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GNU Midnight Commander

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525 pointspykello310 comments

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 to get back to MC; this allows you to easily use MC for things it is the most efficient for, and normal command-line for things where that is better).

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!

> It can also directly open ssh and SFTP URLs.

I wish mc could browse remote URLs, and I'm tempted to author an mc clone in Go to address this particular pain-point. Maybe some day handcrafting bespoke rsync/rclone commands will frustrate me enough to motivate me.

In the Left/Right menu in mc, you can select FTP, SFTP and SSH URLs to browse. Is this not what you mean?

And for other protocols like WebDAV you can mount them and then traverse with mc.

That is what I mean. Glad to hear mc supports this already!

> you can't get better than Dolphin

Try <https://krusader.org>. Same KDE underpinnings, but orthodox interface.

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".

Konqueror (the old KDE file manager) lets you do multiple splits, horizontal as well as vertical, and preview files in the file manager.

Very nice, but no longer as well maintained.

I'm partial to pcmanfm-qt, which also supports splits, and has the best "search in current directory" I've seen anywhere. You open a directory, start typing, and it filters out matching files fzf-style.

It doesn't simply select them like some other file managers do, it searches within the name and not just the prefix (again, like some other file managers), you don't have to press anything beforehand. When you get used to it, it's hard to go without it.

https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt

For those preferring lightweight environments, it has far fewer dependencies than dolphin.

Wish there was a screenshot of the final product in this repo! QT apps are non-trivial to build if you don't already have the environment setup.

BTW, do you know if it can build for macOS, or is that a non-starter?

Not only that, but if you want to move around a large number of files, Dolphin is the only that get you covered without crashes or slowing down

I miss TkDesk, which I discovered many years ago when I was first trying Linux, partly because it supports unlimited splits, not just two. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, when navigating to a subdirectory the default was just to open it in a new split. You ended up with splits containing the full path from wherever you started to your eventual subdirectory (you could scroll the view of splits horizontally once there got to be too many).

https://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/

I think I love it more than you do. I am sure of it. It is ingrained into my workflow and how I think about files.

Can you reference the file that was modified latest by me? With one shortcut?

Because that's what I miss most in my shell.

You mean something like

    print -rl -- *(om[1].)

in zsh?

No, I mean globally (over all directories, starting from my home directory).

And of course, if the latest file isn't what I wanted, then it should be possible to easily go to the latest file before that.

Then you need emacs’s dired. There’s a find command that will do that. ;)

It's 10x slower than a more specialized command [1] for me, but adding recursion only requires adding one extra asterisk (`**` instead of `*`) and maybe a D if you want to include dot files or triple star if you want to follow symlinks:

    $ date; print -rl -- **(om[1].D);date; newest -n4 -r0 $HOME
    Wed Sep 17 12:48:53 EDT 2025
    .config/mozilla/firefox/p9/bounce-tracking-protection.sqlite
    Wed Sep 17 12:49:25 EDT 2025
    /u/p9/.config/mozilla/firefox/p9/permissions.sqlite
    /u/p9/.config/zsh/history
    /u/p9/.config/mozilla/firefox/p9/places.sqlite-wal
    /u/p9/.config/mozilla/firefox/p9/bounce-tracking-protection.sqlite
    *newest -n4 -r0 $HOME
     Time: 1.882365 (u) + 1.318166 (s)=3.215131 (99%) mxRSS 139 MiB

Not sure how to change to get most recent 4 or whatever in the Zsh style (since, you know, that'd be 10x slower..)

[1] https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/newest.md*

Reverse shell command search for eg *.txt allows you to look through the most recent text files you've explicitly referenced

Same here. I wonder how much does it have to do with the fact that I came of age during the MS-DOS era. The design seems just so sleek and efficient to me.

My only issue with it is that it does not come with vim keybindings by default, I love to have consistent keybindings across my system / TUI tools

You might like Yazi[0], although the layout is more "modern" (like ranger / nnn etc.) uses tabs for multiple different views.

[0]: https://yazi-rs.github.io/

Oh thanks for the tip, appreciate it.

I see it can even do file previews with kitty which is perfect as I already use kitty as my default terminal.

I have loved it since '99, when my friends used to tell me that to be a linux admin you have to stay up late because midnight commander works only after midnight ! Slackware 7 <3

Right now, is it after midnight, or before midnight, where you live?

The only time that is not after midnight is midnight.

it was not always named Midnight Commander, it was Mouseless Commander

it was renamed somewhere around 1995

That hint is amazing! I tried it out and love that you can do this!

Interestingly, the latest GNOME sorta supports something similar, as a new feature:

> ..a “Ctrl + dot” keyboard shortcut for opening the current directory in the terminal

https://9to5linux.com/gnome-49-brescia-desktop-environment-o...

Does it work the same as Dolphin where you get a terminal panel to the same window with the Konsole settings of yours, and it changes the directory together with Dolphin navigation?

Super nice especially when adding music to my library with Beets...

Awesome project from 90s, I remember it from 1992 at the university.

> 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 <Ctrl+X>. 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 <Ctrl+X><T>

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.

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. And it should be the classic IBM PC numpad: large +, large 0, [num]/*- in the top row. Then, you wanted your function keys as a top row above your keyboard. Also, ESC was supposed to work immediately, not after a delay.

I know many people think these things don't matter, because you can do everything with MC (and more), but I disagree. In this case, every fraction of a second matters. In the setup I described above, selecting all files in the current directory and moving them to the directory in the other pane is: one flick of the right hand (roll over + and Enter on the numpad), F6 with the left hand followed by another Enter immediately with the right hand. Now try to do that using the + that is on your = key and tell me it's the same thing.

Stuff is still there as long as you get a proper keyboard.

Well, and monitor.

If you're slouching over your laptop for extended periods of time, you have bigger problems than not being able to use numpad +...

> 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 something even easier like maybe X, X)

> 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 positions that make sense to the brain.

> it's easier to find in a tactile manner

It isn't because your resting keys require NO finding, so will always be easier.

> makes MUCH more sense to the brain than hjkl > Even the gaming community got this more correct with wasd, in terms of key positions that make sense to the brain

Don't repeat the ancient hjkl mistake? What does your brain say to this simple counter? But more importantly, how does any of the numpad+/F6 nonsense follow from the fact that you can improve within the letters?

