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Midnight Commander version 4.8

"Watching and listening to a skillful musician is like being in the presence of the Gods." -- this is applicable to skilled users of Orthodox file managers too ;-)

News Orthodox File Managers Recommended Links MC2 -- mc with LUA support Ebook Orthodox File Manager(OFM) Paradigm mcedit- Midnight Commander editor Midnight Commander tutorial mcedit mcview mcdiff Context Sensitive User Menu MC Extension menu
Macro Substitution Command line and command window External panelize OFM Book  History of commands Colorizing OFM YouTube Tutorials Color scheme Midnight Commander as Bash IDE      
Cheetsheet Midnight Commander version 4.8 mc does not display pseudo-graphic characters properly Software and configuration management using RPM Building RPMs OFM Standards OFM Standard 1999 Sysadmin Horror Storie MC History  Tips Humor Etc

Midnight Commander (mc) is one of the most popular Unix command line Orthodox File Managers (OFMs) and in various version it is available in compiled form for all major UNIX flavors as well as in Windows with Cygwin installed. This is a pretty old implementation, with development started in 1994 and major features implemented around 1998 (in version 4.1.35). It was little changed since them.

I would cvall it the best kept secret for increasing Unix/Linux system administrators productivity. As it provides visual feedback it also decrease the probability of some common SNAFU, which are the most unleast part of sysadmin life.

A good tutorial can be found at Midnight Commander Guide

The most popular version is version 4.6.2.pre1 created around 2006 which available from the installation DVD for SLES 10 and 11 as well as RHEL 5 and 6. As you understand that means there was not much development since this version. Some progress was achieved when in late 2009 Slava Zanko became a maintainer and moved the development to a new site www.midnight-commander.org  This team created a better, newer version 4.8.x series (the latest stable version is 4.8.24) has improved internal editor and viewer and better implementation of Ctrl-O (switch to terminal window) command. 

RHEL7 includes binary RPM for mc 5.8.7 in the ISO. The same is true for Debian. 

There is also  a "cutting edge" development version with night build available for download and testing. It is interesting mainly for those who want to in some way to participate in mc development (and project does need additional human resources) as well as "beta-addicts".

In well trained hands, mc like other OFMs is extremely efficient, enabling the sysadmins and advanced users  to shuffle huge number of files with a minimum of keystrokes. Switch from Windows OFM like FAR or Total Commander is not without problems as mc has a lot of idiosyncrasies but basic compatibility is present.

For a sysadmin the main attraction is that mc allows to perform pretty complex operations with files, eliminating errors from misspelling (and several other types of errors) as well as simplifying and speeding up such operation in comparison with usage of Unix command line tools. Built-in editor is adequted for small editing of configuration files -- the operation that sysadmin perfom most of the time and is very convininet as it can be invoked by just pointing to the file in the panel and pressing F4. External editor as vim is also supported.

What is important is presence of panels it provides visual feedback (size of file, date of modification, etc) which is very helpful too. Ctrl-O allow stich tot he shell windows which is hidden behind the panels.    Unfortunately mc does not implement "half-screen" mode from original Norton commander which allows terminal window and panels coexist.  But as you can open multiple terminal session those day this is a minor nuisance.

For Unix sysadmins who never used OFMs before, tapping into mc power has a price. There is no free lunch and mc does has a rather steep initial learning curve (probably the first two days or so; one day for expsilly gifted and determined ;-). The close analogy is with vi for Windows users, which looks completely foreign to people who get used to Windows-style editors. But which is extremely powerful and flexible editor. BTW vi can be called  a representative of Orthodox file editors as it provides command line  and the system of command for editing, which is the essence of what is called "Orthodox Interface" -- and unique bland of GUI and the command line interfaces power.  BTW there are Orthodox-style file managers which imitate vi keyboard bindings. Actually, those two utilities (mc and vi) have many things in common, including the use of the keyboard for most operations, availability of command line and related command set as well as the use of regular expressions.

Like any OFM, mc should be better viewed as  an extension of the command line capabilities of the shell -- a new generation of the shell interface for the Unix environment.  Kind of visual shell. But initial developers did not have this understanding and architecture of  Midnight Commander does not allow full implementation of this idea. It remains crippled although in version 4.8 it is less crippled then in previous versions.

If and when command windows capability becomes "first class citizen" in GNU screen manner (and actually there is great, completely untapped synergy between those two projects), mc might became a really revolutionary tool for system administrators, or for anyone who need to work with shell scripts and manipulate the large number of files. Currently it is still mostly file manager, and only partcially a sysadmin IDE (via user menu and externtion menu). Still even with its limitation it is extremly powerful and  flexible tool.  See also my ebook discussion for more details. 

It has been said that the secret of success and longevity of Unix is connected not so much with the operating system itself,but with the philosophy. The key ideas and the whole the way of thinking (Unix paradigm, or "Unix way") behind it. Here is the review of Peter Salus book on history of Unix that outlines this idea:

This is an expensive short book with mainly trivial chronological information, 90% of which are freely available on the Internet. As for the history of the first 25 year of Unix it is both incomplete and superficial. Peter Salus is reasonably good as a facts collector (although for a person with his level of access to the Unix pioneers he looks extremely lazy and he essentially missed an opportunity to write a real history, setting for a glossy superficial chronology instead). He probably just felt the market need for such a book and decided to fill the niche.

In my humble opinion Salus lucks real understanding of the technical and social dynamics of Unix development, understanding that can be found, say, in chapter "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix from AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable" in the book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly, 1999)" (available online). The extended version of this chapter will be published in the second edition of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System (Unix and Open Systems Series)" which I highly recommend (I read a preprint at Usenix.)

In any case Kirk McKusick is a real insider, not a former Usenix bureaucrat like Salus. Salus was definitely close to the center of the events; but it is unclear to what extent he understood the events he was close to.

Unix history is a very interesting example how interests of military (DAPRA) shape modern technical projects (not always to the detriment of technical quality, quite opposite in case of Unix) and how DAPRA investment in Unix created completely unforeseen side effect: BSD Unix that later became the first free/open Unix ever (Net2 tape and then Free/Open/NetBSD distributions). Another interesting side of Unix history is that AT&T brass never understood what a jewel they have in hands.

Salus's Usenix position prevented him from touching many bitter conflicts that litter the first 25 years of Unix, including personal conflicts. The reader should be advised that the book represents "official" version of history, and that Salus is, in essence, a court historian, a person whose main task is to put gloss on the events, he is writing about. As far as I understand, Salus never strays from this very safe position.

Actually Unix created a new style of computing, a new way of thinking of how to attack a problem with a computer. This style was essentially the first successful component model in programming. As Frederick P. Brooks Jr (another computer pioneer who early recognized the importance of pipes) noted, the creators of Unix "...attacked the accidental difficulties that result from using individual programs together, by providing integrated libraries, unified file formats, and pipes and filters.". As a non-programmer, in no way Salus is in the position to touch this important side of Unix. The book contains standard and trivial praise for pipes, without understanding of full scope and limitations of this component programming model...

I can also attest that as a historian, Peter Salus can be extremely boring: this July I was unfortunate enough to sit on one of his talks, when he essentially stole from Kirk McKusick more then an hour (out of two scheduled for BSD history section at this year Usenix Technical Conference ) with some paternalistic trivia insulting the intelligence of the Usenix audience, instead of a short 10 min introduction he was expected to give; only after he eventually managed to finish, Kirk McKusick made a really interesting, but necessarily short (he had only 50 minutes left :-) presentation about history of BSD project, which was what this session was about.

In this, once popular, book The Unix Programming Environment (1983), Kernighan and Pike noted that the essence of Unix philosophy "is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves."

One such capability to combine power many small scripts is present in mc in the form of user menu and extension menu. For some reason the key capability of OFMs: the ability to create your own custom user menu and extension menu is deemphasized in mc documentation. But mc does provide rich and up-to-date set of default user menu entries and extension menu that can serve as template for your own development efforts. You just need to put a mdest effort to adapting them to your needs. Any self-respecting sysadim should put some effort into adapting bash scripts in the user menu and integrating their own "quick-fixes" for common problems.

MC user menu has a minimal interface but allows small script and programs to be strung together in pipelines to do jobs that no single program could do alone.

Most operating systems -- including modern Unix and Linux systems -- have graphical interfaces that are powerful and a pleasure to use. But none of them provide power and flexibility of classic Unix pipes and filters glued by the programming power of the shell.

Usually Unix administrators quickly learn how to use basic shell functionality and stop their. They seldom acquire skills we can do without. OFM like mc, on the other hand, teaches shell programming in a very deep and subtle way as a slow but steady extension of the work you do simply by codifying operation you perform in Mc into entries in mc user menu and extension menu entries. Faced with a choice between an hour spent on a boring, repetitive task and an hour putting together a script that will do the task, many eventually will choose the latter.

Another mc strength is that it permits quickly solve a typical file manipulation tasks that constitute a large percentage of a typical load for system administrators and power users. If has favorites menu (Ctrl-\) which make assessable various system directories including deeply nested with  two to three keystrokes.

As I already mentioned several times, but would like to repeat it again, it provides much better visibility of those operations that command line it also prevent many painful mistakes and blunders. Thus MC should be viewed as a natural SNAFU avoidance tool for sysadmins. extension of the Unix shell and

Starting from version 4.8 Midnight commander more correctly (but still with flaws) implements the second fundamental property of OFMs -- "first class citizen" implementation of command windows which make if more attractive for UNIX system administrators. Here is a relevant quote from the main page:

One "terminal style" windows that initially is minimized to a single line at the bottom but can be expanded to full screen, half-screen or any number of lines (classic Norton Commander provided two preselected sizes: half screen and full screen, FAR introduced the ability to expand command line windows by any number of lines necessary/optimal).  At least the ability hide panel and work with full screen command windows should be present. Unfortunately this feature is very poorly understood and as such is very poorly implemented (paradoxically it is implemented especially bad in Unix OFMs). At the same time this is what makes OFM close to visual shell -- as you can use environment variables and shortcuts related to panels in command line. This is a really unique feature of OFM.  Unfortunately implementation is completely screwed in Midnight Commander -- the leading Unix OFM and capability to extend the third windows is completely absent from Total Commander -- probably the best GUI-based OFM for Windows. So again the key feature of orthodox file managers is very badly implemented with the exception of the original Norton Commander and FAR.  This ability to paste elements (current file, path to left and right panel, list of selected files, etc) from panel from it using keyboard shortcuts simplifies many operations in comparison with both die hard command line Unix users on one hand and GUI-addicted CDD (click-drag-drop) type of Windows users on the other.

This "visual shell" memo is one of the most powerful ideas within OFM paradigm, but unfortunately "the religion became corrupted" as it often happens. Only FAR and Midnight commander (starting from version 4.8 produced by Slava Zanko team; in versions up to 4.6 it was a dirty hack, not a real implementation) implement this idea correctly, but with different strong point of the implementation:

At the same time such a popular implementation as Total Commander is completely defective in this respect: the third command line allow only a single command to be executed and output is not visible other that (if this is command affects file in the panel) in changes in listed in panels files.

Midnight Commander implementation of user menu concept invludes the ability to hide non-relvant entries from the view: 

Additional way of integration with the underling OS shell via so called User menu and extension menu using the same set of macro variables that are available for command line. This way "user menu" provide a user with he capability to write his own simple extensions some of which can be quite useful. Here is an example taken from Midnight Commander User menu (which has a unique feature that it is dynamic and only those items of the menu that are applicable to the current file type and presence/absence of selected files are shown to the user): 

= t r
+ ! t 
y       Gzip or unzip current file
        unset DECOMP
	case %f in
	    *.gz) DECOMP=-d;;
	    *.[zZ]) DECOMP=-d;;
	esac
        gzip $DECOMP -v %f

+ t t
Y       Gzip or gunzip tagged files
        for i in %t
        do
          unset DECOMP
	  case "$i" in
	    *.gz) DECOMP=-d;;
	    *.[zZ]) DECOMP=-d;;
	  esac
          gzip $DECOMP -v "$i"
        done


+ f \.tar.gz$ | f \.tgz$ | f \.tpz$ | f \.tar.Z$ | f \.tar.z$ | f \.tar.bz2$ | f \.tar.F$ & t r & ! t t
z       Extract compressed tar file to subdirectory
	unset D
	set gzip -cd
	case %f in
	  *.tar.gz) D="`basename %f .tar.gz`";;
	  *.tgz)    D="`basename %f .tgz`";;
	  *.tpz)    D="`basename %f .tpz`";;
	  *.tar.Z)  D="`basename %f .tar.Z`";;
	  *.tar.z)  D="`basename %f .tar.z`";;
	  *.tar.bz2) D="`basename %f .tar.bz2`"; set bunzip2 -c ;;
	  *.tar.F) D="`basename %f .tar.F`"; set freeze -dc;
	esac
	mkdir "$D"; cd "$D" && ("$1" "$2" ../%f | tar xvf -)

+ t t
Z       Extract compressed tar files to subdirectories
	for i in %t
        do
	  set gzip -dc
          unset D
	  case "$i" in
	    *.tar.gz)  D="`basename $i .tar.gz`";;
	    *.tgz)     D="`basename $i .tgz`";;
	    *.tpz)     D="`basename $i .tpz`";;
	    *.tar.Z)   D="`basename $i .tar.Z`";;
	    *.tar.z)   D="`basename $i .tar.z`";;
	    *.tar.F)   D="`basename $i .tar.F`"; set freeze -dc;;
	    *.tar.bz2) D="`basename $i .tar.bz2`"; set bunzip2 -c;;
          esac
	  mkdir "$D"; (cd "$D" && "$1" "$2" "../$i" | tar xvf -)
        done

This idea of user menu was extended to the mc internal editor which has an additional macro variable %b to which you can direct the output of shell command for insertion into editor buffer and vise versa. 

This is a valuable innovation. Generally in version 4.8.1 editor looks more promising and more modern then in previous version although it still is lack in quality and capabilities from FTE, which I strongly recommend as an external editor for Midnight Commander.

See Mcedit -- Midnight Commander’s Editor

From version 4.8.24 mc implements the file edit and view history. Default shortcut is Alt-Shift-E Also subshell in available standalone mceditor, mcviewer, and mcdiffviewer


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[May 10, 2021] The Tilde Text Editor

Highly recommended!
This is an editor similar to FDE and can be used as external editor for MC
May 10, 2021 | os.ghalkes.nl

Tilde is a text editor for the console/terminal, which provides an intuitive interface for people accustomed to GUI environments such as Gnome, KDE and Windows. For example, the short-cut to copy the current selection is Control-C, and to paste the previously copied text the short-cut Control-V can be used. As another example, the File menu can be accessed by pressing Meta-F.

However, being a terminal-based program there are limitations. Not all terminals provide sufficient information to the client programs to make Tilde behave in the most intuitive way. When this is the case, Tilde provides work-arounds which should be easy to work with.

The main audience for Tilde is users who normally work in GUI environments, but sometimes require an editor for a console/terminal environment. This may be because the computer in question is a server which does not provide a GUI, or is accessed remotely over SSH. Tilde allows these users to edit files without having to learn a completely new interface, such as vi or Emacs do. A result of this choice is that Tilde will not provide all the fancy features that Vim or Emacs provide, but only the most used features.

News Tilde version 1.1.2 released

This release fixes a bug where Tilde would discard read lines before an invalid character, while requested to continue reading.

23-May-2020

Tilde version 1.1.1 released

This release fixes a build failure on C++14 and later compilers

12-Dec-2019

[Apr 03, 2020] Use Midnight Commander like a pro by Igor Kilmer

Apr 03, 2020 | klimer.eu

Panels

Common actions

Panel options

Bonus assignments

[Mar 05, 2020] Using Ctags with MC

Mar 05, 2020 | frankhesse.wordpress.com

the Midnight Commander's built-in editor turned out to be. Below is one of the features of mc 4.7, namely the use of the ctags / etags utilities together with mcedit to navigate through the code.

Code Navigation
Training
Support for this functionality appeared in mcedit from version 4.7.0-pre1.
To use it, you need to index the directory with the project using the ctags or etags utility, for this you need to run the following commands:

$ cd /home/user/projects/myproj
$ find . -type f -name "*.[ch]" | etags -lc --declarations -

or
$ find . -type f -name "*.[ch]" | ctags --c-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q -e -L-

')

me marginwidth=


After the utility completes, a TAGS file will appear in the root directory of our project, which mcedit will use.
Well, practically all that needs to be done in order for mcedit to find the definition of the functions of variables or properties of the object under study.

Using
Imagine that we need to determine the place where the definition of the locked property of an edit object is located in some source code of a rather large project.


/* Succesful, so unlock both files */
if (different_filename) {
if (save_lock)
edit_unlock_file (exp);
if (edit->locked)
edit->locked = edit_unlock_file (edit->filename);
} else {
if (edit->locked || save_lock)
edit->locked = edit_unlock_file (edit->filename);
}

me marginwidth=

To do this, put the cursor at the end of the word locked and press alt + enter , a list of possible options appears, as in the screenshot below.
image

After selecting the desired option, we get to the line with the definition.

[Mar 05, 2020] How to switch the editor in mc (midnight commander) from nano to mcedit?

Jan 01, 2014 | askubuntu.com

Ask Question Asked 9 years, 2 months ago Active 6 months ago Viewed 123k times

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html


sdu ,

Using ubuntu 10.10 the editor in mc (midnight commander) is nano. How can i switch to the internal mc editor (mcedit)?

Isaiah ,

Press the following keys in order, one at a time:
  1. F9 Activates the top menu.
  2. o Selects the Option menu.
  3. c Opens the configuration dialog.
  4. i Toggles the use internal edit option.
  5. s Saves your preferences.

Hurnst , 2014-06-21 02:34:51

Run MC as usual. On the command line right above the bottom row of menu selections type select-editor . This should open a menu with a list of all of your installed editors. This is working for me on all my current linux machines.

, 2010-12-09 18:07:18

You can also change the standard editor. Open a terminal and type this command:
sudo update-alternatives --config editor

You will get an list of the installed editors on your system, and you can chose your favorite.

AntonioK , 2015-01-27 07:06:33

If you want to leave mc and system settings as it is now, you may just run it like
$ EDITOR=mcedit

> ,

Open Midnight Commander, go to Options -> Configuration and check "use internal editor" Hit save and you are done.

[Aug 20, 2019] Is it possible to insert separator in midnight commander menu?

Jun 07, 2010 | superuser.com

Ask Question Asked 9 years, 2 months ago Active 7 years, 10 months ago Viewed 363 times 2

okutane ,Jun 7, 2010 at 3:36

I want to insert some items into mc menu (which is opened by F2) grouped together. Is it possible to insert some sort of separator before them or put them into some submenu?
Probably, not.
The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with anything but
space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in order to be able to use
it like a hot key, the first character should be a letter). All the lines that
start with a space or a tab are the commands that will be executed when the
entry is selected.

