of norton commander. Got hooked to it, after joining the se-nse.net forum ( https://www.facebook.com/sensedotnet ). Sadly it's been disbanded now

[deleted]

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#238

Post by tracker1 »

arevno wrote: post #199
eviks wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 posit…

In early, original Doom/Doom2 days, I'd use ctrl/shift as up/down with zx mapped to left right... resting my left hand there felt really comfortable and the actions were pretty easy functionally without as much RSI strain. In the end, I gave up and went with wasd as I got tired of changing settings for games all the time, or having someone else use my computer and complain.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#239

Post by tomrod »

unmole wrote: post #54
pimeys wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it especially when moving files around in my NAS and it is awesome. For GUI file managers, I have to say you can't get better than Dolphin. It has an integrated shell for the current directory, and you can split the view. It can also directly open ssh and SFTP URLs. For local things the combination of Dolphin and it's shell is unbeatable.

> and you can split the view You could do the same with Nautilus. But in their infinite wisdom GNOME developers decided to remove that ability.

The stories about GNOME dev make me sad. Not quite as bad as resume-driven development changes to core tech products, but not too far off either.

I like things that work. Somehow that makes me a luddite!

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#240

Post by lproven »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #164
lproven wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orthodox file managers seem to be very much a thing across the Eastern Bloc. I moved from England to Czechia in 2014 and was amazed to discover almost everyone used them. My first job in a Windows company, it had a site licence to Total Commander, and it was preinstalled on all machines. When I told them I found the Windows Explorer to be perfectly fine, people genuinely gaped in amazement at me as if I said I chose…

Mazochist :)

:-D I honestly don't mind it.

I used the Windows 3 UI, complete with File Manager, until 1996. I didn't mind it at all. But I thought the Windows 95 Explorer was an amazing tool when it was launched, and as soon as Win NT got Explorer with NT 4, I switched to it.

I have never been unhappy.

I can tile 2 windows side-by-side in moments if I want that old source-and-destination layout. It works absolutely great.

I tried Total Commander, and Midnight Commander too, and they don't do anything I can't do in seconds anyway. I really don't get it. It's not that I dislike them, but I am perfectly happy with the replacement.

I am not saying anything is wrong with the OFM model but when it went away in the OSes I used 30 years ago, I didn't miss it.

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