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Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

klimer.eu

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#51

It's just frustrating to use autocomplete on the $ shell, it's so ubiquitous to to use Tab to autocomplete that within mc it switches panes. I cannot discover how to "Esc Tab", because pressing Esc then Tab does not autocomplete, pressing and holding Esc then Tab, also doesn't autocomplete, other than that it's the good'ol souped up norton commander.

In mc, Alt-Tab or Esc+Tab two times does autocomplete for command name, but it's much easier just to press Ctrl-O and use shell in full screen, with native autocompletion by Tab, then switch back to mc by Ctrl-C + Ctrl-O. (Without Ctrl-C, mc may not be able to synchronize directories between shell and panel, which often leads to confusion).

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#52

I loved using Total Commander back when I used windows. There is nothing like this for the macOS as far as I know.

Give Marta a shot. It gives Total Commander a run for its money imo. Free. https://marta.sh/

Total Commander is just too great, never have seen anything coming close, maybe except Double Commander. Double Commander is the closest clone of TC, with many many features in place, but not as smooth and streamlined. Everything else i've tried on non-windows platforms is too barebones, including Marta.

Copy from older comment, regarding Total Commander:

powerful mass rename, advanced queue management for file operations, intelligent "resume" for larger file copying - it checks beginning/end bytes plus ~3 random points inside to to be sure you can continue on copying that huge file cut in the middle. You can color files/folders by conditions, e.g. files/folders created today are red and music files with bitrate 128 or lower are gray. Also, lister (built in preview on F3) - you can scroll through dozen-GB sized log file in seconds. Search is great, you can find duplicate images bigger than 512x512 and show them on file panel for any processing. And plugings. Lots of plugins. For archive formats, for lister, for mass-rename, for file system, for additional columns etc

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#53
post #30

some other shortcut: ALT+. -> hide/unhide dot files/directories other dualpane -way faster file operations eg like copy/move than mc- is the Worker http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html (Amiga `directory opus` look like)

Worker, being a graphical tool, is unusable over a SSH connection or where only a text terminal is available.

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#55

I don't often use a file manager, but when I do, I use ranger. It's mostly for use cases like "delete everything in this directory but these 3 files" and navigating deep directory structures with many files. However, recently I've also begun to use a mix of "z" and the "cd" feature/bash-binding of fzf. I like that ranger allows me to use vim key bindings, which matches nicely the rest of my system which is centered a…

Ranger is my daily driver, too. It integreates well with the shell as well as Vim usages, as ranger can be used as a file/directory picker.

One thing I regret of it, though, is that it's a Python application. Had it been a light weight, single-binary, application, I could have quickly scp'ed and used it on a remote ssh hosts. Likewise, had it been using async/await, it could have been snappier on directories with a ton of files.

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#56

Some colleagues believed I was some kind of Unix demigod when they were working with SunOS ksh command line and I had my own copy of mc (probably downloaded from Solaris Freeware site or something like that). There's one powerful thing that mc does and almost any other dual file manager omits: it has the concept of "pop up menus" for commonly used commands --with the option of sending the selected file(s). Also, thes…

mc was uber-fast on reading docs from /usr/share/docs, often in .gz format.

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#57
post #35

For users prefering GUI applications, I would like to suggest Sunflower FM, a GTK3 based dual-pane file manager: https://sunflower-fm.org/ As usual with such applications it seems to be a bit on hiatus, but maybe some developers would be interested to lend a hand?

And for users of GUIs who are (understandably) fed up with GNOME and all the GTK Stuff, I can wholeheartedly recommend Dolphin, KDEs standard filebrowser. Which isn't on Hiatus, doesn't require GTK, and has switchable Split views (aka. dual-pane), and tabs (where each tab may have its own split view).

Krusader is made for that.

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#58
post #35

For users prefering GUI applications, I would like to suggest Sunflower FM, a GTK3 based dual-pane file manager: https://sunflower-fm.org/ As usual with such applications it seems to be a bit on hiatus, but maybe some developers would be interested to lend a hand?

Last commit on github[0] seems to be from 2 days ago. And the previous one from last april. I'd say that the home page is on hiatus, not the project.

[0] https://github.com/MeanEYE/Sunflower

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#59
As something of an old-timer here, there's some amusement, but mostly appreciation that people are discovering that these very old ways of doing things have a lot of potential (and a lot of untapped ideas)

Somewhat relatedly, recently I discovered the colorfully named fff. It's a solid file manager, but what I've used it for is a terminal based filespace navigator (by adding a function that just leaves you in the place you navigated to).

It's funny how it's hard to break the habit of "cd" to move around, despite this being way faster, especially if you're not sure where you're going.

https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff

Re: Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)

#60
post #30

some other shortcut: ALT+. -> hide/unhide dot files/directories other dualpane -way faster file operations eg like copy/move than mc- is the Worker http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html (Amiga `directory opus` look like)

Worker, being a graphical tool, is unusable over a SSH connection or where only a text terminal is available.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that makes one wonder why we haven't been able to settle on a good "mostly text, but maybe a little bit of graphics when necessary kind of a standard."

Like some kind of sixel + html thing or something.

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