But MC allows you to make multiple menu entries with same shortcut and title, so you can make a menu entry that looks like separator and does nothing, like:

a hello
  echo world
- --------
b world
  echo hello
- --------
c superuser
  ls /

This will look like:

[Aug 20, 2019] Fixing Midnight Commander's unreadable dropdown menus

Apr 24, 2011 | tech.iprock.com
Skip to content April 24, 2011 by Admin
Important This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

If you've installed Midnight Commander and haven't changed the default colors, when you try to access a dropdown menu you may see this:

Midnight Commander -- Original Colors

REALLY hard to read that menu, isn't it? Wouldn't you rather see this?

Midnight Commander -- Changed Colors

To fix the unreadable menus, just make sure Midnight Commander is not open, then use any text editor (such as nano) to open ~/.mc/ini:

nano ~/.mc/ini

Assuming that there is no existing [Colors] section in the file, just add this at the bottom of the file (if the second line exceeds the blog column width, just use copy and paste to get it all):

[Colors] base_color=default,default:menu=black,cyan:menuhot=brightmagenta,cyan:menusel=white,blue:menuhotsel=brightmagenta,blue

If there is an existing [Colors] section, you can try tweaking it using the parameters shown above. If you have a very recent version of Midnight Commander (which you probably will have if you are running Ubuntu), then instead of menu= you'll need to use menunormal= , as shown here:

[Colors] base_color=default,default:menunormal=black,cyan:menuhot=brightmagenta,cyan:menusel=white,blue:menuhotsel=brightmagenta,blue

Note that for some reason the base_color parameter must appear, or the other items are ignored. Save the change, exit the editor, and open Midnight Commander. If you then close Midnight Commander, you may find that the position of the [Colors] section has moved within the ini file -- apparently Midnight Commander rewrites the file when you close it -- but if you don't like the changes you can remove the [Colors] section to reverse the change.

I figured out how to do this after reading this blog post:
Ajnasz Blog – Midnight Commander colors and themes
Another source of information is:
Zagura's blog – Midnight Commander Color Themes

Related Posts
  • [Aug 20, 2019] Midnight Commander, using date in User menu

    Dec 31, 2013 | unix.stackexchange.com

    user2013619 ,Dec 31, 2013 at 0:43

    I would like to use MC (midnight commander) to compress the selected dir with date in its name, e.g: dirname_20131231.tar.gz

    The command in the User menu is :

    tar -czf dirname_`date '+%Y%m%d'`.tar.gz %d

    The archive is missing because %m , and %d has another meaning in MC. I made an alias for the date, but it also doesn't work.

    Does anybody solved this problem ever?

    John1024 ,Dec 31, 2013 at 1:06

    To escape the percent signs, double them:
    tar -czf dirname_$(date '+%%Y%%m%%d').tar.gz %d

    The above would compress the current directory (%d) to a file also in the current directory. If you want to compress the directory pointed to by the cursor rather than the current directory, use %f instead:

    tar -czf %f_$(date '+%%Y%%m%%d').tar.gz %f
    

    mc handles escaping of special characters so there is no need to put %f in quotes.

    By the way, midnight commander's special treatment of percent signs occurs not just in the user menu file but also at the command line. This is an issue when using shell commands with constructs like ${var%.c} . At the command line, the same as in the user menu file, percent signs can be escaped by doubling them.

    [Aug 19, 2019] mc - Is there are any documentation about user-defined menu in midnight-commander - Unix Linux Stack Exchange

    Aug 19, 2019 | unix.stackexchange.com

    Is there are any documentation about user-defined menu in midnight-commander? Ask Question Asked 5 years, 2 months ago Active 1 year, 2 months ago Viewed 3k times 6 2


    login ,Jun 11, 2014 at 13:13

    I'd like to create my own user-defined menu for mc ( menu file). I see some lines like
    + t r & ! t t
    

    or

    + t t
    

    What does it mean?

    goldilocks ,Jun 11, 2014 at 13:35

    It is documented in the help, the node is "Edit Menu File" under "Command Menu"; if you scroll down you should find "Addition Conditions":

    If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will not be included in the menu.

    This is preceded by "Default conditions" (the = condition), which determine which entry will be highlighted as the default choice when the menu appears. Anyway, by way of example:

    + t r & ! t t
    

    t r means if this is a regular file ("t(ype) r"), and ! t t means if the file has not been tagged in the interface.

    Jarek

    On top what has been written above, this page can be browsed in the Internet, when searching for man pages, e.g.: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-mc/

    Search for "Menu File Edit" .

    Best regards, Jarek

    [Aug 10, 2019] LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Midnight Commander Help

    Aug 10, 2019 | www.linuxquestions.org
    CrazyCatLover 12-22-2014 02:40 AM

    Midnight Commander Help
    Hi,

    I need to know how to check the current colour for mc and how to change it.
    I google it and they talk about changeing some initial file /.mc/ini which i have no idea (no one ever gives full filename.)and i cant find it at all. Wasted an hour of my life. I just need the simplest way to change it, not another 10+ steps to change a stupid colour.


    gengisdave 12-22-2014 03:22 AM

    in some distros (mine, e.g.) it is located in ~/.local/mc/ini

    sycamorex 12-22-2014 03:24 AM

    This is the full filename. Mind you on my distro it's in ~/.config/mc/ini
    Find / Create this file and add the following (obviously change the colour values):

    The syntax is: variable=foreground_colour,background_colour
    Code:


    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,green:normal=green,default:selected=white,gray:marked=yellow,default:markselect=yellow,gray:directory=blue,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=cyan,default:device=brightmagenta,default:special=lightgray,default:errors=red,default:reverse=green,default:gauge=green,default:input=white,gray:dnormal=green,gray:dfocus=brightgreen,gray:dhotnormal=cyan,gray:dhotfocus=brightcyan,gray:menu=green,default:menuhot=cyan,default:menusel=green,gray:menuhotsel=cyan,default:helpnormal=cyan,default:editnormal=green,default:editbold=blue,default:editmarked=gray,blue:stalelink=red,default


    Also, have a look at this:
    http://blog.mybox.ro/2010/05/10/skin...ght-commander/

    [Aug 10, 2019] Plug-and-Pray Editing Midnight Commander's color scheme

    Aug 10, 2019 | plug-and-pray.blogspot.com

    Editing Midnight Commander's color scheme In a previous post I was sort of laying out a "formula" on how to transform your Midnight Commander default color scheme into a trasnparent skin, without talking too much about how you can change the other colors.

    To my great shame, I didn't pay too much attention to this blog or to the comments asking for further advice. I found Mateus' comment rather late (just now!) and decided to dig further, in order to find out how exactly to deal with more refined color changes, while still keeping the transparent background (in both in Midnight Commander and its editor).

    So the first thing to know is which are the colors that Midnight Commander supports; the available colors are:

    black
    gray
    lightgray
    white
    red
    brightred
    green
    brightgreen
    blue
    brightblue
    magenta
    brightmagenta
    cyan
    brightcyan
    brown
    yellow
    default

    The " default " color is the one giving out the nice transparency.

    Now, there are certain "components" in Midnight Commander's display that can have their colors altered. Here they are:

    base_color, normal, selected, marked, markselect, errors, menu, reverse, dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus, viewunderline, menuhot, menusel, menuhotsel, helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink, gauge, input, directory, executable, link, stalelink, device, core, special, editnormal, editbold, editmarked, errdhotnormal, errdhotfocus

    Each and every one of these "components" can have its own colors set accordingly to the user's wish. Each component is assigned a color pair and must be followed by a colon (':') in order to separate it from the color pair of the next component. Here's how this basic syntax must look like:

    component=foreground_color,background_color:

    When you start modifying the color scheme in your Midnight Commander configuration file (located at ~/.mc/ini ), you just have to add a section called " [Colors] " and proceed with enumerating the color pairs. So you'd have something like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    component1=foreground_color1,background_color1:...:componentN= foreground_colorN,background_colorN

    For increased readability, I will "truncate" that long line, adding a backslash ('\') to indicate that in fact what follows on the next line should be adjacent to the text on the previous line. This being said, the [Colors] section could look like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    component1=foreground_color1,background_color1:\
    component2=foreground_color2,background_color2:\
    ...
    componentN=foreground_colorN,background_colorN

    Now that you've gotten the hang of this, let's see how the [Colors] section looks like in the default Midnight Commander color scheme (you know, the "ugly" one, with blue and dull cyan):

    IMPORTANT NOTE: For visual impact's sake and due to Blogspot breaking long lines, I wrote each color pair on a single row, followed by a backslash ('\'). Please note that this does NOT work in the ~/.mc/ini file, so the final [Colors] section in your Midnight Commander configuration file MUST be a SINGLE line with no spaces and with each color pair separated from the next one by a colon (':').

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,blue:\
    normal=lightgray,blue:\
    selected=black,cyan:\
    marked=yellow,blue:\
    markselect=yellow,cyan:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=white,cyan:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=black,lightgray:\
    dfocus=black,cyan:\
    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\
    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\
    viewunderline=brightred,blue:\
    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,blue:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,cyan:\
    directory=white,blue:\
    executable=brightgreen,blue:\
    link=lightgray,blue:\
    stalelink=brightred,blue:\
    device=brightmagenta,blue:\
    core=red,blue:\
    special=black,blue:\
    editnormal=lightgray,blue:\
    editbold=yellow,blue:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now let's see. What you want to change first of all is most of the background of these "components", such that the display will be one with a neat looking transparent background. So first of all you might want to make a few changes to these color pairs by replacing the background color "blue" with "default". After doing these changes, your [Colors] section will look a bit like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,default:\
    normal=lightgray,default:\
    selected=black,cyan:\
    marked=yellow,default:\
    markselect=yellow,cyan:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=white,cyan:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=black,lightgray:\
    dfocus=black,cyan:\
    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\
    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\
    viewunderline=brightred,default:\
    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,default:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,cyan:\
    directory=white,default:\
    executable=brightgreen,default:\
    link=lightgray,default:\
    stalelink=brightred,default:\
    device=brightmagenta,default:\
    core=red,default:\
    special=black,default:\
    editnormal=lightgray,default:\
    editbold=yellow,default:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now you've got the basic "Midnight Commander transparent scheme" that was the result of this post .

    Proceeding to Mateus' question, regarding how to change the rest of the colors now, it's about the same as before. What he didn't like there (and as a matter of fact I don't quite like it, either) is the dull cyan that's still seen in the following places:

    1. the bottom line (the one displaying the F1...F10 function keys);
    2. the line that signifies the current selection, the "prompt" which shows you on which file/directory you're "on" at a given moment;
    3. the uppermost line (the "menu" line);
    4. the menus themselves, once you open them.
    To "fix" issues 1, 2, and 3 it is sufficient to alter the value of the " selected " parameter. Notice how it is initially

    selected=black,cyan:\

    My personal choice is to replace the background cyan, which I don't really like, with green. To do this, I'll change this color pair to

    selected=black,green:\

    You can, of course, change the foreground color as well. For me, it's alright to keep the foreground (the text) "black". You can change it to whatever suits your taste.

    To "fix" issue number 4 in the list above, you need to change the " menu " parameter. To get it transparent, just change the "cyan" background to "default". Make other adjustments as you see fit. In other words, change

    menu=white,cyan:\

    into, for instance,

    menu=ligthgray,default:\

    However, there are a few "leftovers" from the default color scheme.

    One of them is the parameter regarding the hotkeys in the menus (the "underlined" character on most of the menu options, showing you what key you can press in order to access that option faster than by moving to it with the arrow keys). This color pair is called " menuhot ". I changed it from

    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\

    into

    menuhot=yellow,default:\

    Another thing which might bother you is the color of the line in the panel you're in when you've "selected all" files (when you've pressed the "*" key). This parameter is called " markselect ". I changed it from

    markselect=yellow,cyan:\

    into

    markselect=white,green:\

    The color pair of the selected buttons in dialogs is called " dfocus ". I changed mine from

    dfocus=black,cyan:\

    into

    dfocus=black,green:\

    In the "focused" buttons or options, the underlined character is called " dhotfocus ". I changed mine from

    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\

    into

    dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:\

    since the background color was already green, after I modified the " dfocus " color pair.

    The other buttons or options in the dialogs which have hotkeys assigned to them, but which are not "focused" (the buttons/options that you're not located on at a given moment) are still displayed in blue on a light gray background. This color pair is referred to as " dhotnormal ". Since the blue looks a bit odd there, I changed

    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\

    into

    dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:\

    Well, this is nice, in window titles and on normal (unfocused) hotkeys I get the transparent background. The problem now is that the rest of the dialog window is still light gray. To change this (to make the window transparent as well), you only need to alter the " dnormal " color pair, such as changing it from

    dnormal=black,lightgray:\

    into

    dnormal=white,default:\

    You may notice that the input fields stay cyan, as well; you find these fields in quite a lot of dialog boxes. To alter this, I changed

    input=black,cyan:\

    into

    input=black,green:\

    One thing which I consider useful is to have symbolic links displayed in bright cyan (as in the colored listings in the terminal). So I just changed

    link=lightgray,default:\

    into

    link=brightcyan,default:\

    Now, regarding the rest of the color pairs, I don't really know what they do. However, if at some point after using Midnight Commander more with this new, neat, transparent/green color scheme you'll notice unwanted leftovers, you can try out other changes in the color pairs values, one at a time, until you determine the troublesome one.

    After operating the changes above, my [Colors] section in ~/.mc/ini now looks like this:

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,default:\
    normal=lightgray,default:\
    selected=black,green:\
    marked=yellow,default:\
    markselect=white,green:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=lightgray,default:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=white,default:\
    dfocus=black,green:\
    dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:\
    dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:\
    viewunderline=brightred,default:\
    menuhot=yellow,default:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,default:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,green:\
    directory=white,default:\
    executable=brightgreen,default:\
    link=brightcyan,default:\
    stalelink=brightred,default:\
    device=brightmagenta,default:\
    core=red,default:\
    special=black,default:\
    editnormal=lightgray,default:\
    editbold=yellow,default:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    I need to direct you to the " IMPORTANT NOTE " above. The final [Colors] section above is written like this - one pair on each row, followed by a backslash - for clarity's sake. The actual final [Colors] section in your ~/.mc/ini file will have to be a one-liner, with no blanks and no backslashes. So it will probably look similar to this:

    base_color=lightgray,default:normal=lightgray,default:selected=black,green:marked=yellow,default:markselect=white,green:errors=white,red:menu=lightgray,default:reverse=black,lightgray:dnormal=white,default:dfocus=black,green:dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:viewunderline=brightred,default:menuhot=yellow,default:menusel=white,black:menuhotsel=yellow,black:helpnormal=black,lightgray:helpitalic=red,lightgray:helpbold=blue,lightgray:helplink=black,cyan:helpslink=yellow,default:gauge=white,black:input=black,green:directory=white,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=brightcyan,default:stalelink=brightred,default:device=brightmagenta,default:core=red,default:special=black,default:editnormal=lightgray,default:editbold=yellow,default:editmarked=black,cyan:errdhotnormal=yellow,red:errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now, the next time you start mc , the new color scheme will take effect.

    As a bonus, here's a picture of how my Midnight Commander looks like, with this new "skin" on:

    Posted by Alexandra at 1:54 PM Labels: color scheme , mc , transparency

    [Aug 10, 2019] Midnight Commander color scheme ~ centosvn

    Aug 10, 2019 | centos-vn.blogspot.com

    Midnight Commander (or "mc") can have transparent panels instead of the ugly, dull default blue. So can "mcedit", its text editor.

    Here's how to do it. Edit the file ~/.mc/ini and add at the end the following:

    [Colors]
    base_color=normal=,default:selected=,:marked=,default:\
    markselect=,:menu=,:menuhot=,:menusel=,:\
    menuhotsel=,:dnormal=,:dfocus=,:dhotnormal=,:dhotfocus=,:\
    input=,:reverse=,:executable=,default:directory=,default:\
    link=,default:device=,default:special=,:core=,:helpnormal=,:\
    helplink=,:helpslink=,:editnormal=,default:

    Note #1: In the above 'code' block, there is only one line below [Colors] . I truncated the line with the backslash because of blogspot rendering issues. You just write all that on one single line, without the "\" (backslash-es).

    Note #2: At the end of this line, the " editnormal,=default: " option means that mcedit will have transparent background in your console, as well.

    To my great shame, I didn't pay too much attention to this blog or to the comments asking for further advice. I found Mateus' comment rather late (just now!) and decided to dig further, in order to find out how exactly to deal with more refined color changes, while still keeping the transparent background (in both in Midnight Commander and its editor).

    So the first thing to know is which are the colors that Midnight Commander supports; the available colors are:

    black
    gray
    lightgray
    white
    red
    brightred
    green
    brightgreen
    blue
    brightblue
    magenta
    brightmagenta
    cyan
    brightcyan
    brown
    yellow
    default

    The " default " color is the one giving out the nice transparency.

    Now, there are certain "components" in Midnight Commander's display that can have their colors altered. Here they are:

    base_color, normal, selected, marked, markselect, errors, menu, reverse, dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus, viewunderline, menuhot, menusel, menuhotsel, helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink, gauge, input, directory, executable, link, stalelink, device, core, special, editnormal, editbold, editmarked, errdhotnormal, errdhotfocus

    Each and every one of these "components" can have its own colors set accordingly to the user's wish. Each component is assigned a color pair and must be followed by a colon (':') in order to separate it from the color pair of the next component. Here's how this basic syntax must look like:

    component=foreground_color,background_color:

    When you start modifying the color scheme in your Midnight Commander configuration file (located at ~/.mc/ini ), you just have to add a section called " [Colors] " and proceed with enumerating the color pairs. So you'd have something like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    component1=foreground_color1,background_color1:...:componentN= foreground_colorN,background_colorN

    For increased readability, I will "truncate" that long line, adding a backslash ('\') to indicate that in fact what follows on the next line should be adjacent to the text on the previous line. This being said, the [Colors] section could look like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    component1=foreground_color1,background_color1:\
    component2=foreground_color2,background_color2:\
    ...
    componentN=foreground_colorN,background_colorN

    Now that you've gotten the hang of this, let's see how the [Colors] section looks like in the default Midnight Commander color scheme (you know, the "ugly" one, with blue and dull cyan):

    IMPORTANT NOTE: For visual impact's sake and due to Blogspot breaking long lines, I wrote each color pair on a single row, followed by a backslash ('\'). Please note that this does NOT work in the ~/.mc/ini file, so the final [Colors] section in your Midnight Commander configuration file MUST be a SINGLE line with no spaces and with each color pair separated from the next one by a colon (':').