> It's like 80ms travel

I bet you didn't really time anything in real use, especially not the return timing to go back to the base, which will take you longer. But more importantly, go convince the "every fraction of a second matters" guy first. To me the lack of design logic/convenience is enough.

>It isn't because your resting keys require NO finding, so will always be easier

You still need to find them unless your hand is glued to the resting keys and even if it were the resting keys might not be hjkl, and even if they are they will by default type hjkl and not move the cursor in any other software you ever use except vim.

(It can't be objectively measured of course but I am convinced anyone who can use vim without thinking has spent more time learning vim than they gained from using vim for other things) ;-)

> unless your hand is glued to the resting keys

It is, the hint is in the name!

> even if it were the resting keys might not be hjkl

So? Use the other resting keys, resting is key here, not their labels

> even if they are they will by default type hjkl and not move the cursor in any other software you ever use except vim.

Sorry, but your knowledge of the software world is too shallow, there are other apps that do that, specifically, file managers.

Also you can use them universally in all apps with an extra modifier (right alt to do everything with a single hand), so

> gained from using vim for other thing

will literally include every single app that uses cursor keys

>It is, the hint is in the name!

Just about any line of text I write daily uses symbols not reachable from the resting position, and once my hand has left that position the arrow keys are easier to find. (Inverted T of course, with home/end/pgdown/pgup cluster).

>there are other apps that do that, specifically, file managers

The point is that you ("you" in this case being a typical user, not you personally) will open applications every day where hjkl does nothing at all with the cursor, and you have to use the arrow keys anyway. This is mental friction that remains even after you spent years internalizing the hjkl cursor moving flaw.

Faced with this situation a user can choose to either use the arrow keys in vim, or go full Stockholm syndrome and change the default in every other piece of software to match vim.

If that seems like a good idea, it might be worth remembering that the creator of vi didn't choose hjkl because he thought it superior to using arrow keys - he did it because the computer he used had no arrow keys! ;-)

> Just about any line of text I write daily uses symbols not reachable from the resting position

Use a better setup! No-one forces you to use bad defaults and think everything must be bad. Also, there are no such symbols even on standard setup, all of the number row keys/symbols are reachable with individual fingers, so you never miss the resting place, it's a couple of fingers moving back and forth.

> my hand has left that position the arrow keys are easier to find. (Inverted T of course, with home/end/pgdown/pgup cluster

It didn't, a couple of your fingers did. But also, why did you ignore the F6, numpad+ etc hand dance and only focus on the arrow keys?

> "you" in this case being a typical user

A typical user doesn't use vim. A real user using vim is perfectly capable of basic keyboard rebinding

> This is mental friction that remains even after you spent years internalizing the hjkl cursor moving flaw.

No, it goes away after you spend minutes oiling your system to remove friction. (Of course, it may still take years of ignorance before that...)

> change the default in every other piece of software to match vim.

Or you change the default once system-wide. See, reality is much simpler than your fantasy!

> the creator of vi didn't choose hjkl because he thought it superior

So? You're the only one here stuck on hjkl because for some reason you can't comprehend that it's just a config, not a mandatory commandment passed down by the Vim prophet.

>Use a better setup!

Even if you only use your own computer, customizing the basics is a bit of a trap in many ways.

First you need to find a different setup that is actually better, not just different. Then you need to build muscle memory for it, then you need to never use any other computer because they will not have your setup.

I think getting good at using the defaults is better than changing the defaults. Basically learn to play the guitar, even if it's hard.

I customize things too, but take care to make it additive, not transformative. Aliases, plugins, better software and such are fine, but messing with my muscle memory is just not worth it.

>Also, there are no such symbols even on standard setup

That depends on the standard. In some countries you need two hands to type an @, just to take one example. For US english the numpad is a good example though. Not so easy to find the home keys from the numpad, but your hand passes the arrow keys on the way. :)

>why did you ignore the F6, numpad+ etc hand dance and only focus on the arrow keys?

Because I'm mainly making a counterpoint to your claim that using hjkl was better than using the arrow keys.

It has admittedly grown to a more general anti-bikeshedding rant fuelled by my own bikeshedding regrets - so I better stop here. :)

> then you need to never use any other computer because they will not have your setup

Again, if you really had such a defeatist attitude to changing things you'd simply never vim, or the MC file manager for that matter because they're not available everywhere, and you need to avoid other computers etc. In reality all of this is false, of course, humans are flexible enough

> but messing with my muscle memory is just not worth it.

You don't have any muscle memory for F6. But also it's trivial for such common things as cursor keys alternatives, you ijkl is already an inverted T that your muscles are used to, just without the extra hand move

> That depends on the standard. In some countries you need two hands to type an @, just to take one example

Wrong again, you'd need two fingers, but your hands stay near their resting place.

> Because I'm mainly making a counterpoint to your claim that using hjkl was better than using the arrow keys.

You're the one who brought these keys up! My point was "Don't repeat the ancient hjkl mistake?", but then you couldn't argue with.

Fun fact: hjkl are in the same order as the arrows on screen in Dance Dance Revolution.

gaming defaulted to wasd because you only use one hand.

hjkl makes a ton of sense considering the j key on all keyboards has a tactile feel, it is way easier than arrows which are a whole lot more than 80ms travel for the move + finding the home row again.

but you're probably just rage baiting

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.

Nobody has their index finger on the F when using wasd navigation. The reason wasd was chosen is because of the position of ctrl, alt and space (also common in games): with the hand on esdf, the ctrl and alt keys are quite hard to reach; but with the index finger on the D, the thumb can easily switch between alt and space, and the pinky can access ctrl and shift.

btw this is why vi used hjkl for navigation: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys

> Nobody has their index finger on the F when using wasd navigation.

Yes, but they would while editing text, and the context of this was the idea of drawing inspiration from other control systems for a text editor UI.

The choice of key labeling on that terminal implies that there was a pre-existing convention, but the article doesn't go into any detail about that.

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.

"select all files" was just one key: * (actually, it was invert selection -- so assuming no files were selected beforehand). Pressing + and Enter would select one file, then try to edit/run the next one?

