Use Midnight Commander like a pro (2015)
klimer.eu
klimer.eu
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, these menus can be global or local, configured for each specific folder or in my case working copies of some proprietary version control repositories (Subversion was too cool then).
Not only viewing files with F3 instead of using 'more' made you go significantly faster when there was no IDE to quickly grok a codebase, in ancient times where version control and diffing and merging was not exactly like today this was extremely powerful, only surpassed by Emacs.
Edit: to add that in macOS Forklift has something like this in a specific "Tools" section.
I never really used mc because once I switched to Linux I became an Emacs user but... I have fond memories of Norton Commander on my 386 PC (running DOS, before Windows 95 became a thing). I think Norton Commander was first and mc was a clone of Norton Commander (even copying the color scheme). And Norton Commander, IIRC, already had these "popup menus" (but my memory may be playing me tricks).
> cp file
> z folder (which is deeply nested somewhere else)
> paste
instead of having to type everything out.
It feels to me like the possibilities of the CLI and how we interact with it have barely been explored.
I don't have any actual reason to be embarassed, since I'm actually perfectly comfortable in vi and and the command line on some old sco box without mc available, it's got to be just because I started among guys who themselves were even older unix guys who never touched anything like mc. Also it felt kind of like still using training wheels when I had been using xtree on dos before encountering unix. But hell I started on xenix myself and still miss some features from ksh93 vs the latest bash5. I haven't needed to live up to anyone else since forever.
But embarrassed or not, I used it all day every day since the late 90's at work and home. It just makes the most sense to be using essentially a browser for that.
For one thing I simply see more stuff.
In the past, every day at work I'd see random junk left all over the place by other employees who clearly didn't even know that they had created these junk files and directories all over the place from having flubbed the syntax of command lines, or botched quoting or escaping inside programs they were writing. Files with names that looked like various other bits of command syntax from quoting mistakes etc. And still sitting there because if you don't actively ls, then you don't see it. I was constantly cleaning up stuff like that back before we finally went to individual developer vms.
Also, a common usecase for me is having a folder full of files dumped together and I want to move some of them according to arbitrary criteria. Marking them with Insert in MC is so so much less work than typing everything.
Being good at something is also using the right tool for the job. CLIs shine at some things. TUIs and GUIs at others. They're complementary. It's not like one is better than the other.
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.
Marta doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore, so if anyone know of a good alternative I am all ears. fman (https:/fman.io) looks nice, but I don't think it has terminal integration.
Use Midnight Commander like a pro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086555 - May 2021 (1 comment)
Use Midnight Commander like a pro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9472409 - May 2015 (11 comments)
It felt amazing. "At last, my arm is complete again" level. I can't believe you could miss a file manager so much. It's one of the greatest tools you can't explain the usage of, you bust have to use it for a week.
Then I discovered that since I last checked a passable Mac clone has appeared. Nimble Commander (https://magnumbytes.com/) is almost 1:1 in terms of UX and does support the Mac filesystem well. Just be sure to press ^3 Tab ^3 the first time you open it.
I like that ranger allows me to use vim key bindings, which matches nicely the rest of my system which is centered around i3 and vimium.
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.
It's now available on macOS and Linux.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/doublecmd/files/latest/down...
It was also my first exposure to a solo developer trying to make income with licenses, which at the time felt annoying, but now I understand completely. Thanks for making me more productive :) such a huge upgrade from the default OS file manager.
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).
Other file managers (Thunar in XFCE) do not have this problem.
Went back to caja.
When I introduced him to midnight commander he was very happy to have basically the same thing but on linux.
Can anyone enlighten me about this? Is it just my poor organizational skills?
- I get a free ls when I navigate directory structure, and with the keyboard shortcuts I can move much faster.
- If the panel is ordered by time the moment I open the folder I see most recent files (in some cases I only care about recent files when opening a folder). If ordered by size you see your biggest files first, etc. And all of this is stateful, you don't need to run a command to identify biggest/latest file, do something with it and then go back to check what as the second biggest/latest file.
- it is easier to check content of the file or an archive
- two panels also work seamlessly with ssh/ftp/archives/etc. You don't need to remember separate commands to copy files from other sources, you will use exactly same pattern for navigating and copying files.
I also understand that people who mastered shell don't see this as a big advantage. But it really helps when jumping between mac/nix/windows.
To perform your "copy, navigate, paste" task while in mc's single pane mode you could either:
a) tag files, pop open the second pane temporarily, navigate and copy.
b) tag files, swap the panes in the background, navigate and copy.
c) tag files, use the bindings to copy them to the inbuilt command line, navigate and copy. Using the "quick cd" dialog would probably speed this up.
d) any of the above with inverted target and source movement.
e) probably a thousand other more sensible ways than the three or cheat-y six I just thought of ;)
Another option might be to bind F10 to start mc, so that it acts as a toggle whether in mc or in a non-mc shell. You'd need to wrap a zle widget in zsh, or add a '$if Bash' guard to your inputrc with bash.
* Ctrl+Z
* Do something in the shell
* fg
Implementing your own extfs scripts to wrap a simple menu around some task can be really useful, far beyond basic archives. I wrote one so that I can shuffle my todo list priorities by moving fake "task files" in to different pseudo-directories.
¹ https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/tree/master/src/vfs/
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2012/Dec/a-guide-to-midnight-co...
(The guide is a PDF link on that page).
There is nothing like this for the macOS as far as I know.
But then I noticed that it is not open source, the sole developer has been on a break for at least a year, and the issue tracker mentions two bugs that may lead to data loss.
So I uninstalled it. I will look elsewhere for now.
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
They advertise as secure ftp solution, but in fact it's a full featured dual pane file manager.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/doublecmd/files/latest/down...
Nimble Commander (https://magnumbytes.com/) is almost 1:1 in terms of UX and does support the Mac filesystem well. Just be sure to press ^3 Tab ^3 ehe first time you open it.
Fully keyboard based, and has a shortcut (F8) that goes into split screen mode if you need.
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)
Like some kind of sixel + html thing or something.