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,blue:\
    normal=lightgray,blue:\
    selected=black,cyan:\
    marked=yellow,blue:\
    markselect=yellow,cyan:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=white,cyan:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=black,lightgray:\
    dfocus=black,cyan:\
    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\
    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\
    viewunderline=brightred,blue:\
    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,blue:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,cyan:\
    directory=white,blue:\
    executable=brightgreen,blue:\
    link=lightgray,blue:\
    stalelink=brightred,blue:\
    device=brightmagenta,blue:\
    core=red,blue:\
    special=black,blue:\
    editnormal=lightgray,blue:\
    editbold=yellow,blue:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now let's see. What you want to change first of all is most of the background of these "components", such that the display will be one with a neat looking transparent background. So first of all you might want to make a few changes to these color pairs by replacing the background color "blue" with "default". After doing these changes, your [Colors] section will look a bit like this:

    # the rest of your ~/.mc/ini file

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,default:\
    normal=lightgray,default:\
    selected=black,cyan:\
    marked=yellow,default:\
    markselect=yellow,cyan:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=white,cyan:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=black,lightgray:\
    dfocus=black,cyan:\
    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\
    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\
    viewunderline=brightred,default:\
    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,default:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,cyan:\
    directory=white,default:\
    executable=brightgreen,default:\
    link=lightgray,default:\
    stalelink=brightred,default:\
    device=brightmagenta,default:\
    core=red,default:\
    special=black,default:\
    editnormal=lightgray,default:\
    editbold=yellow,default:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now you've got the basic "Midnight Commander transparent scheme" that was the result of this post .

    Proceeding to Mateus' question, regarding how to change the rest of the colors now, it's about the same as before. What he didn't like there (and as a matter of fact I don't quite like it, either) is the dull cyan that's still seen in the following places:

    1. the bottom line (the one displaying the F1...F10 function keys);
    2. the line that signifies the current selection, the "prompt" which shows you on which file/directory you're "on" at a given moment;
    3. the uppermost line (the "menu" line);
    4. the menus themselves, once you open them.
    To "fix" issues 1, 2, and 3 it is sufficient to alter the value of the " selected " parameter. Notice how it is initially

    selected=black,cyan:\

    My personal choice is to replace the background cyan, which I don't really like, with green. To do this, I'll change this color pair to

    selected=black,green:\

    You can, of course, change the foreground color as well. For me, it's alright to keep the foreground (the text) "black". You can change it to whatever suits your taste.

    To "fix" issue number 4 in the list above, you need to change the " menu " parameter. To get it transparent, just change the "cyan" background to "default". Make other adjustments as you see fit. In other words, change

    menu=white,cyan:\

    into, for instance,

    menu=ligthgray,default:\

    However, there are a few "leftovers" from the default color scheme.

    One of them is the parameter regarding the hotkeys in the menus (the "underlined" character on most of the menu options, showing you what key you can press in order to access that option faster than by moving to it with the arrow keys). This color pair is called " menuhot ". I changed it from

    menuhot=yellow,cyan:\

    into

    menuhot=yellow,default:\

    Another thing which might bother you is the color of the line in the panel you're in when you've "selected all" files (when you've pressed the "*" key). This parameter is called " markselect ". I changed it from

    markselect=yellow,cyan:\

    into

    markselect=white,green:\

    The color pair of the selected buttons in dialogs is called " dfocus ". I changed mine from

    dfocus=black,cyan:\

    into

    dfocus=black,green:\

    In the "focused" buttons or options, the underlined character is called " dhotfocus ". I changed mine from

    dhotfocus=blue,cyan:\

    into

    dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:\

    since the background color was already green, after I modified the " dfocus " color pair.

    The other buttons or options in the dialogs which have hotkeys assigned to them, but which are not "focused" (the buttons/options that you're not located on at a given moment) are still displayed in blue on a light gray background. This color pair is referred to as " dhotnormal ". Since the blue looks a bit odd there, I changed

    dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:\

    into

    dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:\

    Well, this is nice, in window titles and on normal (unfocused) hotkeys I get the transparent background. The problem now is that the rest of the dialog window is still light gray. To change this (to make the window transparent as well), you only need to alter the " dnormal " color pair, such as changing it from

    dnormal=black,lightgray:\

    into

    dnormal=white,default:\

    You may notice that the input fields stay cyan, as well; you find these fields in quite a lot of dialog boxes. To alter this, I changed

    input=black,cyan:\

    into

    input=black,green:\

    One thing which I consider useful is to have symbolic links displayed in bright cyan (as in the colored listings in the terminal). So I just changed

    link=lightgray,default:\

    into

    link=brightcyan,default:\

    Now, regarding the rest of the color pairs, I don't really know what they do. However, if at some point after using Midnight Commander more with this new, neat, transparent/green color scheme you'll notice unwanted leftovers, you can try out other changes in the color pairs values, one at a time, until you determine the troublesome one.

    After operating the changes above, my [Colors] section in ~/.mc/ini now looks like this:

    [Colors]
    base_color=lightgray,default:\
    normal=lightgray,default:\
    selected=black,green:\
    marked=yellow,default:\
    markselect=white,green:\
    errors=white,red:\
    menu=lightgray,default:\
    reverse=black,lightgray:\
    dnormal=white,default:\
    dfocus=black,green:\
    dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:\
    dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:\
    viewunderline=brightred,default:\
    menuhot=yellow,default:\
    menusel=white,black:\
    menuhotsel=yellow,black:\
    helpnormal=black,lightgray:\
    helpitalic=red,lightgray:\
    helpbold=blue,lightgray:\
    helplink=black,cyan:\
    helpslink=yellow,default:\
    gauge=white,black:\
    input=black,green:\
    directory=white,default:\
    executable=brightgreen,default:\
    link=brightcyan,default:\
    stalelink=brightred,default:\
    device=brightmagenta,default:\
    core=red,default:\
    special=black,default:\
    editnormal=lightgray,default:\
    editbold=yellow,default:\
    editmarked=black,cyan:\
    errdhotnormal=yellow,red:\
    errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    I need to direct you to the " IMPORTANT NOTE " above. The final [Colors] section above is written like this - one pair on each row, followed by a backslash - for clarity's sake. The actual final [Colors] section in your ~/.mc/ini file will have to be a one-liner, with no blanks and no backslashes. So it will probably look similar to this:

    base_color=lightgray,default:normal=lightgray,default:selected=black,green:marked=yellow,default:markselect=white,green:errors=white,red:menu=lightgray,default:reverse=black,lightgray:dnormal=white,default:dfocus=black,green:dhotnormal=brightgreen,default:dhotfocus=brightgreen,green:viewunderline=brightred,default:menuhot=yellow,default:menusel=white,black:menuhotsel=yellow,black:helpnormal=black,lightgray:helpitalic=red,lightgray:helpbold=blue,lightgray:helplink=black,cyan:helpslink=yellow,default:gauge=white,black:input=black,green:directory=white,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=brightcyan,default:stalelink=brightred,default:device=brightmagenta,default:core=red,default:special=black,default:editnormal=lightgray,default:editbold=yellow,default:editmarked=black,cyan:errdhotnormal=yellow,red:errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

    Now, the next time you start mc , the new color scheme will take effect.

    As a bonus, here's a picture of how my Midnight Commander looks like, with this new "skin" on:

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    [Aug 10, 2019] Midnight Commander colors and themes

    Aug 10, 2019 | ajnasz.hu

    Koszti Lajos Midnight Commander is the most pupular file manager on unix like systems. It's fast and it has all features what you need. But it's only blue and we know, that everyone loves the eyecandy, everyone likes customizing his/her own desktop. But is there any way to custimize the mc ?
    Yes, and I try to show you, how can you create your theme .

    You can change the Midnight Commander colors if you edit the ~/.mc/ini file, where you have to add a new section, named [Colors] . You should define the new colors in this section, for example:

    [Colors] base_color=lightgray,green:normal=green,default:selected=white,gray ...

    As you see, it has a simple syntax:

    <keyword>=<foregroundcolor>,<backgroundcolor>:<keyword>= ...

    The colors are optional, so you can use this:

    [Colors] base_color=lightgray,green:normal=green:selected=,gray ...

    It's not the exactly the same as the first version!

    Fine, you can change some colors of the filemanager, but which are the keywords? These are:

    And which are the colors? I don't know all, but here are some of them:
    white, gray, blue, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, red, brown, birghtgreen, brightblue, brightmagenta, brightcyan, brightred, default

    Here is the config, what I use:

    [Colors] base_color=lightgray,green:normal=green,default:selected=white,gray:marked=yellow,default:markselect=yellow,gray:directory=blue,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=cyan,default:device=brightmagenta,default:special=lightgray,default:errors=red,default:reverse=green,default:gauge=green,default:input=white,gray:dnormal=green,gray:dfocus=brightgreen,gray:dhotnormal=cyan,gray:dhotfocus=brightcyan,gray:menu=green,default:menuhot=cyan,default:menusel=green,gray:menuhotsel=cyan,default:helpnormal=cyan,default:editnormal=green,default:editbold=blue,default:editmarked=gray,blue:stalelink=red,default

    Screenshot about my redesigned Midnight Commander

    On the screenshot you can see, that the directory color is blue, the files are green, the executable files are birghtgreen and the selected line is white on a gray background.

    And another one, what I use recently:

    [Colors] base_color=lightgray,blue:normal=blue,default:selected=white,brightblue:marked=yellow,default:markselect=yellow,gray:directory=brightblue,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=cyan,default:device=brightmagenta,default:special=lightgray,default:errors=red,default:reverse=green,default:gauge=green,default:input=white,gray:dnormal=green,gray:dfocus=brightgreen,gray:dhotnormal=cyan,gray:dhotfocus=brightcyan,gray:menu=green,default:menuhot=cyan,default:menusel=green,gray:menuhotsel=cyan,default:helpnormal=cyan,default:editnormal=green,default:editbold=blue,default:editmarked=gray,blue:stalelink=red,default

    Screenshot about my redesigned Midnight Commander

    And here is a small shell script, which will help for you to test your new theme:

    #!/bin/sh mc --colors normal=green,default:selected=brightmagenta,gray:marked=yellow,default:markselect=yellow,gray:directory=blue,default:executable=brightgreen,default:link=cyan,default:device=brightmagenta,default:special=lightgray,default:errors=red,default:reverse=green,default:gauge=green,default:input=white,gray:dnormal=green,gray:dfocus=brightgreen,gray:dhotnormal=cyan,gray:dhotfocus=brightcyan,gray:menu=green,default:menuhot=cyan,default:menusel=green,gray:menuhotsel=cyan,default:helpnormal=cyan,default:editnormal=green,default:editbold=blue,default:editmarked=gray,blue:stalelink=red,default

    Download the shell script to make your own mc theme

    Save it as mccolortest.sh, make it executable with the chmod +x mccolortest.sh command, and run it with the ./mccolortest.sh command. If you want to change a color, just edit this file. When you done, copy the colors and paste it below the [Colors] section in the ~/.mc/ini . If it doesn't exists, make it yourself.

    For more information of the mc redesigning check its manual page .


    Mauricio2 hónapja ,

    Awesome!
    Thank you for your clear explanation.

    Anonymous • 6 éve ,

    Thank you for theme. I tried your last theme and it is exactly what I was searching for.

    Anonymous • 6 éve ,

    Also, in 4.8.3 here, I copied the first example scheme line and my colors are different. I can't even set the background of the select bar to gray (or "grey"): it gets replaced with black. Also, the panel headings remain blue here, unlike the (first) screenshot, and I can see no corresponding tag in the line anyway.

    Good intro, regardless. Someone should post a pointer to a more up-to-date one, though, as Google seems to find this old thread within the top few hits. Király! ;)

    --lunakid

    Ajnasz Anonymous6 éve ,

    The colors are depends on the color settings of your terminal. I don't have those settings anymore which was when I posted this article, but here is my current. If I'm right, it's similar to that. Put it into your .Xdefaults

    *background: #000000
    *foreground: #EEEEEC
    
    ! Default
    ! 0: black
    *color0: #1C1C1C
    *color8: #333333
    ! 1: red
    *color1: #C14242
    *color9: #EF2929
    ! 2: green
    *color2: #6AA037
    *color10: #9DCF70
    ! 3: yellow
    *color3: #CFAB2F
    *color11: #FCDA4F
    ! 4: blue
    *color4: #2D578A
    *color12: #729FCF
    ! 5: magenta
    *color5: #A85EB4
    *color13: #AD7FA8
    ! 6: cyan
    *color6: #2F8D8F
    *color14: #34E2E2
    ! 7: white
    *color7: #D3D7CF
    *color15: #EEEEEC
    
    Anonymous • 7 éve ,

    Now ~/.mc dir is ignored. Now is ~/.config/mc ;)

    Anonymous • 10 éve ,

    Midnight Commander supports skins starting from 4.7.0-pre3 version. You can download a skin with black as a main color from here:
    http://zool.in.ua/software/bluemoon/

    Anonymous • 10 éve ,

    I am using MC on my router ASUS WL-500GP and I am developing php scripts on it. but as I see MC in openwrt (kmaikaze 8.09) does not use syntax-highlighting and it is very unconfortable.
    Do you know how could I turn it on? I have already downloaded php.syntax file and put it into /usr/share/syntax dir but it does not seem to work. is it possible that some support is not compiled into my version or the syntax file must be compiled to another format?
    Br Zé.

    Anonymous Anonymous10 éve ,

    I found it. in ~/.mc/cedit/Syntax must be this:
    file ..\*\\.(php|PHP)$ PHP\sFile
    include php.syntax

    and in the same dir php.syntax file must be placed. (copied out from a source distrib)

    Anonymous • 10 éve ,

    hei ajnasz, your color theme so very nice, keep my eye on my pc longer than usual. Well, i don't have much time to do more explore with this tricks. I think your taste so cool. If you have any kind of theme, i should be try it. :-)

    Regards,

    Dedi

    Anonymous • 10 éve ,

    Any chance to change the color of the files by extension?

    Anonymous Anonymous10 éve ,

    Midnight Commander supports this starting from 4.7.0-pre3 version.

    Ajnasz Anonymous10 éve ,

    I didn't find anything about it. By the way, since the extension doesn't determinate the file type in UNIX like systems, it wouldn't make any sense to do it.

    Anonymous Ajnasz9 éve ,

    Don't be silly. Mp3 is just music, txt is text, doc is document. The only thing, which is not exactly determinable is the executables, but whatever, it has +x flag.

    Anonymous • 11 éve ,

    Also, you should know that most modern terminal applications allow you to redefine the exact shade of those 16 colors.

    Some of them (such as the Gnome or KDE terminals) may have a place under their preferences where you can redefine the colors.

    Older terminals, such as aterm, use ~/.Xdefaults for this. You can edit that file and add lines like this: "aterm*color1: OrangeRed" (without the quotes). What I've done with that is tell aterm that the "color1" (which was red) should now be "OrangeRed". See /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt for valid color names. You can use *color0 through *color15. So when you'll say "red" in MC's ini file, and if you use aterm, it will get replaced by color1 in ~/.Xdefaults and changed to OrangeRed. (Sorry, I don't remember the mappings between the names used by MC and 0-15 in Xdefaults by heart.)

    Anonymous • 12 éve ,

    On the same subject:
    http://www.zagura.ro/index....

    [Aug 10, 2019] Midnight Commander (mc) convenient hard links creation from user menu "

    Notable quotes:
    "... You can create hard links and symbolic links using C-x l and C-x s keyboard shortcuts. However, these two shortcuts invoke two completely different dialogs. ..."
    "... he had also uploaded a sample mc user menu script ( local copy ), which works wonderfully! ..."
    Dec 03, 2015 | bogdan.org.ua

    Midnight Commander (mc): convenient hard links creation from user menu

    3rd December 2015

    Midnight Commander is a convenient two-panel file manager with tons of features.

    You can create hard links and symbolic links using C-x l and C-x s keyboard shortcuts. However, these two shortcuts invoke two completely different dialogs.

    While for C-x s you get 2 pre-populated fields (path to the existing file, and path to the link – which is pre-populated with your opposite file panel path plus the name of the file under cursor; simply try it to see what I mean), for C-x l you only get 1 empty field: path of the hard link to create for a file under cursor. Symlink's behaviour would be much more convenient

    Fortunately, a good man called Wiseman1024 created a feature request in the MC's bug tracker 6 years ago. Not only had he done so, but he had also uploaded a sample mc user menu script ( local copy ), which works wonderfully! You can select multiple files, then F2 l (lower-case L), and hard-links to your selected files (or a file under cursor) will be created in the opposite file panel. Great, thank you Wiseman1024 !

    Word of warning: you must know what hard links are and what their limitations are before using this menu script. You also must check and understand the user menu code before adding it to your mc (by F9 C m u , and then pasting the script from the file).

    Word of hope: 4 years ago Wiseman's feature request was assigned to Future Releases version, so a more convenient C-x l will (sooner or later) become the part of mc. Hopefully

    [Jul 30, 2019] The difference between tar and tar.gz archives

    With tar.gz to extract a file archiver first creates an intermediary tarball x.tar file from x.tar.gz by uncompressing the whole archive then unpack requested files from this intermediary tarball. In tar.gz archive is large unpacking can take several hours or even days.
    Jul 30, 2019 | askubuntu.com

    [Jul 28, 2019] command line - How do I extract a specific file from a tar archive - Ask Ubuntu

    Jul 28, 2019 | askubuntu.com

    CMCDragonkai, Jun 3, 2016 at 13:04

    1. Using the Command-line tar

    Yes, just give the full stored path of the file after the tarball name.

    Example: suppose you want file etc/apt/sources.list from etc.tar :

    tar -xf etc.tar etc/apt/sources.list

    Will extract sources.list and create directories etc/apt under the current directory.

    2. Extract it with the Archive Manager

    Open the tar in Archive Manager from Nautilus, go down into the folder hierarchy to find the file you need, and extract it.

    3. Using Nautilus/Archive-Mounter

    Right-click the tar in Nautilus, and select Open with ArchiveMounter.

    The tar will now appear similar to a removable drive on the left, and you can explore/navigate it like a normal drive and drag/copy/paste any file(s) you need to any destination.

    [Jul 28, 2019] iso - midnight commander rules for accessing archives through VFS - Unix Linux Stack Exchange

    Jul 28, 2019 | unix.stackexchange.com

    ,

    Midnight Commander uses virtual filesystem ( VFS ) for displying files, such as contents of a .tar.gz archive, or of .iso image. This is configured in mc.ext with rules such as this one ( Open is Enter , View is F3 ):
    regex/\.([iI][sS][oO])$
        Open=%cd %p/iso9660://
        View=%view{ascii} isoinfo -d -i %f
    

    When I press Enter on an .iso file, mc will open the .iso and I can browse individual files. This is very useful.