I believe pressing + should open "Select files" dialog prefilled to select all files (and dirs), pressing Enter confirms it.

My Midnight Commander 4.8.33, however, remember previously entered mask, and if no mask was entered - then it defaults to selecting nothing :(

> 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.

The kitty key protocol solves this, but your app and terminal need to support it. Many do.

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.

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

I don't even understand the problem: ESC and the following key is generally just an alias for ALT+key.

Ah Norton Commander. It sure throws me back to the Intel Pentium days. Today for that left versus right birds eye view, just-do-it, operations I use beyond compare.

dual-pane file manager

For some reason, the technical term for these is Orthodox File Manager, which I've always thought was an obscure cultural in-joke from the countries where these were most popular --- Eastern Europe and the former USSR.

This origin is elaborated at length here: https://softpanorama.org/Articles/introduction_to_orthodox_f...

At least in Russia, "orthodox" has an extra connotation that's not strictly coupled to church, akin more to "one true way", as in "orthodox way to learn a tech stack". With a negation, it becomes something like "wrong" or even "heretical", as in "pizza with pineapple".

What you're describing is the meaning of the word in English. I suspect using the word православный with this meaning started as a joke transplanting the English meaning of the word onto the corresponding Russian word.

"Orthodox" in Russian is "pravoslavny", literally "right faith" (pravyj = right, correct). I think it also contributes to the meaning. "The right way".

Means the same thing in Ireland too! My understanding is it derives from greek for “ordinary teaching” we also use the term heterodox for a cultural setting that encourages different types of thought.

The term Paradox is a challenging or somewhat contradictory idea.

We also use the term orthodox for a right handed boxer. “Southpaw” is non-orthodox left handed.

Greek here:

Orthodox = orthos + doxasia

Orthos = straight/correct

Doxasia = belief

orthodoxos = correct belief

Yes and no. Orthodox church is called “православная церковь”, yes, but the word “ортодоксальный” still exists to describe e.g. orthodox jews.

The word “православный” in a meaning of some object/technology/way being good and true only started being used in Internet culture during 00s, and it still used, but as a slang/joke.

Actually, it's the meaning of the word in Greek:

> "what is regarded as true or correct," from Late Latin orthodoxus, from Greek orthodoxos "having the right opinion," from orthos "right, true, straight" + doxa "opinion, praise".

(https://www.etymonline.com/word/orthodox)

But, when referring to dual-pane file managers, it's probably a mix of both meanings ("one true way" and "old-fashioned").

The English word for that is "canonical".

To me, "canonical" feels more descriptive whereas "orthodox" has a prescriptive connotation. But I'm also ESL, so not sure if that's just me or common in any/all English-speaking countries.

They're both derived from religious terms or religious metaphors.

For me (native U.S. English speaker) the religious reference in "orthodox" is more transparent and that in "canonical" is more obscure, so "canonical" sounds more technical or more neutral somehow.

Agreed, but "canon law" has always meant church law. Canonical is derived from that, and it's got similar connotations of "reference design" as the use of "orthodox" here.

"Canonical" is used all the time in math to mean, roughly speaking, a "standard" or "preferred" way of doing things.

But the canonical two-pane file manager is Total Commander, not this TUI Linux clone.

This is incorrect.

Ортодоксальный doesn't carry these connotations at all.

If anything, it describes something that is stuck in old ways and/or pointlessly rigid.

I find this whole thread a bit confusing—the comment two up describes “orthodox” meaning one-true-way as a Russian thing, but this is also part of the connotation in English.

You describe it as not having this “one true way” connotation, but as having this pointlessly rigid connotation. In English, I think it has both connotations. Although, almost any phrase which has an implication of “one true way” can end up with a double meaning of “pointlessly rigid,” right? (It is context dependent, of course).

православный is used in jargon for exactly that meaning. source: 45 years of native Russian speaking.

Must be something recent then. From an Internet meme or something like креведко?

I think this is also the connotation in English. We got it from Greek mostly, correct? I thought it meant something like “right-belief.”

It can be contrasted against orthopraxy, right-practice, where the actions are more important than the belief or intent.

Based on the other comments here, these orthodox file browsers are based on a sort of underlying language,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271878

> The "orthodox" comes from a specific type of GUI, namely one that is driven by commands under the hood. UI elements are merely used to trigger commands that have the actual effect, and these commands could just as well be executed by hand, or automated into more complex commands.

It… kind of makes sense actually, if we stretch the definitions a bit, haha. The orthodox UI has some button, which is translated into a sequence of commands that represent the actual user intent.

The alternative is just to have the button do the thing directly, there’s no description of the user intent other than what the button does. It is quite a stretch but maybe we could call that the an Orthoprax UI.

The "orthodox" comes from a specific type of GUI, namely one that is driven by commands under the hood. UI elements are merely used to trigger commands that have the actual effect, and these commands could just as well be executed by hand, or automated into more complex commands.

This is an excellent way to build powerful UIs. It is what drives things like Vim, and often why Lisp-based software is so hackable -- think Emacs, StumpWM, etc. Instead of writing plugins against some small plugin API, you're wiring new functionality directly into the application.

The article you reference goes into more detail, as you say.

Does Blender also qualify? It even shows you the name of the Python function behind each UI element on hover, which is great for discoverability when scripting. Or maybe it used to, can't see it now.

Still does if you enable dev mode, I think.

Isn't this what tools like lazygit use?

Similar to the ELM architecture in a way? Except that the commands are literal commands that can be executed outside of the standard UI interaction.

They were popular because there was no Unix culture in Eastern Europe at the time. Pretty much any computer geek was a DOS user. To me personally, it always seemed kind of lame because many of these people would not bother to properly learn the shell language.

I'd say "Orthodox File Manager" is a forced meme by the author of the article. (Note that he links to his older article, etc.)

20-25 years ago when this kind of file managers were all the rage for power users I was in a Fidonet/Usenet discussion group with the most fanatical of these users, often sysadmins, plugin devs, etc. I don't think "orthodox" was used as a term - sometimes it was used as an epithet, maybe, sort of a joke.

