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Comment by djbusby | Hacker News Reader

Any thoughts on Midnight Commander?

I have to admit that I had not come across midnight-commander. It certainly looks interesting and I'll be giving it a spin. Thanks for pointing me in its direction!

I do intend to expand nav's feature set to come close to an `ls` replacement, at least for the most common workflows, whereas midnight-commander and other similar tools are perhaps closer to being (or are) file managers. I'm also hopeful that by using the completely awesome Charm [0] libraries that I can make for a pleasing/modern UI. Either way, I had a blast building nav and look forward to continuing on.

Thanks again for the comment!

[0] https://github.com/charmbracelet

Midnight Commander also includes a really decent little text editor (mcedit) with syntax highlighting for a decent range of text file formats.

nnn could be another to compare against.

How about Norton Commander?

Same thing. MC was made to emulate NC. And of course there are actually countless filesystem browsers. Even xtree was probably not the first since that was on ms-dos, and I bet there were some on the 8-bit machines before that.

But this one's aim seems to be a bit specific and not simply to be a filesystem browser (file manager) but specifically to try to be an "interactive ls". IE somehow feel like ls. Though I don't know why. It doesn't seem more useful than a normal file manager. I think it's just down to a very fine point of aesthetics, which is fair enough.

It can edit zip files and stuff. I actually had no idea it was a Miguel de Icaza project. Quite a prolific fellow.

The beauty of that feature is the system to implement it - extfs(EXTernal virtual File System) - is built with simple scripts, so you can add your own little tools to make other things navigable beyond the ~40 that come bundled.

There is a simple introduction in /usr/lib/mc/extfs.d/README, or https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/blob/master/src/vfs/... .

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