    Now my question: I have also files which are disk images, i.e. created with pv /dev/sda1 > sda1.img

    I would like mc to "browse" the files inside these images in the same fashion as .iso .

    Is this possible ? How would such rule look like ?

    [Jul 28, 2019] Use Midnight Commander like a pro

    Jul 28, 2019 | klimer.eu

    May 1, 2015

    If you've used an *nix system, at some point you've stumbled upon Midnight Commander , a file manager based on the venerable Norton Commander. You're probably familiar with the basic operations ( F5 for copying, F6 for moving, F8 for deleting, etc.) and how to switch panels (ummm, the Tab key). But mc offers so much more than that. This article aims to show all the useful (YMMV) shortcuts and functionalities that are often overlooked. Most of them can be accessed using the menu ( F9 ), but who has the time to do that?

    Before we get started, let's establish some facts. This article was written and tested on the following software:

    Oh, and make sure you're running a modern and UTF-8 friendly terminal - for example, rxvt-unicode.

    Hold your horses

    There's actually one thing I'd recommend doing before you run mc . mc has the ability to exit to its current directory. Meaning, you can navigate the filesystem using mc (sometimes it's easier than cd ing into that one directory buried deep down somewhere ) and when you quit mc ( F10 ), your shell will automagically cd to that directory. This is done thanks to the mc-wrapper script that should be bundled with your installation of mc . The exact location is dependent on your distribution - in mine (Gentoo) it's /usr/libexec/mc/ , in Ubuntu supposedly it's in /usr/share/mc/bin/ . Once found, modify your ~/.bashrc :

    alias mc='. /usr/libexec/mc/mc-wrapper.sh'
    

    Restart your shell, launch mc , change to another directory, exit and your shell should be set to that new directory.

    Selecting files Accessing the shell Internal viewer ( F3 ) and editor ( F4 ) Panels Searching files Common actions Virtual File System (VFS)

    mc has a concept known as Virtual File System. Try "entering" an archive ( *.tar.gz , *.rpm or even *.jar ) - you'll be able to browse the contents of the archive like a normal folder, without unpacking it first. You extract selected files from the archive by just copying them to the other panel. Bonus points: try "entering" a *.patch file.

    This concept is even more powerful when you realize that remote locations can be viewed the same way. A quick way to browse an FTP location is to just cd to it: cd ftp://mirrors.tera-byte.com/pub/gentoo (first Gentoo FTP mirror I found). You'll be able to interact with files as you normally do. To exit this remote location, cd to a local directory. Just typing cd will suffice as it will take you to your home directory.

    VFS works for SFTP and Samba shares too. Check the manpages for more information on how to specify user/pass, etc.

    Useful options Bonus assignments

    Well, that was a lot to take in. Of course, this list is not complete (that's what man mc is there for), but I've selected the commands and functionalities that are the most useful to me . Embrace the ones you find useful, forget the rest and learn about the other ones I've missed!

    [Jul 28, 2019] How to Use Midnight Commander, a Visual File Manager

    Jul 28, 2019 | www.linode.com
    1. Another tool that can save you time is Midnight Commander's user menu. Go back to /tmp/test where you created nine files. Press F2 and bring up the user menu. Select Compress the current subdirectory (tar.gz) . After you choose the name for the archive, this will be created in /tmp (one level up from the directory being compressed). If you highlight the .tar.gz file and press ENTER you'll notice it will open like a regular directory. This allows you to browse archives and extract files by simply copying them ( F5 ) to the opposite panel's working directory.

      Midnight Commander User Menu

    2. To find out the size of a directory (actually, the size of all the files it contains), highlight the directory and then press CTRL+SPACE .
    3. To search, go up in your directory tree until you reach the top level, / , called root directory. Now press F9 , then c , followed by f . After the Find File dialog opens, type *.gz . This will find any accessible gzip archive on the system. In the results dialog, press l (L) for Panelize . All the results will be fed to one of your panels so you can easily browse, copy, view and so on. If you enter a directory from that list, you lose the list of found files, but you can easily return to it with F9 , l (L) then z (to select Panelize from the Left menu).

      Midnight Commander - Find File Dialog

    4. Managing files is not always done locally. Midnight Commander also supports accessing remote filesystems through SSH's Secure File Transfer Protocol, SFTP . This way you can easily transfer files between servers.

      Press F9 , followed by l (L), then select the SFTP link menu entry. In the dialog box titled SFTP to machine enter sftp://[email protected] . Replace example with the username you have created on the remote machine and 203.0.113.1 with the IP address of your server. This will work only if the server at the other end accepts password logins. If you're logging in with SSH keys, then you'll first need to create and/or edit ~/.ssh/config . It could look something like this:

      ~/.ssh/config
      1
      2
      3
      4
      5
      
      Host sftp_server
          HostName 203.0.113.1
          Port 22
          User your_user
          IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
      

      You can choose whatever you want as the Host value, it's only an identifier. IdentityFile is the path to your private SSH key.

      After the config file is setup, access your SFTP server by typing the identifier value you set after Host in the SFTP to machine dialog. In this example, enter sftp_server .

    [Jul 28, 2019] Bartosz Kosarzycki's blog Midnight Commander how to compress a file-directory; Make a tar archive with midnight commander

    Jul 28, 2019 | kosiara87.blogspot.com

    Midnight Commander how to compress a file/directory; Make a tar archive with midnight commander

    To compress a file in Midnight Commader (e.g. to make a tar.gz archive) navigate to the directory you want to pack and press 'F2'. This will bring up the 'User menu'. Choose the option 'Compress the current subdirectory'. This will compress the WHOLE directory you're currently in - not the highlighted directory.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Ticket 3745 (Integration mc with mc2(Lua))

    This ticket is from2016...
    Dec 01, 2020 | midnight-commander.org
    Ticket #3745 (closed enhancement: invalid)

    Opened 2 years ago

    Last modified 2 years ago Integration mc with mc2(Lua)

    Description I think that it is necessary that code base mc and mc2 correspond each other. mooffie? can you check that patches from andrew_b easy merged with mc2 and if some patch conflict with mc2 code hold this changes by writing about in corresponding ticket. zaytsev can you help automate this( continues integration, travis and so on). Sorry, but some words in Russian:

    Ребята, я не пытаюсь давать ЦУ, Вы делаете классную работу. Просто яхотел обратить внимание, что Муфья пытается поддерживать свой код в актуальном состоянии, но видя как у него возникают проблемы на ровном месте боюсь энтузиазм у него может пропасть.

    Change History comment:1 Changed 2 years ago by zaytsev-work

    ​ https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/2016-February/msg00021.html

    I have asked what plans does mooffie have for mc 2 sometime ago and never got an answer. Note that I totally don't blame him for that. Everyone here is working at their own pace. Sometimes I disappear for weeks or months, because I can't get a spare 5 minutes not even speaking of several hours due to the non-mc related workload. I hope that one day we'll figure out the way towards merging it, and eventually get it done.

    In the mean time, he's working together with us by offering extremely important and well-prepared contributions, which are a pleasure to deal with and we are integrating them as fast as we can, so it's not like we are at war and not talking to each other.

    Anyways, creating random noise in the ticket tracking system will not help to advance your cause. The only way to influence the process is to invest serious amount of time in the development.

    [Jan 29, 2019] mc2 is the first version of Midnight commander that supports LUA by mooffie

    Highly recommended!
    That was three years ago. No progress so far in merging it with mainstream version. Sad but typical...
    Links are now broken as the site was migrated to www.geek.co.il. Valid link is Getting started
    Oct 15, 2015 | n2.nabble.com

    [ANN] mc^2 11 posts

    mc^2 is a fork of Midnight Commander with Lua support:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/

    ...but let's skip the verbiage and go directly to the screenshots:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/SCREENSHOTS.md.html

    Now, I assume most of you here aren't users of MC.

    So I won't bore you with description of how Lua makes MC a better file-manager. Instead, I'll just list some details that may interest
    any developer who works on extending some application.

    And, as you'll shortly see, you may find mc^2 useful even if you aren't a user of MC!

    So, some interesting details:

    * Programmer Goodies

    - You can restart the Lua system from within MC.

    - Since MC has a built-in editor, you can edit Lua code right there and restart Lua. So it's somewhat like a live IDE:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/game.png

    - It comes with programmer utilities: regular expressions; global scope protected by default; good pretty printer for Lua tables; calculator where you can type Lua expressions; the editor can "lint" Lua code (and flag uses of global variables).

    - It installs a /usr/bin/mcscript executable letting you use all the goodies from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/60-standalone.md.html

    * User Interface programming (UI)

    - You can program a UI (user interface) very easily. The API is fun
    yet powerful. It has some DOM/JavaScript borrowings in it: you can
    attach functions to events like on_click, on_change, etc. The API
    uses "properties", so your code tends to be short and readable:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/40-user-interface.md.html

    - The UI has a "canvas" object letting you draw your own stuff. The
    system is so fast you can program arcade games. Pacman, Tetris,
    Digger, whatever:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/classes/ui.Canvas.html

    Need timers in your game? You've got them:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/modules/timer.html

    - This UI API is an ideal replacement for utilities like dialog(1).
    You can write complex frontends to command-line tools with ease:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/frontend-scanimage.png

    - Thanks to the aforementioned /usr/bin/mcscript, you can run your
    games/frontends from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/standalone-game.png

    * Misc

    - You can compile it against Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or LuaJIT.

    - Extensive documentation.

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re: customize columns in single panel view

    Jun 12, 2017 | mail.gnome.org
    On 6/12/17, Karel <lists vcomp ch> wrote:
    Hello,
    
    Is it possible to customize the columns in the single panel view ?
    
    For my default (two panel) view, I have customized it using:
    
     -> Listing Mode
       (*) User defined:
          half type name | size:15 | mtime
    
    however, when I switch to the single panel view, there are different
    columns (obviously):
    
      Permission   Nl   Owner   Group   Size   Modify time   Name
    
    For instance, I need to change the width of "Size" to 15.
    
    No, you can't change the format of the "Long" listing-mode.
    
    (You can make the "User defined" listing-mode display in one panel (by
    changing "half" to "full"), but this is not what you want.)
    
    So, you have two options:
    
    (1) Modify the source code (search panel.c for "full perm space" and
    tweak it); or:
    
    (2) Use mc^2. It allows you to do this. (It already comes with a
    snippet that enlarges the "Size" field a bit so there'd be room for
    the commas (or other locale-dependent formatting) it adds. This makes
    reading long numbers much easier.)
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re- Help- meaning of the panelize command in left-right menus

    Feb 17, 2017 | mail.gnome.org


    On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 01:25:22PM +1300, William Kimber wrote:
    Briefly,  if you do a search over several directories you can put all those
    files into a single panel. Not withstanding that they are from different
    directories.
    
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean here; anyway I noticed that if you do a
    search using the "Find file" (M-?) command, choose "Panelize" (at the bottom
    of the "Find File" popup window), then change to some other directory (thus
    exiting from panelized mode), if you now choose Left -> Panelize, you can recall
    the panelized view of the last "Find file" results. Is this what you mean?
    
    However this seems to work only with panelized results coming from the
    "Find file" command, not with results from the "External panelize" command:
    if I change directory, and then choose Left -> Panelize I get an empty panel.
    Is this a bug?
    
    Cri
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re- Help- meaning of the panelize command in left-right menus

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org

    Re: Help: meaning of the panelize command in left/right menus



    On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 01:25:22PM +1300, William Kimber wrote:
    
    Briefly,  if you do a search over several directories you can put all those
    files into a single panel. Not withstanding that they are from different
    directories.
    
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean here; anyway I noticed that if you do a
    search using the "Find file" (M-?) command, choose "Panelize" (at the bottom
    of the "Find File" popup window), then change to some other directory (thus
    exiting from panelized mode), if you now choose Left -> Panelize, you can recall
    the panelized view of the last "Find file" results. Is this what you mean?
    
    However this seems to work only with panelized results coming from the
    "Find file" command, not with results from the "External panelize" command:
    if I change directory, and then choose Left -> Panelize I get an empty panel.
    Is this a bug?
    
    Cri
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re- customize columns in single panel view

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org
    On 6/12/17, Karel <lists vcomp ch> wrote:
    
    Hello,
    
    Is it possible to customize the columns in the single panel view ?
    
    For my default (two panel) view, I have customized it using:
    
     -> Listing Mode
       (*) User defined:
          half type name | size:15 | mtime
    
    however, when I switch to the single panel view, there are different
    columns (obviously):
    
      Permission   Nl   Owner   Group   Size   Modify time   Name
    
    For instance, I need to change the width of "Size" to 15.
    
    No, you can't change the format of the "Long" listing-mode.
    
    (You can make the "User defined" listing-mode display in one panel (by
    changing "half" to "full"), but this is not what you want.)
    
    So, you have two options:
    
    (1) Modify the source code (search panel.c for "full perm space" and
    tweak it); or:
    
    (2) Use mc^2. It allows you to do this. (It already comes with a
    snippet that enlarges the "Size" field a bit so there'd be room for
    the commas (or other locale-dependent formatting) it adds. This makes
    reading long numbers much easier.)
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] %f macro in mcedit

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org
    
        
    Hi!
    My mc version:
    $ mc --version
    GNU Midnight Commander 4.8.19
    System: Fedora 24
    
    I just want to tell you that %f macro in mcedit is not correct. It
    contains the current file name that is selected in the panel but not
    the actual file name that is opened in mcedit.
    
    I created the mcedit item to run C++ program:
    += f \.cpp$
    r       Run
        clear
        app_path=/tmp/$(uuidgen)
        if g++ -o $app_path "%f"; then
            $app_path
            rm $app_path
        fi
        echo 'Press any key to exit.'
        read -s -n 1
    
    Imagine that I opened the file a.cpp in mcedit.
    Then I pressed alt+` and switched to panel.
    Then I selected (or even opened in mcedit) the file b.cpp.
    Then I pressed alt+` and switched to mcedit with a.cpp.
    Then I executed the "Run" item from user menu.
    And... The b.cpp will be compiled and run. This is wrong! Why b.cpp???
    I executed "Run" from a.cpp!
    
    I propose you to do the new macros for mcedit.
    
    %opened_file
    - the file name that is opened in current instance of mcedit.
    
    %opened_file_full_path
    - as %opened_file but full path to that file.
    
    I think that %opened_file may be not safe because the current
    directory may be changed in mc panel. So it is better to use
    %opened_file_full_path.
    
    %opened_file_dir
    - full path to directory where %opened_file is.
    
    %save
    - save opened file before executing the menu commands. May be useful
    in some cases. For example I don't want to press F2 every time before
    run changed code.
    
    Thanks for the mc.
    Best regards, Sergiy Vovk.
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re- Setting left and right panel directories at startup

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org

    Re: Setting left and right panel directories at startup



    Sorry, forgot to reply all.
    I said that, personally, I would put ~/Documents in the directory hotlist and get there via C-\.

    On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:38 PM, Keith Roberts < keith karsites net > wrote:

    On 18/03/18 20:14, wwp wrote:

    Hello Keith,

    On Sun, 18 Mar 2018 19:14:33 +0000 Keith Roberts < keith karsites net > wrote:

    Hi all,

    I found this in /home/keith/.config/mc/panels. ini

    [Dirs]
    current_is_left=true
    other_dir=/home/keith/Document s/

    I'd like mc to open /home/keith/Documents/ in the left panel as well whenever I start mc up, so both panels are showing the /home/keith/Documents/ directory.

    Is there some way to tell mc how to do this please?

    I think you could use: `mc <path> <path>`, for instance:
    `mc /home/keith/Documents/ /tmp`, but of course this requires you to know
    the second path to open in addition to your ~/Documents. Not really
    satisfying?

    Regards,

    Hi wwp,

    Thanks for your suggestion and that seems to work OK - I just start mc with the following command:

    mc ~/Documents

    and both panes are opened at the ~Documents directories now which is fine.

    Kind Regards,

    Keith Roberts

    [Jan 01, 2019] Mc2 by mooffie

    Notable quotes:
    "... Future Releases ..."
    Jan 01, 2019 | midnight-commander.org

    #3745 (Integration mc with mc2(Lua)) – Midnight Commander

    Ticket #3745 (closed enhancement: invalid)

    Opened 2 years ago

    Last modified 2 years ago Integration mc with mc2(Lua)

    Reported by: q19l405n5a Owned by:
    Priority: major Milestone:
    Component: mc-core Version: master
    Keywords: Cc:
    Blocked By: Blocking:
    Branch state: no branch Votes for changeset:
    Description I think that it is necessary that code base mc and mc2 correspond each other. mooffie? can you check that patches from andrew_b easy merged with mc2 and if some patch conflict with mc2 code hold this changes by writing about in corresponding ticket. zaytsev can you help automate this( continues integration, travis and so on). Sorry, but some words in Russian:

    Ребята, я не пытаюсь давать ЦУ, Вы делаете классную работу. Просто яхотел обратить внимание, что Муфья пытается поддерживать свой код в актуальном состоянии, но видя как у него возникают проблемы на ровном месте боюсь энтузиазм у него может пропасть.
    Change History comment:1 Changed 2 years ago by zaytsev-work

    ​ https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/2016-February/msg00021.html

    I have asked what plans does mooffie have for mc 2 sometime ago and never got an answer. Note that I totally don't blame him for that. Everyone here is working at their own pace. Sometimes I disappear for weeks or months, because I can't get a spare 5 minutes not even speaking of several hours due to the non-mc related workload. I hope that one day we'll figure out the way towards merging it, and eventually get it done.

    In the mean time, he's working together with us by offering extremely important and well-prepared contributions, which are a pleasure to deal with and we are integrating them as fast as we can, so it's not like we are at war and not talking to each other.

    Anyways, creating random noise in the ticket tracking system will not help to advance your cause. The only way to influence the process is to invest serious amount of time in the development.
    comment:2 Changed 2 years ago by zaytsev

    Lua-l - [ANN] mc^2

    Selected post Oct 15, 2015; 12:13pm [ANN] mc^2
    Mooffie 11 posts mc^2 is a fork of Midnight Commander with Lua support:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/

    ...but let's skip the verbiage and go directly to the screenshots:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/SCREENSHOTS.md.html

    Now, I assume most of you here aren't users of MC.

    So I won't bore you with description of how Lua makes MC a better
    file-manager. Instead, I'll just list some details that may interest
    any developer who works on extending some application.

    And, as you'll shortly see, you may find mc^2 useful even if you
    aren't a user of MC!

    So, some interesting details:

    * Programmer Goodies

    - You can restart the Lua system from within MC.