But I guess Dr. Nikolai shows us that if you are really committed to introduced a term you can do it, eventually :D

Such a pompous name for a nice thing.

For better or worse, that's what they're called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_man...

> This origin is elaborated at length here: https://softpanorama.org/Articles/introduction_to_orthodox_f...

Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_file_manager

The thing about Orthodox File Managers when they first came about, that does not occur today, was the amount of time that had to be devoted to explaining that particular features would not work on OS/2, Unices, Linux-based operating systems, or Windows NT because only MS/PC/DR-DOS let programs do things like directly manipulate stuff in some other program's PSP or directly peek/poke video RAM or the keyboard buffer; or that filenames did not necessarily have "extensions"; or that there was more than 1 type of timestamp; or that links and symbolic links existed; or that different people can have different local times on a single machine; or that directories actually have sizes.

Today, the DOS Think is far less prevalent.

Midnight Commander's screenshots would have looked a little off to OFM users with DOS Think. Today, it's the original MS/PC/DR-DOS tools that will appear odd to novices. They did things like have a narrow 8.3 filename column, omit the dots, use graphics in the filename for system files, use glyphs that one could only obtain through poking C0-range codes into video RAM, change UI elements as one pressed and released the Alt key, and so forth.

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, and really helped improve my workflow a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nnn_(file_manager)

Same here, nnn feels so much lighter too. It also works out of the box, no need to carry around "your" .rc file on dozens of systems as you work

> None of the keyboard shortcuts were at all intuitive to me

They're exactly the same as Norton Commander had been since the 80s.

They probably weren't, huh... in front of computers when it was more of a thing.

It sure is a generational thing, I have the same problem with Emacs. But not with Vim.

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.

None of those things existed when either program was written though, except maybe a very early Finder.

Of course not, they would have had to "adopt" NC's shortcuts (as I said). Apparently, NC wasn't popular enough, for others to want to imitate.

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 are almost the same).

(FWIW Notepad++ was ubiquitous too)

From what I've seen at the time Total Commander didn't stick unless the user was already exposed to NC or its clones. People starting afresh with Windows 95 couldn't be arsed to use anything except File Explorer.

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

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

As in culturally coded. Say MS BASIC was also written by a boomer but most users were Gen X.

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.

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 project.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Opus

I find it a little sad that you haven't released a new revision since 2016 [0]. It has not declined in usefulness.

Edit: Incorrect:(I'd guess the biggest requested change would have been to update it from using GTK 2 to GTK 3, but I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to...)

0: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gentoo/

Wow, massive ego boost, thanks a lot!

I thought I had released the GTK 3.x version, but I guess not, then. It might have been that there was something I just couldn't get to behave right, gentoo is somewhat picky about its UI and tries to make it do the right thing in ways that GTK sometimes isn't ready for.

Today I guess the target would be GTK 4.x, I tried to align with the latest main version back when I was maintaining it more.

Oh and 2016 makes sense, had my first kid in 2015 ... :|

> thought I had released the GTK 3.x version,

My bad. You had. Sorry.

> Oh and 2016 makes sense, had my first kid in 2015 ... :|

Much congrats!

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

Me. I like it, so I pay for it. And there's plenty of time between major releases so it's not like I'm rebuying it yearly.

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.

This with the "Lynx-like motion" panel option and the "Quick view" enabled is the best way to review a source tree. So much so that the Debian ftp-masters use it and a plugin for doing license review of newly introduced packages.

https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20191228133344.GA4943@...

I've been using `mc` for decades... In fact, in my early professional days as a software dev, I've written entire systems with PHP using `mcedit` (the built-in editor), because I didn't know `vim` then, and `mcedit` had syntax highlighting...

Mostly used Notepad++ or SciTE ( https://www.scintilla.org/ ) over the years, as the number of languages/platforms I traverse made it a consistent option for dealing with various document encodings etc.

I thought mc and mcedit was cool, but needed something small and portable within a fairly locked-down environment ( "No [root] for you!" as the admin would say.) =3

Many years ago, I used UltraEdit. It was fast, light weight(ish) and supported huge files.

Wait, what? I've never seen syntax highlighting in mcedit. I'd be looking predominantly at Prolog files to be honest but those normally have a .pl extension so I should at least be seeing Perl-like highlights?

(pun totally coincidental)

I used to use XTree Gold, which was... golden. I always heard of Midnight Commander but never really got around to using it. I should probably fix that.

What I never got was why this style of TUI (MS edit.com, qbasic, etc) isn't really carried through in modern tradition? I really enjoyed these when when I was younger... yet even textual or ratatui apps don't really bring this interface to the terminal. (Or why screen-coordinate-based terminals aren't the norm to base TUI apps upon... this aspect just seems "obvious" but in this aspect modern terminal emulates seem lightyears behind MS-DOS, of all things).

Perhaps the rewrite of edit [1] will spawn a ressurgence of this TUI style?

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-...

Same here, back then I found a little known file manager called DM.COM. That was my # 1 goto in DOS for files. IMO, it is the best.

You can do this to get information on how to download it:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/dm220.txt' > dm220.txt

Yes, I also have fond memories of quite a few TUI apps for DOS. Not sure if it’s pure nostalgia, it might be. But then it feels like dark magic that you could have 40kB .COM or 100kB .EXE doing so many things and looking so nicely..

I still love FAR Manager: https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en (UNIX port: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l ).

It now even supports true keyboard reporting (through Kitty TTY protocol on compatible terminals) for SSH connections.

the best norton commander of all

I still have great affection for Midnight Commander, like Norton Commander before it. I used to use the latter to initiate a parallel cable connection to my brother's computer for Doom deathmatches, pretty cool for a file manager.

For no good reason, here's a screenshot of both of them running side by side on an iPad, which is a thing you can apparently do these days:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GYRYTq6WUAAt_1t?format=jpg&name=...

9%[___)

Dude, plug that thing in!

The world’s best portable Linux/DOS workstation!

I guess you're not familiar with the iconography, but the little lightning bolt symbol in the battery icon means it is plugged in! (edit: I tried to reproduce your "ASCII art" with unicode lightning bolt but the formatting didn't survive)

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 connected to applications (eg: I am more likely to navigate my coding projects from an IDE than from Shell/MC)

And when I administer eg my home linux system, it seems more likely that I jump to a random far-away directory or edit a specific file, rather than navigating the filesystem MC stye.

