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Comment by axiolite | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

> 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.

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.

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

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