    - Since MC has a built-in editor, you can edit Lua code right there
    and restart Lua. So it's somewhat like a live IDE:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/game.png

    - It comes with programmer utilities: regular expressions; global scope
    protected by default; good pretty printer for Lua tables; calculator
    where you can type Lua expressions; the editor can "lint" Lua code (and
    flag uses of global variables).

    - It installs a /usr/bin/mcscript executable letting you use all the
    goodies from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/60-standalone.md.html

    * User Interface programming (UI)

    - You can program a UI (user interface) very easily. The API is fun
    yet powerful. It has some DOM/JavaScript borrowings in it: you can
    attach functions to events like on_click, on_change, etc. The API
    uses "properties", so your code tends to be short and readable:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/40-user-interface.md.html

    - The UI has a "canvas" object letting you draw your own stuff. The
    system is so fast you can program arcade games. Pacman, Tetris,
    Digger, whatever:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/classes/ui.Canvas.html

    Need timers in your game? You've got them:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/modules/timer.html

    - This UI API is an ideal replacement for utilities like dialog(1).
    You can write complex frontends to command-line tools with ease:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/frontend-scanimage.png

    - Thanks to the aforementioned /usr/bin/mcscript, you can run your
    games/frontends from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/standalone-game.png

    * Misc

    - You can compile it against Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or LuaJIT.

    - Extensive documentation.

    [Jan 01, 2019] mc - How can I set the default (user defined) listing mode in Midnight Commander- - Unix Linux Stack Exchange

    Jan 01, 2019 | unix.stackexchange.com

    Ask Question 0

    papaiatis ,Jul 14, 2016 at 11:51

    I defined my own listing mode and I'd like to make it permanent so that on the next mc start my defined listing mode will be set. I found no configuration file for mc.

    ,

    You have probably Auto save setup turned off in Options->Configuration menu.

    You can save the configuration manually by Options->Save setup .

    Panels setup is saved to ~/.config/mc/panels.ini .

    [Jan 01, 2019] Lua-l - [ANN] mc^2

    Jan 01, 2019 | n2.nabble.com

    Selected post Oct 15, 2015; 12:13pm [ANN] mc^2

    Mooffie 11 posts mc^2 is a fork of Midnight Commander with Lua support:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/

    ...but let's skip the verbiage and go directly to the screenshots:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/SCREENSHOTS.md.html

    Now, I assume most of you here aren't users of MC.

    So I won't bore you with description of how Lua makes MC a better
    file-manager. Instead, I'll just list some details that may interest
    any developer who works on extending some application.

    And, as you'll shortly see, you may find mc^2 useful even if you
    aren't a user of MC!

    So, some interesting details:

    * Programmer Goodies

    - You can restart the Lua system from within MC.

    - Since MC has a built-in editor, you can edit Lua code right there
    and restart Lua. So it's somewhat like a live IDE:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/game.png

    - It comes with programmer utilities: regular expressions; global scope
    protected by default; good pretty printer for Lua tables; calculator
    where you can type Lua expressions; the editor can "lint" Lua code (and
    flag uses of global variables).

    - It installs a /usr/bin/mcscript executable letting you use all the
    goodies from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/60-standalone.md.html

    * User Interface programming (UI)

    - You can program a UI (user interface) very easily. The API is fun
    yet powerful. It has some DOM/JavaScript borrowings in it: you can
    attach functions to events like on_click, on_change, etc. The API
    uses "properties", so your code tends to be short and readable:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/guide/40-user-interface.md.html

    - The UI has a "canvas" object letting you draw your own stuff. The
    system is so fast you can program arcade games. Pacman, Tetris,
    Digger, whatever:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/classes/ui.Canvas.html

    Need timers in your game? You've got them:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/modules/timer.html

    - This UI API is an ideal replacement for utilities like dialog(1).
    You can write complex frontends to command-line tools with ease:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/frontend-scanimage.png

    - Thanks to the aforementioned /usr/bin/mcscript, you can run your
    games/frontends from "outside" MC:

    http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/standalone-game.png

    * Misc

    - You can compile it against Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or LuaJIT.

    - Extensive documentation.

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re change default configuration

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org
    On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 17:01:17 +0300 Sergey Naumov via mc-devel wrote:
    
    I'm curious whether there is a way to change default configuration that is
    generated when user invokes mc for the first time?
    
    For example, I want "use_internal_edit" to be true by default instead of
    false for any new user.
    
    In vanilla mc the initial value of use_internal_edit is true. Some distros
    (Debian and some others) change this to false.
    
    If there is a way to do it, then is it possible to just use lines that I
    want to change, not the whole configuration, say
    
    [Midnight-Commander]
    use_internal_edit=true
    
    Before first run, ~/.config/mc/ini doesn't exist.
    If ~/.config/mc/ini doesn't exist, /etc/mc/mc.ini is used.
    If /etc/mc/mc.ini doesn't exist, /usr/share/mc/mc.ini is used.
    You can create one of these files with required default settings set.
    
    Unfortunately, there is no info about /etc/mc/mc.ini in the man page.
    I'll fix that at this weekend.
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re does mc support sftp

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org

    Yes, it does, if it has been compiled accordingly.
    
    http://www.linux-databook.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/MC-02.jpeg
    
    On Thu, 15 Nov 2018, Fourhundred Thecat wrote:
    
    
    Hello,
    
    I need to connect to server where I don't have shell access (no ssh)
    
    the server only allows sftp. I can connect with winscp, for instance.
    
    does mc support sftp  as well ?
    
    thanks,
    _______________________________________________
    mc mailing list
    https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
    
    
    --
    Sincerely yours,
    Yury V. Zaytsev
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] Re: Ctrl+J in mc

    Jan 01, 2019 | mail.gnome.org

    , Thomas Zajic

    * Ivan Pizhenko via mc-devel, 28.10.18 21:52
    
    
    Hi, I'm wondering why following happens:
    In Ubuntu and FreeBSD, when I am pressing Ctrl+J in MC, it puts name
    of file on which file cursor is currently on. But this doesn't work in
    CentOS and RHEL.
    How to fix that in CentOS and RHEL?
    Ivan.
    
    Never heard about Ctrl+j, I always used Alt+Enter for that purpose.
    Alt+a does the same thing for the path, BTW (just in case you didn't
    know). :-)
    
    HTH,
    Thomas
    _______________________________________________
    mc-devel mailing list
    https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
    
    

    [Jan 01, 2019] IBM Systems Magazine - All Hail the Midnight Commander! by Jesse Gorzinski

    Notable quotes:
    "... Sometimes, though, a tool is just too fun to pass up; such is the case for Midnight Commander! Of course, we also had numerous requests for it, and that helped, too! Today, let's explore this useful utility. ..."
    Nov 27, 2018 | ibmsystemsmag.com

    Quite often, I'm asked how open source deliveries are prioritized at IBM. The answer isn't simple. Even after we estimate the cost of a project, there are many factors to consider. For instance, does it enable a specific solution to run? Does it expand a programming language's abilities? Is it highly-requested by the community or vendors?

    Sometimes, though, a tool is just too fun to pass up; such is the case for Midnight Commander! Of course, we also had numerous requests for it, and that helped, too! Today, let's explore this useful utility.

    ... ... ...

    Getting Started
    Installing Midnight Commander is easy. Once you have the yum package manager , use it to install the 'mc' package.

    In order for the interface to display properly, you'll want to set the LC_ALL environment variable to a UTF-8 locale. For instance, "EN_US.UTF-8" would work just fine. You can have this done automatically by putting the following lines in your $HOME/.profile file (or $HOME/.bash_profile):

    LC_ALL=EN_US.UTF-8
    export LC_ALL

    If you haven't done so already, you might want to also make sure the PATH environment variable is set up to use the new open source tools .

    Once that's done, you can run 'mc -c' from your SSH terminal . (You didn't expect this to work from QSH, did you?) If you didn't set up your environment variables, you can just run 'LC_ALL=EN_US.UTF-8 /QOpenSys/pkgs/bin/mc -c' instead. I recommend the '-c' option because it enables colors.

    A Community Effort

    As with many things open source, IBM was not the only contributor. In this particular case, a "tip of the hat" goes to Jack Woehr. You may remember Jack as the creator of Ublu , an open source programming language for IBM i. He also hosts his own RPM repository with lynx, a terminal-based web browser (perhaps a future topic?). The initial port of Midnight Commander was collaboratively done with work from both parties. Jack also helped with quality assurance and worked with project owners to upstream all code changes. In fact, the main code stream for Midnight Commander can now be built for IBM i with no modifications.

    Now that we've delivered hundreds of open source packages, it seems like there's something for everybody. This seems like one of those tools that is useful for just about anyone. And with a name like "Midnight Commander," how can you go wrong? Try it today!

    [Jan 01, 2019] NEWS-4.8.22 Midnight Commander

    Looks like they fixed sftp problems and it is now usale.
    Jan 01, 2019 | midnight-commander.org
    View all closed tickets for this release Major changes since 4.8.21 Core VFS Editor Viewer Diff viewer Misc Fixes

    [Jun 18, 2018] Copy and paste text in midnight commander (MC) via putty in Linux

    Notable quotes:
    "... IF you're using putty in either Xorg or Windows (i.e terminal within a gui) , it's possible to use the "conventional" right-click copy/paste behavior while in mc. Hold the shift key while you mark/copy. ..."
    "... Putty has ability to copy-paste. In mcedit, hold Shift and select by mouse ..."
    Jun 18, 2018 | superuser.com

    Den ,Mar 1, 2015 at 22:50

    I use Midnight Commander (MC) editor over putty to edit files

    I want to know how to copy text from one file, close it then open another file and paste it?

    If it is not possible with Midnight Commander, is there another easy way to copy and paste specific text from different files?

    szkj ,Mar 12, 2015 at 22:40

    I would do it like this:
    1. switch to block selection mode by pressing F3
    2. select a block
    3. switch off block selection mode with F3
    4. press Ctrl+F which will open Save block dialog
    5. press Enter to save it to the default location
    6. open the other file in the editor, and navigate to the target location
    7. press Shift+F5 to open Insert file dialog
    8. press Enter to paste from the default file location (which is same as the one in Save block dialog)

    NOTE: There are other environment related methods, that could be more conventional nowadays, but the above one does not depend on any desktop environment related clipboard, (terminal emulator features, putty, Xorg, etc.). This is a pure mcedit feature which works everywhere.

    Andrejs ,Apr 28, 2016 at 8:13

    To copy: (hold) Shift + Select with mouse (copies to clipboard)

    To paste in windows: Ctrl+V

    To paste in another file in PuTTY/MC: Shift + Ins

    Piotr Dobrogost ,Mar 30, 2017 at 17:32

    If you get unwanted indents in what was pasted then while editing file in Midnight Commander press F9 to show top menu and in Options/Generals menu uncheck Return does autoindent option. Yes, I was happy when I found it too :) – Piotr Dobrogost Mar 30 '17 at 17:32

    mcii-1962 ,May 26, 2015 at 13:17

    IF you're using putty in either Xorg or Windows (i.e terminal within a gui) , it's possible to use the "conventional" right-click copy/paste behavior while in mc. Hold the shift key while you mark/copy.

    Eden ,Feb 15, 2017 at 4:09

    1. Hold down the Shift key, and drag the mouse through the text you want to copy. The text's background will become dark orange.
    2. Release the Shift key and press Shift + Ctrl + c . The text will be copied.
    3. Now you can paste the text to anywhere you want by pressing Shift + Ctrl + v , even to the new page in MC.

    xoid ,Jun 6, 2016 at 6:37

    Putty has ability to copy-paste. In mcedit, hold Shift and select by mouse

    mcii-1962 ,Jun 20, 2016 at 23:01

    LOL - did you actually read the other answers? And your answer is incomplete, you should include what to do with the mouse in order to "select by mouse".
    According to help in MC:

    Ctrl + Insert copies to the mcedit.clip, and Shift + Insert pastes from mcedit.clip.

    It doesn't work for me, by some reason, but by pressing F9 you get a menu, Edit > Copy to clipfile - worked fine.

    [Jun 18, 2018] My Favorite Tool - Midnight Commander by Colin Sauze

    Notable quotes:
    "... "what did I just press and what did it do?" ..."
    "... Underneath it's got lots of powerful features like syntax highlighting, bracket matching, regular expression search and replace, and spell checking. ..."
    "... I use Mcedit for most of my day-to-day text editing, although I do switch to heavier weight GUI-based editors when I need to edit lots of files at once. ..."
    Jun 18, 2018 | software-carpentry.org

    I've always hated the Vi vs Emacs holy war that many Unix users like to wage and I find that both editors have serious shortcomings and definitely aren't something I'd recommend a beginner use. Pico and Nano are certainly easier to use, but they always a feel a bit lacking in features and clunky to me.

    Mcedit runs from the command line but has a colourful GUI-like interface, you can use the mouse if you want, but I generally don't.

    If you're old enough to have used DOS, then it's very reminiscent of the "edit" text editor that was built into MS-DOS 5 and 6, except it's full of powerful features that still make it a good choice in 2018. It has a nice intuitive interface based around the F keys on the keyboard and a pull-down menu which can be accessed by pressing F9 .

    It's really easy to use and you're told about all the most important key combinations on screen and the rest can all be discovered from the menus. I find this far nicer than Vi or Emacs where I have to constantly look up key combinations or press a key by mistake and then have the dreaded "what did I just press and what did it do?" thought.

    Underneath it's got lots of powerful features like syntax highlighting, bracket matching, regular expression search and replace, and spell checking.

    I use Mcedit for most of my day-to-day text editing, although I do switch to heavier weight GUI-based editors when I need to edit lots of files at once. I just wish more people knew about it and then it might be installed by default on more of the shared systems and HPCs that I have to use!

    [Jun 17, 2018] Midnight Commander Guide

    Jun 17, 2018 | www.nawaz.org

    Selecting Text

    images/editmark.png

    3.2.3 Navigation 3.2.4 Replacing Text

    images/editreplace.png

    3.2.5 Saving

    images/editsaveas.png 3.2.6 Syntax Highlighting

    images/edithighlight.png

    3.2.7 More Options 3.2.8 Some Comments about Editing

    [Jun 14, 2018] Changing shortcuts in midnight commander by rride Last Updated 20:01 PM

    Feb 04, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    I haven't found anything on the topic in the Internet. The only line from .mc/ini that looks related to the question is keymap=mc.keymap but I have no idea what to do with it.

    Tags : linux keyboard-shortcuts midnight-commander

    Okiedokie... lets see
    $ man-section mc | head -n20
    mc (1)
    --
     Name
     Usage
     Description
     Options
     Overview
     Mouse support
     Keys
     Redefine hotkey bindings
    

    8th section... is that possible? Lets look

    man mc (scroll,scroll,scroll)

    Redefine hotkey bindings
        Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file).  A keymap-
        file is searched on the following algorithm  (to the first one found):
    
         1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap>
         2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
         3) Parameter keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] of config file.
         4) File ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap
         5) File /etc/mc/mc.keymap
         6) File /usr/share/mc/mc.keymap
    

    Bingo!

    cp /etc/mc/mc.keymap ~/.config/mc/
    

    Now edit the key mappings as you like and save ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap when done

    For more info, read the Keys ( man mc ) section and the three sections following that.


    $ cat /home/jaroslav/bin/man-sections 
    #!/bin/sh
    MANPAGER=cat man $@ | grep -E '^^[[1m[A-Z]{3,}'
    

    [Jun 13, 2018] How mc.init is stored

    Jun 13, 2018 | superuser.com

    The configuration is stored in

    $HOME/.config/mc/

    In your case edit the file $HOME/.config/mc/ini . You can check which files are actually read in by midnight-commander using strace :

    strace -e trace=open -o mclog mc
    

    [Jun 13, 2018] Temporary Do Something Else while editing/viewing a file

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.nawaz.org

    [Jun 13, 2018] My Screen is Garbled Up

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.nawaz.org

    [Jun 13, 2018] Find file shows no results

    Jun 13, 2018 | wiki.archlinux.org

    If the Find file dialog (accessible with Alt+? ) shows no results, check the current directory for symbolic links. Find file does not follow symbolic links, so use bind mounts (see mount(8) ) instead, or the External panelize command.

    [Jun 13, 2018] Draft of documentation for Midnight Commander

    Jun 13, 2018 | midnight-commander.org

    Table of content

    1. Introduction
    2. Getting sources
    3. Making and installing?
    4. Ini-options setup?
    5. Usage
    6. Migration to keybindings in 4.8.x series
    7. How to report about bugs
    8. Frequently asked questions

    [Jun 13, 2018] Trash support

    Jun 13, 2018 | wiki.archlinux.org

    Midnight Commander does not support a trash can by default. Using libtrash

    Install the libtrash AUR package, and create an mc alias in the initialization file of your shell (e.g., ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc ):

    alias mc='LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libtrash.so.3.3 mc'
    

    To apply the changes, reopen your shell session or source the shell initialization file.

    Default settings are defined in /etc/libtrash.conf.sys . You can overwrite these settings per-user in ~/.libtrash , for example:

    TRASH_CAN = .Trash
    INTERCEPT_RENAME = NO
    IGNORE_EXTENSIONS= o;exe;com
    UNCOVER_DIRS=/dev
    

    Now files deleted by Midnight Commander (launched with mc ) will be moved to the ~/.Trash directory.

    Warning:

    See also [2] .

    [Jun 13, 2018] Mcedit is actually a multiwindow editor

    Opening another file in editor will create the second window. You can list windows using F9/Window/List\
    That allows to copy and paste selections to different files while in editor
    Jun 13, 2018 | www.unix.com

    Many people don't know that mc has a multi-window text-editor built-in (eerily disabled by default) with macro capability and all sorts of goodies. run

    mc -e my.txt
    

    to edit directly.

    [Jun 13, 2018] Make both panels display the same directory

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.fredshack.com

    ALT+i. If NOK, try ESC+i

    [Jun 13, 2018] Opening editor in another screen or tmux window

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    by user2252728 Last Updated May 15, 2015 11:14 AM


    The problem

    I'm using tmux and I want MC to open files for editing in another tmux window, so that I can keep browsing files while editing.

    What I've tried

    MC checks if EDITOR variable is set and then interprets it as a program for editing, so if I do export EDITOR=vim then MC will use vim to open files.

    I've tried to build on that:

    function foo () { tmux new-window "vim $1"; }
    export EDITOR=foo
    

    If I do $EDITOR some_file then I get the file open in vim in another tmux windows - exactly what I wanted.

    Sadly, when I try to edit in MC it goes blank for a second and then returns to normal MC window. MC doesn't seem to keep any logs and I don't get any error message.

    The question(s)

    Tags : midnight-commander

    Answers 1
    You are defining a shell function, which is unknown for mc when it is trying to start the editor.