I am curious how people are using computers today that MC-like interface is still most suitable.

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.

I remember a time when FAR was one of the first things I install on Windows.

On windows I use mc to navigate around the WSL-2 file system.

On linux I use it to manage remote servers without a window manager (by design, because I don't need one).

I also use it to pass files between my laptops over ssh, between windows and/or linux.

I use MC all the item for both work and personal (and was using NC back in the day before MC). I find it much faster/more productive than all the GUI file explorers I've tried.

Recursively find files -> Panelize alone is worth the price of admission.

Multi-file select.

Two-panel for easy moving/copying files, including to cloud/remote/ssh drives (just mount them).

Quickly go back to previously visited folders in your history.

Compare folders.

etc etc

> I jump to a random far-away directory

Esc-C and type in the path. I do it all the time in MC.

> or edit a specific file

Navigate to folder (above), type first letters of filename to find it, press F4 to edit.

When I was young and incompetent mc was the only way I knew to remove files starting with a dash :)

Hahah same!!!!

On Unixen? Use:

  $ rm -- -filename

where -filename is the file starting with a dash, and -- means "end of the command-line options".

I have been using mc for almost 30 years, and the original Norton Commander as a kid before that!

Pleasantly surprised to see this topping HN today, and even more than the project and its website are still maintained in 2025.

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.

And who started Gnome Desktop! That always strikes me as funny. That he made the ultimate tool for in the terminal, and then move on to write a desktop environment

It was kind of the evolution of the time though. We were coming from dumb terminals hooked up to VAX/VMS and Ultrix boxes with kermit, to computers that had a tcp/ip stack and could actually do graphics.

And now porting Godot to iPads as Xodot. https://xogot.com/

Wow, I have absolutely no need for access to a game engine but I still will do the free trial. Some complaints about cost but $3 per week or $30 per year seems reasonable enough. I am a fan of the Swift Playground.

Starting when I wrote the Chess program that Apple distributed on their Apple II demo cassette tape, I have been interested in writing games for fun. Unfortunately, while I can code, I need artists and generally people with ‘game design style’ to do anything decent - I had that when I worked at Angel Studios.

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

greatest ?

Gnome is a parody of its former self.

For anyone looking for more modern terminal file managers: my favorite is yazi since it has great preview capabilities out of the box and requires zero config, but other alternatives are nnn, ranger, walk and lf.

Yazi is absolutely phantastic. It can be extended by own scripts. I have configured it to jump to any folder via fzf, find any file in a folder and subfolders via `fd`, and navigate to any folder/subfolder on my system in seconds. I don't use my GUI finders on my Mac anymore. Absolutely recommended.

mc user for decades here. I spent a long time teaching myself yazi and configuring it just to my liking, only to realize I don't really use a file manager that much anymore. It's hard to compete with shells for efficiency in most scenarios.

...and a tip for `ranger`: `alias r='source ranger'`

See `cat "$( which ranger )"` for what it does, but TLDR lets your shell `cd` (navigate) to the directory where you've navigated to within ranger. (ie: you can use the alias `r` as a lazy man's `cd`).

It has to be done as a shell alias b/c `$PWD` is exclusively a shell concept, can't be modified by a mere program that you're running (thankfully).

Other useful bits are sometimes `F2` for interactive file-rename (eg: backspace `.txt` to `.csv` or whatever), mark/tag support so `'d` goes to `~/Downloads`, `'g` goes to `~/Git`, `'t` for `/tmp`, etc.

Overall if you're decent at vim there's a lot to love, and otherwise the basics pretty much work like you'd expect with keyboard/gui conventions (arrows, f2, etc).

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.

Dired is awesome. It’s replaced a bunch of my terminal usage https://xenodium.com/how-i-batch-apply-and-save-one-liners

Total Commander for Android not bad either

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

Total Commander is still the first thing I install on every fresh Windows install for the last 20 or so years. Copy/move/delete etc keys are the same as in mc.

They are the same because both projects are inspired by Norton Commander for DOS which also used those keys.

The best are the youtube movies that try to explain to amateurs how to use the horrible built in windows file manager WITH A MOUSE!.... while there is total commander.

Windows Explorer? It's not that bad. Granted, I only ever use it with the keyboard. But then you can tile two windows side-by-side (or four) and it's a bit like a commander of sorts.

The only time I ever have to use the mouse in WE is when I try to move to the Quick Access side-bar: sometimes focus gets lost somewhere around all the bloody menus I never use and I can't place it where I want it. It's weird and I'm not describing it clearly because it happens only occasionally and I don't understand exactly how.

For some strange reason I am attracted to try to use ZTreeWin, even though I am using a dual pane manager as my daily driver, but there is some nostalgic force driving me to try and force myself onto ZTreeWin. I even bought the license for it more than 2 years ago, but still haven't touched it in any serious capacity. I mostly lack the convenience and speed by which I am able to accomplish tasks in my existing (dual panel) orthodox filemanager, and at the same time I am losing patience by learning every single thing in it from sratch. Does anyone know of a good learning resource for ZTreeWin?

It seems nobody remembers the reason for the F-key assignment in the original i.e. Norton Commander... The assignment was very logical and easy to remember (and use) on the original PC keyboard, where F-keys were located in two columns on the left edge of the keyboard: F1, F2, then F3, F4, and so on. You can immediately see the advantages of the F9 location (the leftmost key at the bottom) and of the proximity of the Browse and Edit keys. I used my left thumb to press F10 - it was in the correct place almost without palm movement...

Nowadays I almost don't use Mc (except for file manipulation) because the Linux version has a serious weak point - it blocks the most important keystroke in shell: Tab. It is of course traditionally reserved for panel switching but this role could be deactivated when instead a single command line zone MC would allow to have a multi-line (in NC it was 3 or 4 line) zone for the shell scrolled display. This way it would be possible to have the full-size panel display (with the Tab switching panes) and one keystroke away reduced-size panels with full functionality of the shell tab key in the alternative panel mode... Another disadvantage is the complicated way of changing settings (especially the colors and file attributes display format) in practice forcing trial and error mode... True, it's not needed often but spending hours on it is rather deterrent.

