Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager

It's not the vibe coding, it's the lack of tests

I have never known this part of the history while using Midnight Commander for so many years.

I was mildly excited clicking the link and then I saw that ... I guess this is the shape of things to come.

Is anti-AI sentiment somehow exempt from the "shallow dismissals" rule?

yazi is great, I’ve had it around for a while… integrates well with neovim and other shell tools.

Tried yazi this week and it indeed feels nice, currently trying to maybe move over from Total Commander to yet to have same file manager across OSes.

Some aspects are still not completely ironed out, though. For example, today I discovered that there's no reliable exit hook and plugins have to override hotkeys and resort to various hacks. I had to patch a session saving extension so it kills mpv-based music preview plugin after yazi quits with "q". Kinda rough experience, but at least manageable with plugins in Lua.

My first impression is not great. Several clicks in the docs - no screenshots to see how it looks like. The very first thing advertised on their GitHub - some "#1 coding agent". And again - no screenshots. Some flashing unpleasant video. "Written in Rust", which is becoming a meme, like if a user should care.

Maybe it's a good file manager but, imo, authors completely failed to advertise it right.

I actually used Yazi a while back. And it's definitely >100x more robust and production-ready than what I iterated for ~3 hours :). And I have no doubt that it is probably way faster.

The only problem for me is that it's not how I use a file manager. I learned to have two parallel windows when moving files, even before I learned how to use a terminal. That's why Midnight Commander was feeling so great. Until the day that I wanted to eliminate my usage of function keys and was tired of maintaining a config file. Some may say I "overkilled" it just to get rid of a config file..

It's perfectly valid to be second- and further-level inspired and even dislike/reject some aspects of the predecessors.

Interesting that in Chinese, classical writing is associated with terseness. That definitely wouldn't work that way in other languages I know.

Just saying, I simply copied from https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Beyond the cost of tokens, I found it's very good at doing more with a limited context window before OpenCode hits context compaction.

Isn't this the point if TUI/GUI that you don't have to? Common things should be shortcutted, some accessible from menus for discoverability.

Command entering is just one if the "modes", and not necessarily the default one.

If shortcuts are limited to special keys and combos, this frees plane input for commands, but I personally prefer list filtering by default.

I actually thought about this when I was doing iterations. So I do almost all my work in tmux, so I have no shortage of terminal windows. Therefore, to me, it makes more sense that the command palette here should be used to trigger some additional commands beyond keybindings.

I also hate to use function keys and having a menu bar in the TUI app. Therefore, I chose this design.

Norton Commander always had a permanent command prompt at the bottom. The active pane mandates the CWD. It was not just for browsing and copying some dir structure. Viewing, editing, unzipping, shell.

still haven't found anything that replaces mc for me. the 2-pane layout is basically muscle memory at this point. everything modern just feels way too bloated or slow. mc is great but customizing the bindings is a total headache tbh. really like the idea of better vim integration here. curious how it handles performance on large directories with 10k+ files? giving it a spin...