    The correct way is to create a bash script, not a function. Then set EDITOR value to it, for example:

    $ cat ~/myEditor.sh
    #!/bin/sh
    tmux new-window "vim $1"
    
    export EDITOR=~/myEditor.sh
    

    [Jun 13, 2018] Copy and paste text in midnight commander (MC) via putty in Linux

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    I use Midnight Commander (MC) editor over putty to edit files

    I want to know how to copy text from one file, close it then open another file and paste it?

    If it is not possible with Midnight Commander, is there another easy way to copy and paste specific text from different files?


    I would do it like this:
    1. switch to block selection mode by pressing F3
    2. select a block
    3. switch off block selection mode with F3
    4. press Ctrl+F which will open Save block dialog
    5. press Enter to save it to the default location
    6. open the other file in the editor, and navigate to the target location
    7. press Shift+F5 to open Insert file dialog
    8. press Enter to paste from the default file location (which is same as the one in Save block dialog)

    [Jun 13, 2018] How to exclude some pattern when doing a search in MC

    Mar 25, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    In Midnight Commander, is it possible to exclude some directories/patterns/... when doing search? ( M-? ) I'm specifically interested in skipping the .hg subdirectory.


    Answers 1
    In the "[Misc]" section of your ~/.mc/ini file, you can specify the directories you wish to skip in the "find_ignore_dirs" setting.

    To specify multiple directories, use a colon (":") as the delimiter.

    [Jun 13, 2018] Midnight Commander tab completion

    Sep 17, 2011 | superuser.com
    You can get tab-completion by pressing ESC then TAB . You can also get the currently highlighted file/subdir name onto the command line with ESC-ENTER.

    [Jun 13, 2018] mc-wrapper does not exit to MC_PWD directory

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    I recently installed openSUSE 13.1 and set up the mc in typical why by aliasing mc with mc-wrapper.sh to have it exit into the last working directory in mc instance. However this does not seem to be working. I tried to debug the mc-wrapper.sh script - the echo commands.

    MC_USER=`id | sed 's/[^(]*(//;s/).*//'`
    MC_PWD_FILE="${TMPDIR-/tmp}/mc-$MC_USER/mc.pwd.$$"
    /usr/bin/mc -P "$MC_PWD_FILE" "$@"
    
    if test -r "$MC_PWD_FILE"; then
            MC_PWD="`cat "$MC_PWD_FILE"`"
            if test -n "$MC_PWD" && test -d "$MC_PWD"; then
                    echo "will cd in : $MC_PWD"
                    cd $MC_PWD
                    echo $(pwd)
            fi
            unset MC_PWD
    fi
    
    rm -f "$MC_PWD_FILE"
    unset MC_PWD_FILE
    echo $(pwd)
    

    To my surprise, mc-wrapper-sh does change the directory and is in the directory before exiting but back in bash prompt the working directory is the one from which the script was invoked.

    Can it be that some bash settings is required for this to work?

    Tags : linux bash shell midnight-commander

    Answers 1
    Using answer above working solution for bash shell is this:
    alias mc='source /usr/lib/mc/mc-wrapper.sh'
    

    OR

    alias mc='. /usr/lib/mc/mc-wrapper.sh'
    

    [Jun 13, 2018] How to enable find-as-you-type behavior

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    Alt + S will show the "quick search" in Midnight Commander.

    [Jun 13, 2018] How to expand the command line to the whole screen in MC

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.queryxchange.com

    You can hide the Midnight Commander Window by pressing Ctrl + O . Press Ctrl + O again to return back to Midnight Commander.

    [Jun 13, 2018] MC Tips Tricks

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.fredshack.com

    If MC displays funny characters, make sure the terminal emulator uses UTF8 encoding. Smooth scrolling

    vi ~/.mc/ini (per user) or /etc/mc/mc.ini (system-wide):

    panel_scroll_pages=0

    Make both panels display the same directory

    ALT+i. If NOK, try ESC+i

    Navigate through history

    ESC+y to go back to the previous directory, ESC+u to go the next

    Options > Configuration > Lynx-like motion doesn't go through the navigation history but rather jumps in/out of a directory so the user doesn't have to hit PageUp followed by Enter

    Loop through all items starting with the same letter

    CTRL+s followed by the letter to jump to the first occurence, then keep hitting CTRL+s to loop through the list

    Customize keyboard shortcuts

    Check mc.keymap

    [Jun 13, 2018] MC_HOME allows you to run mc with alternative mc.init

    Notable quotes:
    "... MC_HOME variable can be set to alternative path prior to starting mc. Man pages are not something you can find the answer right away =) ..."
    "... A small drawback of this solution: if you set MC_HOME to a directory different from your usual HOME, mc will ignore the content of your usual ~/.bashrc so, for example, your custom aliases defined in that file won't work anymore. Workaround: add a symlink to your ~/.bashrc into the new MC_HOME directory ..."
    "... at the same time ..."
    Jun 13, 2018 | unix.stackexchange.com

    Tagwint ,Dec 19, 2014 at 16:41

    That turned out to be simpler as one might think. MC_HOME variable can be set to alternative path prior to starting mc. Man pages are not something you can find the answer right away =)

    here's how it works: - usual way

    [jsmith@wstation5 ~]$ mc -F
    Root directory: /home/jsmith
    
    [System data]
    <skipped>
    
    [User data]
        Config directory: /home/jsmith/.config/mc/
        Data directory:   /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/
            skins:          /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/skins/
            extfs.d:        /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/extfs.d/
            fish:           /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/fish/
            mcedit macros:  /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/mc.macros
            mcedit external macros: /home/jsmith/.local/share/mc/mcedit/macros.d/macro.*
        Cache directory:  /home/jsmith/.cache/mc/
    

    and the alternative way:

    [jsmith@wstation5 ~]$ MC_HOME=/tmp/MCHOME mc -F
    Root directory: /tmp/MCHOME
    
    [System data]
    <skipped>    
    
    [User data]
        Config directory: /tmp/MCHOME/.config/mc/
        Data directory:   /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/
            skins:          /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/skins/
            extfs.d:        /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/extfs.d/
            fish:           /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/fish/
            mcedit macros:  /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/mc.macros
            mcedit external macros: /tmp/MCHOME/.local/share/mc/mcedit/macros.d/macro.*
        Cache directory:  /tmp/MCHOME/.cache/mc/
    

    Use case of this feature:

    You have to share the same user name on remote server (access can be distinguished by rsa keys) and want to use your favorite mc configuration w/o overwriting it. Concurrent sessions do not interfere each other.

    This works well as a part of sshrc-approach described in https://github.com/Russell91/sshrc

    Cri ,Sep 5, 2016 at 10:26

    A small drawback of this solution: if you set MC_HOME to a directory different from your usual HOME, mc will ignore the content of your usual ~/.bashrc so, for example, your custom aliases defined in that file won't work anymore. Workaround: add a symlink to your ~/.bashrc into the new MC_HOME directoryCri Sep 5 '16 at 10:26

    goldilocks ,Dec 18, 2014 at 16:03

    If you mean, you want to be able to run two instances of mc as the same user at the same time with different config directories, as far as I can tell you can't. The path is hardcoded.

    However, if you mean, you want to be able to switch which config directory is being used, here's an idea (tested, works). You probably want to do it without mc running:

    Hopefully it's clear what's happening there -- this sets a the config directory path as a symlink. Whatever configuration changes you now make and save will be int the one directory. You can then exit and switch_mc two , reverting to the old config, then start mc again, make changes and save them, etc.

    You could get away with removing the killall mc and playing around; the configuration stuff is in the ini file, which is read at start-up (so you can't switch on the fly this way). It's then not touched until exit unless you "Save setup", but at exit it may be overwritten, so the danger here is that you erase something you did earlier or outside of the running instance.

    Tagwint ,Dec 18, 2014 at 16:52

    that works indeed, your idea is pretty clear, thank you for your time However my idea was to be able run differently configured mc's under the same account not interfering each other. I should have specified that in my question. The path to config dir is in fact hardcoded, but it is hardcoded RELATIVELY to user's home dir, that is the value of $HOME, thus changing it before mc start DOES change the config dir location - I've checked that. the drawback is $HOME stays changed as long as mc runs, which could be resolved if mc had a kind of startup hook to put restore to original HOME into – Tagwint Dec 18 '14 at 16:52

    Tagwint ,Dec 18, 2014 at 17:17

    I've extended my original q with 'same time' condition - it did not fit in my prev comment size limitation – Tagwint Dec 18 '14 at 17:17

    [Jun 13, 2018] Editing mc.ini

    Jun 07, 2014 | superuser.com
    mc / mcedit has a config option called auto_save_setup which is enabled by default. This option automatically saves your current setup upon exiting. The problem occurs when you try to edit ~/.config/mc/ini using mcedit . It will overwrite whatever changes you made upon exiting, so you must edit the ~/.config/mc/ini using a different editor such as nano .

    Source: https://linux.die.net/man/1/mc (search for "Auto Save Setup")

    [Jun 13, 2018] Running mc with you own skin

    Jun 13, 2018 | help.ubuntu.com

    put

    export TERM="xterm-256color"

    at the bottom (top, if ineffective) of your ~/.bashrc file. Thus you can load skins as in

    mc -S sand256.ini

    In

    /home/you/.config/mc/ini

    have the lines:

    [Midnight-Commander]
    skin=sand256

    for preset skin. Newer mc version offer to choose a preset skin from within the menu and save it in the above ini file, relieving you of the above manual step.

    Many people don't know that mc has a multi-window text-editor built-in (eerily disabled by default) with macro capability and all sorts of goodies. run

    mc -e my.txt

    to edit directly.

    Be aware that many skins break the special characters for sorting filenames reverse up/down unless one works hard with locale parameters and what not. Few people in the world know how to do that properly. In below screenshot you see "arrowdown n" over the filename list to indicate sort order. In many xterm, you will get ??? instead so you might resort to unskin and go to "default skin" setting with ugly colours.

    The below CTRL-O hotkey starts what mc calls a subshell. If you run mc a second time in a "subshell", mc will not remind you of the CTRL-O hotkey (as if the world only knows 3 hotkeys) but will start mc with no deeper "subshell" iteration possible, unless one modifies the sources.

    [Jun 13, 2018] mcdiff - Internal diff viewer of GNU Midnight Commander

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.systutorials.com

    mcdiff: Internal diff viewer of GNU Midnight Commander. Index of mcdiff man page
    Read mcdiff man page on Linux: $ man 1 mcdiff NAME mcdiff - Internal diff viewer of GNU Midnight Commander. USAGE mcdiff [-bcCdfhstVx?] file1 file2 DESCRIPTION

    mcdiff is a link to mc , the main GNU Midnight Commander executable. Executing GNU Midnight Commander under this name requests starting the internal diff viewer which compares file1 and file2 specified on the command line.

    OPTIONS
    -b
    Force black and white display.
    -c
    Force color mode on terminals where mcdiff defaults to black and white.
    -C <keyword>=<fgcolor>,<bgcolor>,<attributes>:<keyword>= ...
    Specify a different color set. See the Colors section in mc (1) for more information.
    -d
    Disable mouse support.
    -f
    Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander files.
    -t
    Used only if the code was compiled with S-Lang and terminfo: it makes the Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP variable for the terminal information instead of the information on the system wide terminal database
    -V
    Displays the version of the program.
    -x
    Forces xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals (two screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
    COLORS The default colors may be changed by appending to the MC_COLOR_TABLE environment variable. Foreground and background colors pairs may be specified for example with:
    MC_COLOR_TABLE="$MC_COLOR_TABLE:\
    normal=lightgray,black:\
    selected=black,green"
    
    FILES /usr/share/mc/mc.hlp
    The help file for the program.

    /usr/share/mc/mc.ini

    The default system-wide setup for GNU Midnight Commander, used only if the user's own ~/.config/mc/ini file is missing.

    /usr/share/mc/mc.lib

    Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this file affect all users, whether they have ~/.config/mc/ini or not.

    ~/.config/mc/ini

    User's own setup. If this file is present, the setup is loaded from here instead of the system-wide startup file.

    [Jun 13, 2018] MC (Midnight Commmander) mc/ini settings file location

    Jun 13, 2018 | unix.stackexchange.com

    UVV ,Oct 13, 2014 at 7:51

    It's in the following file: ~/.config/mc/ini .

    obohovyk ,Oct 13, 2014 at 7:53

    Unfortunately not... – obohovyk Oct 13 '14 at 7:53

    UVV ,Oct 13, 2014 at 8:02

    @alexkowalski then it's ~/.config/mc/iniUVV Oct 13 '14 at 8:02

    obohovyk ,Oct 13, 2014 at 8:41

    Yeah, thanks!!! – obohovyk Oct 13 '14 at 8:41

    ,

    If you have not made any changes, the config file does not yet exist.

    The easy way to change from the default skin:

    1. Start Midnight Commander
      sudo mc
      
    2. F9 , O for Options, or cursor to "Options" and press Enter
    3. A for Appearance, or cursor to Appearance and press Enter

      You will see that default is the current skin.

    4. Press Enter to see the other skin choices
    5. Cursor to the skin you want and select it by pressing Enter
    6. Click OK

    After you do this, the ini file will exist and can be edited, but it is easier to change skins using the method I described.

    [Jun 13, 2018] Hide/view of hidden files

    Sep 17, 2011 | superuser.com

    Something I discovered which I REALLY appreciated was the hide/view of hidden files can be toggled by pressing ALT-. (ALT-PERIOD). Be aware that often the RIGHT ALT key is NOT seen as an ALT key by the system, so you usually need to use Left-ALT-. to toggle this. I forgot about the Right-ALT weirdness and thought I'd broken mc one day. {sigh} Such a blonde...

    Just checked (xev!), I guess the ALT-. toggle is mapped to ALT_L-., and the right ALT key gives an ALT_R keycode... which doesn't match the mc mapping, causing it to not work... now I know why! Hooray!

    [Jun 13, 2018] Loss of output problem

    Sep 17, 2011 | superuser.com
    1) If the panels are active and I issue a command that has a lot of output, it appears to be lost forever.

    i.e., if the panels are visible and I cat something (i.e., cat /proc/cpuinfo), that info is gone forever once the panels get redrawn.

    If you use Cygwin's mintty terminal, you can use its Flip Screen context menu command (or Alt+F12 shortcut) to switch between the so-called alternate screen, where fullscreen applications like mc normally run, and the primary screen where output from commands such as cat appears.

    [Jun 13, 2018] I Can't Select Text With My Mouse

    Jun 13, 2018 | www.nawaz.org

    I Can't Select Text With My Mouse

    [May 20, 2018] Midnight Commander (mc): convenient hard links creation from user menu

    Notable quotes:
    "... Future Releases ..."
    May 20, 2018 | bogdan.org.ua

    3rd December 2015

    Midnight Commander is a convenient two-panel file manager with tons of features.

    You can create hard links and symbolic links using C-x l and C-x s keyboard shortcuts. However, these two shortcuts invoke two completely different dialogs.

    While for C-x s you get 2 pre-populated fields (path to the existing file, and path to the link – which is pre-populated with your opposite file panel path plus the name of the file under cursor; simply try it to see what I mean), for C-x l you only get 1 empty field: path of the hard link to create for a file under cursor. Symlink's behaviour would be much more convenient

    Fortunately, a good man called Wiseman1024 created a feature request in the MC's bug tracker 6 years ago. Not only had he done so, but he had also uploaded a sample mc user menu script ( local copy ), which works wonderfully! You can select multiple files, then F2 l (lower-case L), and hard-links to your selected files (or a file under cursor) will be created in the opposite file panel. Great, thank you Wiseman1024 !

    Word of warning: you must know what hard links are and what their limitations are before using this menu script. You also must check and understand the user menu code before adding it to your mc (by F9 C m u , and then pasting the script from the file).

    Word of hope: 4 years ago Wiseman's feature request was assigned to Future Releases version, so a more convenient C-x l will (sooner or later) become the part of mc. Hopefully.

    [May 20, 2018] Midnight Commander: panelize or select all files newer than specified date

    May 20, 2018 | bogdan.org.ua

    3rd February 2017

    If you ever need to select lots (hundreds, thousands) of files by their modification date, and your directory contains many more files (thousands, tens of thousands), then angel_il has the answer for you:
    1. touch -d "Jun 01 00:00 2011″ /tmp/.date1
    2. enter into your BIG dir
    3. press C-x ! (External panelize)
    4. add new command like a "find . -type f \( -newer /tmp/.date1 \) -print"

    I've used a slightly different approach, specifying desired date right in the command line of External Panelize:

    1. enter your directory with many files
    2. press C-x ! (External Panelize)
    3. add a command like find . -type f -newermt "2017-02-01 23:55:00" -print ( man find for more details)

    In both cases, the created panel will only have files matching your search condition.

    [Mar 29, 2017] SDB: Midnight Commander tips

    openSUSE
    Using the mouse

    Although Midnight Commander is a text mode application it can make use of mouse. The openSUSE delivered mc will make use of the mouse when used with a GUI console, without any further configuration needed.

    The text mode terminal that we get when booting in runlevels 2 or 3 is a bit different story. You have to install the package gpm ("general purpose mouse") which is also called mouse server. The gpm is used in Linux to receive movements and clicks from mouse. Start gpm and then start Midnight commander.

    If you come to the text terminal using Ctrl + Alt + F1, then gpm will not work as another driver that belongs to GUI (X Server) claims control over the mouse.

    ... ... ...

    FTP browsing

    This is file browsing on remote FTP server just as it is on your computer.

    1. Press F9 to select drop down menus on the top of the screen.
    2. Press Alt + L if you want to use left side panel, or Alt + R for right panel.
    3. Press Alt + P for input box where you have enter server name. Enter for instance
    ftp.gwdg.de/pub
    

    and press Enter.

    Now mc will try anonymous connection to remote machine. If machine responds, you'll get directory listing of /pub on remote server.

    It is possible to do the same from mc command line by typing:

    cd /#ftp:ftp.gwdg.de/pub 
    

    Archive browsing

    Archive in classic meaning is compressed file. In Linux you can recognize them by suffix like:

    tgz, tar.gz, tbz, tar.bz2

    and many more, but above few are the most used

    1. Highlight the file
    2. Press Enter

    That's it. Midnight Commander will decompress file for you and present it's internal structure like any other directory. If you want to extract one or all files from archive mark what you want toextract and use F5 to copy in another panel. Done.

    RPM browsing

    The package installation files for any SUSE are RPM and mc will let you browse them.

    1. Highlight the file
    2. Press Enter

    You'll see few files:

    /INFO
    CONTENTS.cpio
    HEADER
    *INSTALL
    *UPGRADE
    

    Browse to see details of your RPM.