GNU MC is indispensable. Some basic features it has still like a file overwrite strategy prompt is absent from many modern file managers of the day like yazi.

One of the most overlooked features is a custom user menu[1]. It allows greatly expanding MC's capabilities with custom actions and integrate it into specific workflows. No plugins or DSLs, just a `sh` calling whatever you like.

For example, I have a couple keybinds for transferring selected files/directories over rsync while browsing the remote directory over sftp. You can easily adapt it to do the same for directories mounted remotely with sshfs/rclone mount.

Another action that I like to add (this one I actually use in Double Commander on my GUI workstation) is to automatically convert transferred files on the fly, like compress media with ffmpeg (WAV to FLAC, * to OPUS, etc).

[1]: https://source.midnight-commander.org/man/mc.html#Edit_Menu_...

I haven't used this for a long old time. Back in the day it was the only way to recover your university dissertation when you'd rm -rf'd in the wrong directory.

Go on, ask me how I know ...

I've not had much cause to use it since then though.

Okay, I’ll bite mate:

How do you know?

They rm -rf'd the wrong directory, lost their dissertation, and used mc to recover it.

Yeah, the answer was there in the question really :)

That was not a good day, about a week before submission was due. I unmounted the disk the second I realised what I'd done and started to look for guides on finding lost ext2 inodes. MC to the rescue!

mc can recover deleted files?

Back in the 90s it certainly had some features that made it easier to do so, yes. On ext2 file systems (no journaling or other advanced features) it had some method to browse unlinked inodes that were still on disk so you could recover them. They’d then show up in “lost+found”.

If you were quick and unmounted as soon as you had realised what you’d done, and the space had not been re-used for anything, you could often get the file back because rm just unlinked the inodes on ext2 IIRC.

I imagine that the commands it used under the hood were accessible to anyone with the right know-how, but at the time that’s not something I had, and all the guides started with “use midnight commander” so I did :)

(Saying “only way” to recover might be a stretch, it’s true)

I've always found Midnight Commander to be underrated, perhaps because it "looks old". I still recommend checking it out if you want a terminal-based file manager.

In case you do prefer GUIs, consider DoubleCommander.

Worker[0] is a mature double panel GUI file manager that's often overlooked.

0. http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/

For MacOS, I love Marta file manager.

It's not so bad once you change the skin to non-default ones. I like the yadt256 skin.

`mc` was a gateway drug for me to switch from DOS to Linux in 1995. Because I hadn't been gotten comfortable with other text editors and file management commands yet, mc and its own text editor (mc -e) had felt very intuitive at the time. I felt at home. I was also amazed by stuff like FTP VFS support. It was so complete and done right.

Very cool successor of Norton Commander idea.

Volkov Commander anyone?

If we're going to individually name every Orthodox File Manager, we are going to take some while. (-:

You mean like FAR commander? ;)

FAR Manager. They went civilian :)

Dos Navigator.

m602

volkov was a great virus detector

its size was right at the edge of segment (64k) so when a virus appended to the .com binary, volkov stopped working

Unfortunately there were also badly written, overwriting viruses that destroyed the host.

I made a COM-to-EXE convertor back in time so that I can compress them with LZEXE (I don't remember anything about it, but I guess I just prepended an empty relocation table). It would have been interesting to incorporate that functionality in a virus.

I still use volcov commander on my dos machines :)

And MC on the *nixes of course.

I remember asking to my friend how do you use ‘nc’ in Linux and he answering “type ‘mc’”.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/candidtim/f2-commander

I've been working on "F2 Commander" on and off for a while now. At first, I wanted a TUI to view the contents of cloud storage buckets (GCS, S3, etc.), but it quickly evolved into an orthodox file manager. The funny thing is, the first version was in Common Lisp, but then I discovered Textual and was instantly sold on it - it's really fun to work with. The app scratches my itch, and although most of the time I myself prefer just using the regular command line, I open it up when I need to quickly navigate or move some files in a complex directory tree.

[1] https://textual.textualize.io/

Nostalgia! However; dired (and wdired) is more powerful, so I won't be switching back any time soon.

you need a new username =P

Why? Vim is not just a concrete set of products. It's also an idea. One can perfectly remain a die-hard vimmer and use Emacs. That's a fundamental truth unrecognized only by those who misunderstand either Vim or Emacs, or both.

I have reasons to believe the comment above was tongue-in-cheek.

Specifically I believe this:

Is a tongue-in-cheek emoticon, but I can see how it can be mistaken for a mobius strip emoticon.

I know. I don't even use vim bindings any more.

Yup, only Dired allows you to edit your file structure tree like editing a wiki page and at the same time integrates well with source control. Where else can you mark some files and dirs and see the git log pertaining only marked items so easily? What else can easily integrate with your video player for quickly reviewing a bunch of vids? What else can you use to connect to a remote machine and keep the same worfklows as if the stuff is on your local?

I been using mc since mandrake days, coming from dos looking for a norton commander replacement.

Still use mc in 2025 :-)

I still remember how I installed Slackware in 1996 and then found about Midnight Commander by accidentally typing in 'mc'. I LOLed hard as I saw the name "midnight". Still using it today too!!

After moving from Windows to MacOS mc is the closest to Total Commander - the only software that I’m still missing from MacOS. Reminds me to DOS Navigator and Volkov Commander or even FAR

Try doublecmd[1], much better then tc, open source, updated frequently, works on all platforms. Oh and written in object pascal, which I like a lot!

[1]: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io

Tried it on linux. It crashed while moving folder. Like the main thing it's used for.

It works fine for me. When did you tested it?

In May

Well while note open-source (but still free), Marta is the best MacOS TotalCommander alternative: https://marta.sh/

Midnight Commander is available under Brew.

https://brew.sh/

The command to install it is:

brew install mc

Thanks, your comment was the one I was looking for, even though I had guessed that ‘brew install mc’ would work. I am curious how mc will fit in with tmux and emacs-nw.

With tmux it is seamless, screen as well.

I don't know anything about Emacs =)

The command to install it is:

brew install mc

The Midnight Commander web site says to use

  % brew install midnight-commander

mc is an alias to it.

