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GNU Midnight Commander

midnight-commander.org

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Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#291

Post by imiric »

zerr wrote: post #165
unwind wrote: 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…

Funny that it is still available for Windows and costs 60 USD. I wonder who buys such software nowadays.

Directory Opus is a brilliant piece of software. At least was when I last used it in the Windows XP days. It's a steal for $60.

Just take a look at that feature set. All in 26.58MB. The average modern web site weighs more than that.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#292

Post by imiric »

kqr wrote: post #32

For people on Android phones, Ghost Commander is neat. For people who like the power of Emacs dired, there used to be Sunrise Commander but last I looked it wasn't so actively maintained and had some bugs, so I've sadly gone back to regular dired.

I liked X-plore on Android, which also supports dual panes. It's not open source, unfortunately.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#293

Post by HackerThemAll »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #265
xyzelement wrote: post #264

Anytime I see this stuff, I get nostalgic for Norton Commander (it was HUGE in the USSR when I was a kid learning computers in the late 80s and early 90s) But somehow the reality of how I - and I think most people - use computers today is very different. I don't find myself navigating a shallow directory hierarchy and making file operations too often. A part of it is that all the stuff is in the cloud or at least con…

I use Total Commander on Windows all the time. It is much better than Explorer at so many things, such as: - Actually letting you navigate the directory structure. - Making WSL volumes easy to work with. - Keyboard accessibility. - Dealing with many tabs and bookmarks. - A stable interface that doesn't randomly change without my consent. - Many other things I'll omit for time reasons.

- Multi-rename tool.

- Synchronize directories (symmetric and asymmetric, with subdirectories).

- Background operations.

- Operation queue (so that you don't thrash disks while doing many operations).

- Start menu.

- Displaying directory sizes easily.

- Great file search.

- Diff viewer for text files.

- F3 quick file viewer.

- Compare directories.

- Plugins.

Those are my favorites.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#294

Post by shirro »

I still often go to mc over a gui file manager whenever I am doing something isn't straightforward to capture with a regular command. Like moving a group of files that isn't related by name, date, size etc. There are more linux-like text file managers that have vim bindings etc and are probably a better choice for the terminal crowd now but I have had mc installed on my machines since the mid 90s when emulating a dos file manager made a lot more sense.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#295

Post by kouteiheika »

kees99 wrote: post #283
kouteiheika wrote: post #15

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…

> Ctrl+O in MC will switch to a normal prompt Better yet! (one-line) shell prompt is always available and has some nifty integrations via . For example, one has a bunch of files visually tagged (selected) on current panel, and wants to tar them up as "/tmp/foo.tgz". Well... tar czf /tmp/foo.tgz

Oh that's great; thanks! I always used Alt+Enter to do this for the currently highlighted file, but didn't know you can do it for multiple files too.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#296

Post by axiolite »

ranger_danger wrote: post #77
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,…

> None of the keyboard shortcuts were at all intuitive to me They're exactly the same as Norton Commander had been since the 80s.

Right, but other file managers didn't adopt them. Do you use Norton Commander keyboard shortcuts with Nautilus, Dolphin, Thunar, Windows Explorer, Finder, etc? Did anything else adopt most of them? Because if you're only appealing to those who used Norton Commander, that's not a big user base. Using Windows Explorer keyboard shortcuts, instead, would give you a vastly larger audience.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#297

Post by hulitu »

mongol wrote: post #64
latchkey wrote: post #23

Brings back memories. This is one of my older open source contributions that's still visible. I helped port it to a/ux in the early 90's. Line 98: https://fossies.org/linux/mc/AUTHORS It was originally written by Miguel de Icaza who became a semi-famous for his work on Mono and others.

I think Miguel's greatest legacy is starting the Gnome project.

greatest ?

Gnome is a parody of its former self.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#298

Post by axiolite »

11mariom wrote: post #200
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).

Just renaming a single file, with a rather LONG file name that includes spaces and other symbols that need to be escaped, can take FAR longer at the BASH prompt, than starting up nnn and doing it there. Same goes for moving several of the most recently updated files to another folder, or similar.

Re: GNU Midnight Commander

#299

Post by axiolite »

badsectoracula wrote: post #217
varjag wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depending on where you're from you might have used another orthodox file manager. For some reason they've been very popular in central and eastern European countries. For example i've worked three Polish gamedev companies and in every single one of them most people (including people who weren't even born in the days of Norton Commander) used Total Commander (it is GUI-based but the shortcut keys and overall layout ar…

I use EmelFM all the time, but despite being "orthodox" it doesn't use keyboard shortcuts anywhere close to NC/MC's.
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