    The CONTENTS.cpio is actual archive with files, and if you want to see within:

    1. Highlight the file
    2. Press Enter

    (You know the drill)

    The *INSTALL and *UPGRADE will do what the name tells, but if you want only to extract one or more files from CONTENTS.cpio than use F5 to copy them in the directory in the other panel.

    PuTTY and line drawing

    PuTTY is terminal application used to access remote computers running Linux via ssh (SSH tunnels from Microsoft Windows see details). The line drawing in Midnight Commander, YaST and another applications that draw lines using special characters can be displayed wrong as something else. The solution is to change settings:

    If that doesn't help, you may set this too:

    Found on webmilhouse.com.

    User menu (F2 key) add-on

    Diffs in color

    Tip by James Ogley:

    + t r & ! t t
    d       Diff against file of same name in other directory
            if [ "%d" = "%D" ]; then
              echo "The two directores must be different"
              exit 1
            fi
            if [ -f %D/%f ]; then        # if two of them, then
              diff -up %f %D/%f | sed -e 's/\(^-.*\)/\x1b[1;31m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                      -e 's/\(^\+.*\)/\x1b[1;32m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                      -e 's/\(^@.*\)/\x1b[36m\1\x1b[0m/g' | less -R
            else
              echo %f: No copy in %D/%f
            fi
    
    D       Diff current directory against other directory
            if [ "%d" = "%D" ]; then
              echo "The two directores must be different"
              exit 1
            fi
            diff -up %d %D | sed -e 's/\(^-.*\)/\x1b[1;31m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                 -e 's/\(^\+.*\)/\x1b[1;32m\1\x1b[0m/g' \
                                 -e 's/\(^@.*\)/\x1b[36m\1\x1b[0m/g' | less -R
    fi

    [Jul 14, 2016] Maintenance release of MC with LUA support

    Jul 14, 2016 | typo.co.il
    A new release of mc^2 is out. It's mainly a maintenance release,
    so there aren't many exciting new features.
    
        http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/
    
    News:
    
    The C side:
    
      - The branch is rebased against mc 4.8.17.
    
    The Lua side:
    
      - A few minor bug fixes.
    
      - New module: "dynamic skin"
    
        It lets you change the skin automatically depending on
        the directory you're in.
    
        So, for example, when you're examining an old backup disk
        you've mounted, or when you're on a remote machine, or when
        you're browsing a panelized or filtered listing, or when
        you're in a read-only directory, you can get a very
        noticeable visual indication reminding you of this.
    
      - New module: "colon"
    
        It lets you type :commands :like :these on the
        command-line (or in the editor). Like in 'vi'.
        E.g., you can rename files by typing:
    
            :s/\.jpe?g/jpg/i
    
        (This launches Visual Rename, where you can inspect
        the changes before committing them.)
    
      - The snapshots module can now save/restore panelized listings.
    _______________________________________________
    mc-devel mailing list
    https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel

    [Jul 14, 2016] mc-4.8.17 released

    Notable quotes:
    "... Copy & move operations now use an adaptive buffer, just like the corresponding coreutils commands, which will significantly improve the performance (hopefully!) for many of our users. ..."
    www.midnight-commander.org

    This is a maintenance release that includes bugfixes for a bunch of very annoying bugs that surfaced in the previous version (FISH, patchfs, segfault and tcsh detection on FreeBSD) and brings several new features.

    Copy & move operations now use an adaptive buffer, just like the corresponding coreutils commands, which will significantly improve the performance (hopefully!) for many of our users. Move to the new high-level mouse API has not only simplified our code, but also resolved a number of long-standing mouse bugs. Finally, the new panel centered scrolling mode is weird, but fun; try it out!

    For a detailed list of changes since the last version, please refer to the release notes.

    Download page: http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/?C=N;O=D

    Major changes since 4.8.16

    Core

    VFS

    Editor

    Misc

    [Jun 04, 2015] Plans for Midnight Commander development

    Notable quotes:
    "...I want to use the release announcement to call for volunteers to join the team as maintainers to contribute to bug triaging and code review. Hopefully, this helps attract the attention of distro maintainers / packagers and downstream users that do not follow the mailing lists."
    "Midnight Commander is not going away; even if commits completely cease, I'm still up to maintaining the website and all thirds-party services, as we've been doing for the last 5-6 years for as long as I can; if this changes, a proper public announcement will be made as early as possible. "

    Hi there,

    It seems that I'm the only member of the current team left who still wants to go on with the project, so here is my current plan.

    Re mc is over! - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site

    On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 02:47:02PM +0200, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
    Under these circumstances, I can stick my own (very negative) opinion
    of Github issue tracker somewhere deep down, and accept that the tools
    are chosen by those people who do the real work. If they like Github
    issues and they make them productive, so be it.
    i'll use that as a launchpad for some general musings of
    state-of-the-art hosting tools i'm aware of. this is an invitation to
    discussion, and i find it interesting beyond the scope of mc.
    
    
    it's obvious at first sight that the github issue tracker provides much
    less formal structure than trac. and trac ain't that great to start with
    (especially on the workflow side, at least as configured for mc (i
    don't know what would be possible with a current version)).
    
    in github, almost everything is done with labels. it's nice and
    uncomplicated, but simply doesn't scale.
    
    on the migration side, it seems that it's impossible to fake issue
    reporters. incidentally, that's one of the two problems that i fixed
    last year in mc's issue import to trac because i found it so annoying.
    most advanced import tool i found:
    https://github.com/trustmaster/trac2github
    
    i find github's code review system terrible; it doesn't encourage the
    workflow i want (every commit being polished), and it doesn't scale,
    either.
    luckily, there is gerrithub.io to alleviate the problem.
    
    
    there is also an open-source clone of github: gitlab.
    it is really a look-alike, so it has pretty much all downsides of
    github, with the addition that no gerrit integration exists (yet).
    on the upside, the issue import is probably better. tool:
    https://gitlab.com/kevinlee/trac-issues-to-gitlab
    
    
    there is also bitbucket, but the free version is limited to teams of
    five, whatever that may mean in practice. anyone here has experience
    with it?
    yet another fully integrated solution (for own hosting) would be
    phabricator. no personal experience with it, either.
    
    _______________________________________________

    Re: "mc is over!?" - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site

    27.05.2015 13:37, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: 

    Hi all,

    The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what happens within your team. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit access), to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom.

    Yes, I confirm that our team as fact has ended to develop mc. Ilia has issues with access to internet from his work, at home he has much stronger priorities with family, the same for Andrew. As for me, I have heavy loading on work, after work I am very busy on building my house. So there is no time for development mc.

    And of course, we are opened for any of our wishes to develop mc. Just let me know if someone wants to participate in development and I'll give write access to repo/wiki/transifex and I'll do some knowledge transfer about usual workflows (such as: preparing for release, code styling, where our ContinuousIntegration is placed and so on).

    I hope, mc will rise again with new blood.

    And I agree with Andrew: "It weren't worst 5 years in my life" Yeah, it was five happy years for me :)

    WBR, Slavaz -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlVlotoACgkQb3oGR6aVLpqysACfROPBo1/KrzNu73zwm8kpLTEI QbsAn2Gwet6bDc0FZc4nx4Gphsl4LSTE =QFDk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

    [Oct 29, 2013] Some 64 bit Farmanager plugin links by Justin Dearing

    Mar 27. 2012 | Just A Programmer

    I've previously written about my love of FAR, the File and ARchive manager. One of its greatest strengths is all the plugins written for it. However, some of the most popular plugins are no longer maintained (because they just work), and were not ported to 64 bit. Luckily, this is becoming less and less of an issue.

    I have therefore compiled this short list of sites with 64-bit FarManager plugins. BTW these days U run nightly builds of Far3. Some of these plugins might not work in Far2.

    UPDATES 2012-09-06:

    [Oct 29, 2013] My new favorite tool, the Far File manager by Justin Dearing

    Jun 21, 2010 | Just A Programmer

    Installing Far and plugins.

    Far is available on http://farmanager.com. There is a 1.7 and 2.0 version. The 2.0 version supports unicode asnd the 1.7 version us the legacy ascii version. You can get 64 bit binaries for both versions. You can install far via an MSI, or a 7-zip archive.

    After you install Far, you will want to install several plugins. I will highlight my favorite ones here. ote that while binaries compiled against the far 1.7 SDK will work with Far 2.0, 32 bit plugins will not work with 64 bit far. For this reason you probably want to install the 32 bit version of Far, unless you are like me and like pain.

    Except where mentioned, these plugins can either be found at the plugring site, or for 64 bit binaries, the evil programmers google code project. I will go through some of the plugins I like below.

    7-Zip

    As far as I know, there is no 64 bit version of this available yet. However, I probably just haven't found it yet. If you install far without this plugin, you can browse the contents of most archives in Far. However, you will not be able to copy files out of them. I've yet to try getting the built-in archive support full working. However, with all the archives supported by 7-zip, I'm in no hurry to.

    Event Viewer

    This works like a text mode only version of eventvwr.exe. I've yet to find a truly compelling case to use it over the standar gui version. However, its nice to have an alternative tool for any job.

    Service Manager

    This is really convenient. It lists drivers and services temperately. It also allows you to edit things you can't in the mmc snap-in, such as the path to the binary the service executes. Finally, it lets you create a new service. You rarely need to do this, but when you do its hard to find a good tool for the job.

    User Manager

    This one is really useful, especially on XP Home edition. Functionality is similar to the "Local Users and Groups" section of the Computer Management MMC snap-in on XP Pro. The thing I really love about it is you can set the "User must change password at next logon" flag on a user in XP Home Edition. I spent the good part of a train ride from Penn Station to Islip on Friday failing to achieve this in other ways. I'm not saying its the only way this task can be done. I'm just saying that this plugin will let me accomplish this task easily.

    User Must Change Password At Next Logon

    WinSCP

    The arbitrariness of alphabetical order has put what is perhaps the most useful plugin last. There is a GUI scp/sftp client for windows called WinSCP. The author also made a Far plug-in based on the same code.

    This plug-in, along with the 7-zip one, also take advantage of one of the most powerful intrinsic features of Far. With Far, you can copy any file from one panel to another, regardless of whether the panels contain a local folder, a unc path, the inside of an archive, or a sftp folder. Because of this, Far is a great tool for moving files to and from remote servers.

    Conclusion

    Far is a great file manager, and I will spend more time getting to know it. I think all programmers and sys-admins that work with Windows should get familiar with it as well.

    [Apr 11, 2013] MC major changes and fixes since 4.8.7

    What is funny is that the web page for Midnight Commander does not have a link to a stable release. I am assuming that all releases are now unstable ;-). In reality the last (more or less) stable version 4.8.1.7
    Core:

    [Nov 06, 2012] Windows XP+/32 bit native port of GNU Midnight Commander, based on the current 4.8.4 development stream.

    Sourceforge.net

    Windows XP+/32 bit native port of GNU Midnight Commander, based on the current 4.8.4 development stream.

    Midnight Commander (also known as mc) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager and a clone of Norton Commander.

    Features include the ability work with common archive formats as if they were simply another directory, and to function as an FTP client. Midnight Commander also includes an builtin editor/viewer, features include syntax highlighting for many languages, macros, code snippets, simple integration with external tools, automatic indentation, mouse support, clipboard and the ability to work in both ASCII and hex modes.

    Midnight Commander can also rename groups of files, move files to a different directory at the same time as it renames them. It lets the user specify the original and resulting file names using wildcard characters.

    [Nov 05, 2012] NEWS-4.8.2 – Midnight Commander

    Added new flag -X (--no-x11) to allow not to use X11 to get the state of modifiers Alt, Ctrl, Shift (#86)

    [Nov 05, 2012] Mcedit allows to edit many files in one mcedit window 4.8.4 – Midnight Commander

    [Nov 04, 2012] Multiple viewers and editors¶

    Multi-screen feature: support of many opened editors and viewers (#1490)
    You can concurrently run multiple viewers and editors (screens). Use following default hotkeys:
    shortcut description
    Meta + ` Show list of screens: viewers, editors and file panel
    Meta + { Switch to previous screen
    Meta + } Switch to next screen

    Diff viewer 4.7.2

    A built-in tool to visual compare and merge two files (#120, #2159)

    [Oct 28, 2012] Re Creating Symlinks with defaul relative path


    Am Freitag, den 28.09.2012, 15:37 +0200 schrieb Carsten Richter:
    > Hi there,
    > 
    > When I am creating Symlinks in MC (using Ctrl-x s) i am spending quite
    > some time for replacing the absolute by the relative one and I was
    > wondering if it is possible to have the default path in the address line
    > to be the relative one.
    > 
    > Is there such an option or can it be implemented?
    
    I think Ctrl-x v does the job
    
    > 
    > Cheers,
    > 
    > Carsten
    

    Re mc Digest, Vol 101, Issue 10

    On Fri, 28 Sep 2012, chris glur wrote:

    > }}Man, this rocks! Excellent job. Many problems and solutions discussed plus a
    > lot of tips. And I like the presentation. I am proud to see LaTeX still leads
    > to beautiful products. {{

    Yes, it does. I am a mathematician, had to learn to use LaTex years ago, and still use it routinely.

    > I vote for apartheid between the art-students and the computer-scientists.
    > Surely nc/mc's intention was NOT to be arty.
    > Which differs from "to be NOT arty". English is real crap. It's too arty.
    > mc is for utility. We don't want to PAY for art.
    > How much energy is needed to eg. extract text from your *.pdf/latex and
    > insert it in email or USEnet or fax?

    That part ought to be easy. Open a PDF file, and you ought to be able to do a mouse-copy of any part of the text and copy it into a text-based e-mail. Details of the procedure:

    Open your mail program (I use apine these days) in an xterm. Fire up something like xpdf (file.pdf) in another xterm. Find the text you want to copy. Then mouse over it while holding down the left mouse button. If you start at the top left corner of whatever you want to copy and end at the bottom right corner, you will end up with a highlighted rectangular block. Then go over to the other xterm, where you are working on a mail to send to someone, and click the middle mouse button. The text within the highlighted block will then appear in your mail, starting at whatever point the cursor was in the mail program when you hit the middle button.

    What is actually being used here, by the way, is basic functionality which is built into X. It is perhaps unfortunate that lots of people do not know this can be done with any X-conformant program. I myself did not know, for example, that it can be done for several years after I started to use Linux and X. The propagation of knowledge about this feature seems to proceed by the transmission of old folklore from those who know to those who apparently do not yet know, on an ad-hoc basis as is happening right now.

    A similar transmission of old folklore was what informed me about this years ago. There was one of those sometimes-recurring discussions out there somewhere, started by someone moaning that X on Linux "lacks" the ability to do cut and paste. Some old timer pointed out that cut and paste is a fundamental feature of X. It just isn't done using Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V as it is in some other operating system, but instead it is done by using the mouse. Several people did not want to believe the old timer and said so in their responses. Me, I went and tried it, and it worked perfectly.

    As far as the specific case of copying from a PDF into an e-mail is concerned, my most recent use of that was yesterday evening. The piece I copied was a rectangle containing a block of text from the right hand column of a two-column document, and I put it right into the e-mail. Thus, I assume that the same procedure would work equally well for you.

    You can also use the mouse to copy, of course, from one linux terminal to another. Unfortunately, you can not copy out of X to a linux terminal by mouse-highlighting and then switching to the linux terminal. Neither can you copy from a linux terminal into an X session. Also if you have opened a file in a linux terminal with the mc viewer or editor you can mousecopy into it or from it to another linux terminal. But when mc is running in the terminal you have to push a Shift key while doing something with the mouse.

    A recent feature (which is irritating because it is a new behavior) is that you still need to press the Shift key even if mc is put into the background with Ctrl-O. Until the most recent version of mc this used not to be the case. That is, if you put mc in the background and then started an app (an editor, for example) and you wanted to copy into it from another linux terminal, then one used not to need to remember that mc is running in the background. But now you have to remember that and use the shift key. I am sorry for this change and consider it more or less of a recently introduced bug. But I gu at I will simply have to adjust.

    Hope that the above helps. Happy mouse-copying.

    Theodore Kilgore

    deselect text after ctrl+ins

    Hello.

    I am used to work with Debian Squeeze (mc 4.7.0.9) and now decided to try Ubuntu 12.04 (mc 4.8.1).

    On debian ctrl+ins in mcedit deselects region to be copied (even when editor_persistent_selections=1), but not on Ubuntu. Is there an option in mc 4.8 to enable old behavior?

    By the way, there are numerous issues to make mc work correctly under screen/tmux, and one of them is shift+fn.

    I have managed to make them work by including following lines into mc.lib:

    [terminal:screen]

    copy=xterm

    Thanks in advance, Sergey Naumov.

    [Oct 19, 2012] MC 4.8.1 -- a landmark version of Midnight Commander

    Internal editor and internal viewer are significantly improved in mc 4.8.1. mc 4.8.1 (and possibly some earlier versions after 4.6.2, I did not check) implement command window by swapping to shell making the implementation more correctly and this make mc more acceptable for Unix sysadmins in comparison with old implementation. They did not correctly implemented the context switch -- if you change directory in full command windows and press Ctrl-O to restore panel you will still see the old active panel. This is a bug that needs to be fixed (active windows should always display $PWD directory form the shell window).
    Warning:
    portability of mc was and still is poor due to glib dependencies so if your distribution uses mc-4.6.2.pre1-121.31.x86_64.rpm as RHEL 6 and Suse 11 do, you are stuck. Ubuntu and Debian users are the only which are probably OK. Among RPM-based distributions OpenSuse 12.2 has 4.8.1.3. Fedora now uses Systemd and is problematic in so many ways that it does not really matter what version of mc it is using. Cygwin has 4.8.1.6.

    Congratulations to the development team !

    Name Nickname Country Additional info
    Andrew Borodin andrew_b Russia aborodin at vmail dot ru
    Stan. S. Krupoderov iNode Russia pashelper at gmail dot com
    Ilia Maslakov angel_il Russia (il.smind at gmail dot com)
    Sergei Trofimovich slyfox,sjřtroll,skogtroll Belarus
    Slava Zanko slavaz, slavazanko Belarus (jabber+gmail: slavazanko at gmail dot com)
    Yury V. Zaytsev ZYV Germany

    [Sep 28, 2012] Midnight Commander Guide

    Everything is nice but implementation of third (command line) window remains completely screwed in Midnight Commander. This is the key OFM feature that Miguel de Icara never understood and we are still paying for that.
    [email protected]

    I've written a guide to Midnight Commander in presentation format: http://nawaz.org/media/docs/mc/mc.pdf

    For those who really don't want to look at the PDF and are just curious about the content, I put the HTML version here: http://www.nawaz.org/media/docs/mc/mc.html

    It'll have a bunch of LaTeX formatting interspersed with the text, but much of it should be readable.