Volkov Commander was so fast on my 486, amazing thing. Think it was written in assembly to get that speed.

FAR was awesome.

I just couldn't live without this thing. Well, I could but I would be less productive and more grumpy.

Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder

In a restricted environment like a console only system these two pane file managers are very useful. I was a heavy user of norton commander (nc) back in my DOS days. Also these are useful on mobile.

However I rarely use them on a graphical environment like windows where I can open arbitrary explorer windows and arrange them as I see like. I guess it depends on what people have experience on...

It's an interesting file browser, the default "blue" colors gives old-school vibes nowadays.

If you wonder how to quit (if started from a terminal):

It's `ESC 0`. Or "exit" like from a shell. Took me some time I have to admit (q, ctrl-c, ctrl-q, F10, ESC all did not work).

F10 always worked for me, but some terminals use F10 for some other functionality.

If that fails, you can click on "10 Quit" with the mouse (not ideal, but an immediate solution).

Ah I see, thx, it's a pretty default configured "gnome-terminal", which probably captures the F10.

Didn’t realize mc was under gnu banner. Nice.

I’ve been trying to get used to ranger since I’m learning vim anyway

Been using MC for over 20 years (and NC before it). Still haven't found a better file manager (GUI or TUI), and I've tried many. I even use it on my Mac.

I use it for SCP and S3 file management too (first mounting the folder using sshfs or goofys).

We all know it’s a clone of the Norton commander.

We all know it’s a clone of the Norton commander.

PathMinder pre-dates Norton Commander by two years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder

I have been using Norton Commander from early versions. Then Volkov Commander.

Somehow during my 30+ years *nix career I never truly and actually used mc. Seems like moving files around in shell is good enough.

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.

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

If you're stuck on Windows I recommend xplorer². https://www.zabkat.com/

my one gripe after using mc for a few years is no parallel transfer support. it slows down significantly when transferring small files compared to one large file.

That I agree with. In Total Commander I typically do F5 copy and then put it in the background F2. Then start another.

This isn't possible in MC. And also a concrete parallelization is not available. This sounds like a feasible feature request to the upstream MC project! I'm sure Gnu Parallel or just pure C code would be able to handle parallelization of copy jobs.

EDIT: Wait! It does have background transfer now. Which means my technique of how I do it in Total Commander will work in MC now as well. It is almost like having Parallelization.

I've been a mc user for many years, but lately I've been using dired in emacs. It's quite powerful and intuitive to me.

Fun fact, on Windows I stopped using File Explorer and use Midnight Commander.

Now that I am more into the command line, I may need to give it a try.

Fun fact (???) wayback about 40 years ago Central Point Software was humiliating Microsoft with its suites of utilities for Microsoft's OS's, which included file managers for Windows (and MS-DOS IIRC), and was a top rated #1 best seller. Microsoft graciously offered to buy a license for said software from Central Point, which they would make a standard part of windows. This was the kind of deal that practical realists tend to accept, even though it spells DOOM with a capital 3-finger salute. 'Tis great to see something as versatile as the wheel and axle or the Oklahoma speed wrench still rolling along.

I used Norton Commander from the early DOS days. I've gone through many clones over the years. Eventually I was more OK with just using command line for moving files around, but I still find myself starting mc and moving things that way, because it's just so much easier. I'm so glad it still exists and is maintained.

Lots of comments here review the (OFM) concept, not the particular implementation.

I have plenty of criticism for MC, I wish it had the sufficient amount of features so that it becomes a better representative of its genre and I could start recommending it to other users. Krusader and Total Commander are lightyears ahead, try these first.

I use midnight commander to transfer files between my servers using FTP over VPN but supports multiple protocols. Great software, once you get familiar with the shortcuts there's nothing like it. Clean, simple and does the job. You can transfer in the background or foreground. It's a pretty complete tool.

I'm a little surprised graphical file management is so popular. I use the command line for almost everything (ie using unix utilities to manage files), and I am a little mystified as to what people do with their computers such that file management is so time consuming it benefits from stuff like this.

I fondly remember my first PC, which only had DOS.

I came from C64 where I had GEOS, that allowed me to do anything with a nice GUI, so it felt like quite the step back.

However, PCs were all the rage at that time, so I got one and thanks to Norton Commander, I was able to use it with a nice(+ish) GUI too.

I used to install Windows Commander (later Total Commander) on every system I have used, so much so that I bought the Total Commander licence. However as time passes by I used it less and less, to the point that currently I run it once a month out of pure nostalgia.

Check out File Pilot

I still use it. Did you know it supports extensions? Such as being able to explore SQLite files and so on. A Polish team has put toghether as many extensions as possible into a self contained installer-distro for Total Commander. It is called Total Commander Ultima Prime. I enjoy it a lot.

https://tcup.pl

I've been using OneCommander [1] on Windows for a few years now, it's great. Also dual pane with lots of extra features and active development.

[1] https://www.onecommander.com/

I think the best tool for Windows is Total Commander or TCUP if you want the kitchen sink included:

https://tcup.pl/

This looks interesting but is a 1Gig download.

I need: * grubvox colors ;) * half vertical size of screen (similar norton commander) I can type instructions and see output * default change directory when leave a 'mc'. * better way to change default program (for example image)

I'm sure it has evolved, but Midnight Command began as a recreation of Norton Commander for DOS PCs. I've not used Midnight Commander in particular, but back in my DOS programming days Norton Commander was my best friend.

It uses F10 to quit so if you're in GNOME Terminal (e.g. Ubuntu) go to Terminal Preferences|General and uncheck "Enable the menu accelerator key (F10 by default)", or use Alt-0 to quit instead.

Weird question, when you call yourself "GNU <NAME>" does that just mean GNU Public License, or is it more like "Apache <NAME>" where there's an organization attached?

It's supposed to be the latter (approval as part of the GNU Project).

Those who still remember Norton and Far Commanders, can you recall this favorite song of yours, once even featured in "Madagascar"?

I like to move it, move it!

Move it!

I have fond memories for mc during my transition from Windows and trying to replace DOS Navigator and Far Manager with something similar. Started to use ranger a long ago though and never came back.

