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Comment by kouteiheika | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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!

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?

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.

> 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".

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/

> 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!

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

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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

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

it was renamed somewhere around 1995

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

The only time that is not after midnight is midnight.

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

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

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

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