Far Manager works in Linux and Mac OS and works great.

Went through the same process but ended up with Far clone on Linux called far-2l. Wouldn't say it's great (I miss many plugins) but it's def good enough for me.

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.

"was"? People still use it. Like a lot. I'm surprised

Good shout!

I didn’t use mc much back in the day, but I do use Emacs dired a ton these days. Specially for applying command line utilities to a bunch of files. https://xenodium.com/how-i-batch-apply-and-save-one-liners

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

Thanks!

I'd wish there was a Midnight Commander available for Android that would allow for being used during an adb shell or ssh session. Ghost Commander doesn't cover that use case, sadly.

Miguel de Icaza Rocks So Hard. And whatever he makes rocks as much.

I am especially fond of mcedit, the midnight commander editor which can be run independently. Very easy to pick up and use as a casual user as opposed to something like vi

Yes its really great. You should check out Jed's editor on Linux and MultiEdit on MSdos. It continues in the same spirit as MCView. Both are definitely inspired by Turbo Pascal.

I grew up using Norton Commander. It had everything I needed including a decent editor!

I'm not sure if midnight commander was a complete rewrite.

It is a clean room imlementation and mostly feature complete with more modern support such as SFTP, UTF-8 and so on.

I still use both Midnight Commander and Total Commander daily. Those are hard habits to kick :D For macOS, I use Forklift.

Great FM. I still use it consistently, especially when dealing with a large number of files.

Brings back great memories, used to be my default diff viewer for several years.

How does it compare to meld?

what's new about it? or is it just a reminder that `mc` still exists?

… since 1994

That’s what I know since 1994 as well. thus surprised it’s published here with landing page only and no specific news. Unless I missed one? Is there some 31 years celebration or sth? :)

I love mc, and mcedit is still my text editor of choice 99% of the time!

Still my default tool to install on any remote server. My secret weapon :)

Something feels strange reading the docs for mc in Material for MKDocs

Over the years, I went from mc to ranger to nnn to lf to yazi.

Still used in Poland. I still manage some systems using mcedit.

I have been using ‘yazi’ for a few months and I love it

Mouseless Commander :)

Good memory!

MC is a great file manager, but Far2l is even better.

MC needs a shakeup from its current maintenance mode, since many state-of-the-art features, especially around copying, should be added. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the last decade.

If only you could redefine the keyboard shortcuts...

You can, it even ships with two files you can use as examples in mc.{emacs,vim}.keymap. The vim one has my favorite comment in a config file:

    [editor]
    # No remapping, just use vim instead of mcedit

Given that you can specify the bindings config to use at startup with --keymap you can even configure task specific sets of bindings. This combined with extfs and custom menus makes it a great way to make a personal interface to non-file data sources too.

Thanx! I completely missed that. That’s helpful even though a „Operator Pending Mode„ is missing.

always have it just in case, but its hard to beat dolphin breadth of features. also I use oil+fzf-lua more and more lately.

How does it compare to Apple's Finder?

most of the russian programmers i worked with use this. Not sure if it's taught in university or something.

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 to type with my feet or something. But I do. It's very keyboard-controllable, and was fast and efficient until MS started to cram the ribbon UI into it. Since Windows 8 it's been destroyed.

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.

+power user

Can I get it in a Docker container?

Lol. Realistically speaking, you'd have to bind mount your entire home for it to be usable then

Maybe you're just looking to shell around in your container deployed in a pod somewhere.

That should be doable with `kubectl debug ...` - e.g. attach an ephemeral sidecar container with mc to already running pod. And you would ofc. configure that in K9S as a plugin to easily launch it :)

unraid has a docker container for Krusader - same thing different flavor, why not.

This is not a chat client.

I think this is one of the cases where Nix would be easier. To try it out without polluting your global namespace, nix run nixpkgs#mc.

It would be like having `ls` in a container

The joke has to be more accessible to land ;)

Yes. Probably even a distroless one.

I guess so, but what would be the use case for it?

why bother? I use mine in my AI powered, headless, kubernetes cluster

  docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd):$(pwd)" -w "$(pwd)" nixery.dev/mc mc

I have it in a Docker container in UnRaid to move all my Media around. It’s great.

I preferred snappy XTree

Greatest tool ever!

Tell me you are from USSR without telling me :) Also tell me you are super-conservative, clinging to ossifed replica of a tool from 1986.

P.S. Compare to some other tools from old times, e.g. `vi`. It was wastly modernized as `vim` and still actively developed with new features added.

xtgold?

You might be interested in YTree (https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html), UnixTree (https://www.unixtree.org/), or linuXtree (https://stahlke.org/dan/lxt/).

I always preferred XTree to Norton Commander, and I was a heavy Norton user in the 1980s.

Delighted to find there are some Linux versions!

I never understood the fervent love for midnight/norton commander. Its not like its a new phenomenon. I remember people raving about it in the late 90s too.

is it nostalgia, or is it really that useful?

MSDOS shell language was completely awful as I remember, so Norton Commander came in really handy.

For some people it's just how they work. I did consulting for a company, and the developer I sat next to on my visits used Total Commander of all things. It was probably the first thing he'd install on any new Windows machine. He never open Explorer, everything related to files was done within the confines of Total Commander. For those who got started with Norton Commander and moved to Linux/Unix from there, Midnight Commander is probably just the tool they are used to and it's completely ingrained in their workflows.

Personally I really want to like Midnight Commander, well I do like it, I just don't use it that much. As someone else pointed out, the keyboard shortcuts just doesn't work for me for some reason. I think if you grew up using the F-keys a lot, then it probably makes total sense.

I can;t really argue with the force of habit. I've installed vim bindings to vscode, so I can see their point.

I tried to love mc, but its ergonomics felt slightly off. Maybe it's just hard to rewire my Norton / Volkov Commander / FAR Manager muscle memory, I don't know

I ended up being on a Linux fork of Far Manager, which works beautifully: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

While I use command line tools on Linux daily, using a console-based tool that pretends to be a GUI tool is a bridge too far, so I prefer GUI-based dual pane file managers like Double Commander or Krusader.

Of course mc and far can be used over an SSH connection, so they have their advantages too...

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