    -- Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. - Mark Twain

    Guus Bonnema:

    Man, this rocks! Excellent job. Many problems and solutions discussed plus a lot of tips. And I like the presentation. I am proud to see LaTeX still leads to beautiful products.

    Natalie

    ...Maybe you could add that the copy and move dialogs (F5 and F6) have a very useful history. With Alt-H you get a list of dirs that you have used earlier to copy or move to. Clicking with the mouse on the [^] at the end of the input line has the same effect.

    xxx

    Carsten Richter wrote:

    > Nice work, there are some key bindings which don't work here, maybe due to my
    > terminal emulator (such as Alt-'). But for sure Ctrl-I doesn't redraw
    > the display wenn it's messed up. I need to do the Ctrl-o twice.

    It's Alt-` (backtick) and Ctrl-l (lowercase L). That should work.

    xxx

    Carsten Richter <[email protected]> writes:

    there are some key bindings which don't work here, maybe due to my terminal emulator (such as Alt-'). But for sure Ctrl-I doesn't redraw

    As someone pointed out, it's a backtick and Ctrl-L. I'll see if I can conveniently change the font where those key bindings are listed...

    the display wenn it's messed up. I need to do the Ctrl-O twice.

    Ctrl-L is somewhat common and good to remember. I think a bunch of other Linux programs use it.

    I also would like to know how to change the default keybindings. I was able to change the autocompletion keybinding in an old mc using the "learn keys" option. But with never ones it's not working apparently.

    I'm pretty sure there's a way - you'll find it in the release notes for some release in the last 2-3 years. I think I once found some places that describe how to change them, but it seemed quite painful. I only really wanted it to be able to sort files rather than having to go to the menu - but then they allowed sorting by clicking the headers, and that sufficed.

    -- Heard the one about the dyslexic devil worshiper? He sold his soul to Santa.

    Hallo, mailinglists:

    there are some key bindings which don't work here, maybe due to my terminal emulator (such as Alt-?). But for sure Ctrl-I doesn't redraw

    As someone pointed out, it's a backtick and Ctrl-l. I'll see if I can conveniently change the font where those key bindings are listed...

    Helmut:

    Just additional: sometimes (especially with some remote terminals) the function keys don't work. But (p.e.) esc 3 instead of f3 seems still to work.

    [Sep 21, 2010] Pseudo-graphic border in MC problem

    Should be LANG=C; mc That tip helps if you are using teraterm as emulator
    gnome.apps.mc.general

    > Please, a small question - I made the new installation (FC3, KDE)
    > and run MC (the great SW!!). Everything works, except that borders on
    > the panels are drawn by 'a umlaut' instead of pseudo-graphic (lines)

    This is a locale and termcap issue which I do not fully understand.
    Fortunately I do know a workaround. :) Use this:
    LANG=C; mc
    to start mc.

    [Jul 26, 2010] Getting Midnight Commander line drawing to work with PuTTY andremiller.net

    When using Midnight Commander with the default settings of PuTTY connected to my Ubuntu Linux machine the line drawing characters are all messed up.

    After some experimentation it turns out that to fix it all you have to do is change your character set in PuTTY to UTF-8 and the problem is fixed. To do this open up the PuTTY settings and go to Window->Translation->Received data assumed to be in which character set: and change it to UTF-8.

    After making this change you might have to force a redraw of the mc screen to show the new line drawing characters:

    Also not that some fonts might not have the line drawing characters available. The fonts I know work is Courier New and Lucida Console. To change your font go to Window->Appearance, Font settings and click the Change button.

    For reference, I was using using Midnight Commander 4.6.1 running on Ubuntu 7.10 and using PuTTY 0.59

    [May 1, 2010] Midnight Commander 4.7.2

    Core

    Editor

    Diff viewer

    [Mar 1, 2010] Midnight Commander 4.7.1

    Major changes since 4.7.0.1

    Core

    VFS

    Editor

    Viewer

    [Dec 31, 2009 Midnight Commander

    We've found some critical bugs (editor, x86_64, ...) in the previous 4.7.0 release, so we rushed out a minor bugfix 4.7.0.1 release now. Please upgrade if you happen to experience these.

    Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2010! On behalf of the Midnight Commander development team

    Slava Zanko

    [Oct 2, 2009] Midnight Commander 4.7.0-pre3

    Looks like the new team revitalized development of the old, stale codebase...

    Major changes since 4.7.0-pre2

    Core

    VFS

    Editor

    Viewer

    Misc

    Fixes

    [Aug 28, 2009] Midnight Commander release 4.7.0-pre2! by Slava Zanko

    Changelog

    Major changes since 4.7.0-pre1

    Core

    VFS

    Editor

    Viewer

    Misc

    The new release can be downloaded at the following URL: http://www.midnight-commander.org/downloads

    [Aug 4, 2009] Midnight Commander release 4.7.0-pre1! by Slava Zanko

    Download from http://www.midnight-commander.org/. New development team:

    This release incorporates many code refactoring changes, user interface improvements, numerous bugfixes and new features.

    Changelog

    Major changes since 4.6.2:

    Changes in the core

    * Native UTF-8 support;
    * Support for filename charset selection in panels;
    * Reworked 'Find File' dialog;
    * New unified search/replace engine with multiple search types: plain, wildcard, regexp and hex;
    * Extended 'Learn Keys' capability;
    * Locale-based codepage autodetection;
    * Initial support for Doxygen generated docs;
    * Build system updates (autoconf);
    * Translation updates;
    * Multiple x86_64 fixes.

    Editor

    * Various editor enhancements (mark/move/copy/paste vertical blocks);
    * Multiple syntax file updates;
    * Source code navigation through ctags/etags TAGS files;
    * New option: 'Persistent selection';
    * Delete/Backspace deletes selected block if 'Persistent selection' is off;
    * Ability to shift blocks to the right with Tab key and to the left with Complete key if 'Persistent selection' is off;
    * Show line numbers (optional);
    * Highlighting of tabs and trailing spaces (optional);
    * Added some hotkeys.

    Miscellaneous

    * Show free space on current file system;
    * Show size of selected files in mini-status bar.

    Bugfixes

    * Editor undo fixes;
    * Upstreamed many fixes from the distributions;
    * Fixed segfaults on fish permission checks;
    * Fixed fish symlinks handling and fancy names escaping;
    * Various mc.ext fixes;
    * Command line completion fixes (mainly escaping);
    * Small fixes in history handling (locale independent .mc/history entries);
    * Code cleanups, various memleaks fixed (many thanks to valgrind).

    [Feb 3, 2009] Downloads вЂ" Midnight Commander

    Bug-fix release 4.6.2 is now available.
    mc-4.6.2.tar.gz Midnight Commander v4.6.2 md5sum: ec92966f4d0c8b50c344fe901859ae2a

    [Feb 2, 2009] Midnight Commander wakes from deep sleep - News - The H Open Source News and Features

    The Midnight Commander file manager developers have restarted work on the, once quite popular, file manager for the Linux/Unix console. Midnight Commander was inspired by the famous Norton Commander for DOS. In recent years, there had been no development at all, but now a "Bugfix Release" 4.6.2 has been made available. The new release, as the tag suggests, contains no new features.

    [Sep 15, 2007] pre-release of GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.2 by Pavel Tsekov

    I've just uploaded the tarball to ftp.gnu.org. 
    
       ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mc/mc-4.6.2-pre1.tar.gz
       ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mc/mc-4.6.2-pre1.tar.gz.sig
    ...This is release is mostly a bugfix release and some new features. 
    Perhaps I could compile a list of changes if I get some free time...
    

    [Sep 9, 2007] New MC maintainer

    Pavel Tsekov becomes MC maintainer. He is probably the most active member of the current development team.
    Hello,
    
    I am writing this message to inform you that Pavel Roskin,
    the long time maintainer and developer of GNU Midnight Commander,
    decided to step down as a maintainer. I hope that you'll join me
    to wish Pavel luck in whatever he pursues next.
    
    The FSF following a recommendation from Pavel Roskin appointed me
    as the new project maintainer. I hope that I'll be able to justify
    their trust and live up to the expectations of MC's users.
    
    Pavel Tsekov

    [Aug 23, 2007] polishlinux.org " Midnight Commander in Action

    A good introductory article

    ...Because MC is distributed with every known GNU/Linux system and as a port for BSD systems' family, its installation is trivial and rely on making use of a favorite package manager. It suffices to issue the following command in Debian/Ubuntu systems:

    apt-get install mc

    In Fedora/CentOS/Scientific Linux/Red Hat systems:

    yum install mc

    ... There is a possibility to run MC editor alone. You have to issue a mcedit command adding a file name with its path, e.g. mcedit /etc/fstab.

    ... ... ...

    Apart from almost identical functionality, TC and MC enjoy different keyboard shortcuts. The table below shows comparison of the two groups.

    Functions Midnight Commander Total Commander
    Open directory menu CTRL + \ CTRL + D
    Compare directories CTRL-X + D SHIFT + F2
    Rescan (refresh panel contents) CTRL + R F2
    Hide panels CTRL + O SHIFT + ESC
    Reverse selection M + * NUM *
    Find file ALT + ? ALT + F7
    Quick view CTRL-X + Q CTRL+Q
    Change file and directory rights - chmod Ctrl-X + C n. a.
    Change file and directory owner - chown Ctrl-X + O n. a.
    Make symlink Ctrl-X + S SHIFT+CTRL+F5

    CTRL-X + D sequence must be issued by pressing together CTRL and X, and then D button - like in Emacs editor. A shortcut which should be mentioned here is ESC+0,1,2…9 which replaces all function keys F1 to F10. It is indispensable in terminals which do not support F1-F10 buttons.

    ... You can look into ISO images without prior mountings. All mentioned files are treated as directories. To view ISO contents it is enough to select it with a mouse or cursor keys and press Enter. MC offers additionally a quick-view option where contents of a selected file will be displayed in adjoining panel. The option is available through left/right menu options and bound to CTRL-X + Q shortcut.

    ... ... ...

    ...If you want to list all packages installed in your system enter "cd #rpms" in command line. After a while the list, grouped according to categories, will be shown in one of the MC's panel. Similar ways can be applied to systems using DEB packages. It suffices to write in "cd #apt" or "cd #dpkg" to be able to look through all installed programs.

    F10 key in GNOME-terminal

    There is a conflict between GNOME-terminal and MC shortcuts. It concerns mainly F10 which closes MC, but is used to open upper menu in GNOME-terminal. In order to get rid of the nuisance the following command should be run:

    gconf -set /apps/gnome-terminal/global/use_menu_accelerators \
     -type boot false

    To have original settings one ought to change the false to a true option...

    [Nov 25, 2006] Orthodox file managers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    The term eventually got into Wikipedia :-)

    Orthodox File Managers (OFM), also known as Commander-like file managers, are the family of file managers based on the old Norton Commander interface.

    The following features more or less define the class of orthodox file managers:

    Other common features include:

    All orthodox file managers have similar user interfaces. Interface varies among operating systems and graphic, text background. The orthodox file manager has two windows called panels where one is active and the other inactive. The idea is to manipulate files from active to inactive panel or within active panel. This gives user the ability to use only the keyboard, which makes the process much faster. Each panel shows information about the path (disk, folder, remote address...) and files with usually customizable columns that show relevant file information. Panels can be switched using tab key. Main sections of user interface are:

    1. path: shows the source/destination location of the directory in use
    2. information about directory size, disk usage and disk name
    3. panel with information about file name, extension, date and time of creation, last modification, permissions (attributes) and other
    4. info panel with number of files in directory, sum of size of selected files..
    5. tabbed interface (usually GUI file managers)
    6. function keys: F1–F10 have all the same functions under all OFM's: Example F5 always copies file(s) from active to inactive panel, while F6 moves the file.

    Most functions are always available through shortcut keys. The introduction of tabbed panels to some managers made it possible to manipulate more than one action at the time. A frequently used feature is synchronization where multiple destinations can be updated from the same source. The ability to support many different archives, file systems and remote addresses made these file managers popular among administrators. The consistent interfaces made it possible to switch to any platform and be able to do the same work without much effort.

    mc-light 4.1.40.p9_6* A lightweight Midnight Commander clone

    Reaction to MC 6.x overcomplexity.

    Maintained by: [email protected] search for ports maintained by this maintainer
    port added: 02 Sep 2004 12:26:58
    Also listed in: misc

    [Nov 2, 2003] Midnight Commander 4.1.X-MP by Oleg "Olegarch" Konovalov

    Midnight Commander 4.1.X-MP

    The goal of this project is creating a stable, well-working, usefull console-only version of well-known Midnight Commander, without bugs and garbage, like tk, xv and gnome. I'm bored waiting for bugfixes, and A'rpi's ESP team stops their work in this direction too, so I did it. I'm fixing all (found) bugs, reported by my friends, and made some really pleasent new features, like real-time clock, or filegroups colorizing.

    Why is it an alternate version of mc, instead applying patches to main mc project?

    The original mc is now about v4.6.x, with more and more bugs, "monster from the console" grows more and more, and now it has some very bad structural changes, tons of garbage code, and finally - there is no possibilities to compile it without some X parts, like Glib.

    When I use linux - i want to use fast and powerfull console file manager, and I like mc 4.1.x series much better: it has well-designed structures, easy to add new features.

    Btw. I back-ported some of new usefull things appeared in 4.5.x and 4.6.x, make some fixes, catch some memory leaks, and so on... - README gave you more information about it.

    Index of -pub-Linux-utils-file-managers-mc-snapshots

    version 4.5.55 was buggy (Andrew Samoilov patches helped a bit, but still...). This one is seems to be much better. Macros from the command line does not work properly ( try "cd %D" it should change to the directory of the unactive panel, but that it will not; Ctrl-x-p works).

    Problems using function keys (F1 - F12)

    Biju Chacko botsie at xfce.org
    Wed Nov 24 05:46:18 UTC 2004


    Benedikt Meurer wrote:
    > Piotr Chmura wrote:
    > 
    >> Dnia Tue, 23 Nov 2004 12:49:53 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone  
    >> <bjt23 at cornell.edu> napisał:
    >>
    >>> On 11/23/04 20:13, Rakotomandimby (R12y) Mihamina wrote:
    >>>
    >>>> Hello,
    >>>> I mostly use mc as file manager for my remote server.
    >>>> mc works with the function keys.
    >>>> Unfortunately, for example i I want to quit mc, I have to press F10:
    >>>> that makes tha terminal to pull down its menu.
    >>>> How do you advice me to manage it ?
    >>>> I want to keep the keys for mc.
    >>>> I'm running the 4.2 version of XFCE (debian testing package from
    >>>> os-cillation).>>>
    >>>
    >>>
    >>> that would depend on what terminal you're running.  note that 'xfterm4'
    >>> just runs xterm by default, or whatever your TERMCMD environment 
    >>> variable
    >>> specifies.  xfce doesn't come with its own terminal (yet).
    >>>
    >>> so essentially, the answer you're looking for is: either reconfigure
    >>> your terminal to not use that key for menus, or, if that isn't possible,
    >>> use a different terminal that doesn't use that key.
    >>>
    >>>     -brian
    >>
    >>
    >>
    >> In mc combination of pressing 'Esc' and then a number should work also...
    >>
    >> for example:
    >> F4 <=> 'Esc' '4'
    >> F10 <=> 'Esc' '0'
    > 
    > 
    > If you use Terminal (the debian package is named xterminal), you can 
    > disable F10 in Preferences -> Shortcuts.
    
    If you use gnome-terminal (like I do) you can just switch off the menu. 
    Then F10 works fine for mc and you can still access the menu by 
    right-clicking on the term.
    
    -- b
    The svlug 2002-January Archive by Thread

    Andrew V. Samoilov's patch collection for Midnight Commander (Russian) -- for v. 4.5.55 by Pavel Roskin

    mc-cdrtools by Sami Lempinen

    This utility contains four user menu entries for manipulating CD-Rs:

    They are quite handy for quickly moving stuff over to a CD-R.

    Note that mkisofs and cdrecord are required. You may want to edit the entries to suit your taste for the command line options for mkisofs, write speed and SCSI unit for cdrecord etc.

    MCUtils for the GNU Midnight Commander

    [Sep 23, 2001] nc.el

    emulates famous Ms-Dos file browser in Emacs. Copyright (C) 1996 Stefan Hegny, Ilya Zakharevich Author: Stefan Hegny ([email protected]) with improvements by Ilya Zakharevich ([email protected]) Available: ftp://ftp.math.ohio-state.edu/pub/users/ilya/emacs Suggested by Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen

    [Aug 24, 2001] GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55

    GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55 has been released.
    
    Development of the GNOME frontend will continue on the stable branch only:
    "Branch_MC_4_5_x".  All GNOME support will be removed from the head branch
    in the next few days.
    
    NEWS:
    
    - Mostly bugfixes and portability fixes.  Making things work as they
      were meant to work.
    
    - Text edition improvements.
            - Ctrl-O supported in the viewer and editor.
            - Better terminal support.  Should not need "Learn Keys" on rxvt
              and xterm in most cases.
    
    - GNOME edition improvements.
            - Find dialog rewritten.
            - Editor and viewer ask whether to save modified file when
              closed from window manager.
    
    - Editor.
            - New syntax rules - S-Lang, PO files, Octave.
            - Alt-B goes to matching bracket.
    
    - Portability improvements.
            - Should compile out-of-box on Cygwin and QNX Neutrino.
            - Can be compiled by BSD make.
            - Subshell and VFS code are safer and more portable.
    
    - Experimental features (disabled by default).
            - Charset conversion support.
            - Large (64-bit) file support on 32-bit systems.
    
    
    Homepage:
    
    http://www.gnome.org/projects/mc/
    
    The source tarball is currently available here:
    
    http://www.gnome.org/projects/mc/mc-4.5.55.tar.gz
    
    Note that the final location will be
    
    ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/mc/
    
    Any help with moving the tarball to the final location (or giving me
    access to do so) will be appreciated.
    
    -- 
    Regards,
    Pavel Roskin
    
    

    [May 25, 2001] Inside Solaris - Midnight Commander

    A long time ago, on another computing platform, Peter Norton Computing released Norton Commander. This became my favorite file management program. As I wandered further and further into the UNIX realm, I found it hard to believe that a program like this wasn't available on UNIX. Finally, I came across Midnight Commander, as shown in Figure A. It offers more features than Norton Commander and, unlike Norton Commander, it runs on a variety of different computing platforms.

    [May 24, 2001] Mc down the drain

    Web site was not updated since September 2000. Project seems to be dead.

    From: "Marc" <[email protected]>
    Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 15:40:54 +0200

    Where is Midnight commander?
    
    I managed to download some old tar files but now there is no documentation. The link called "documentation" on the MC
    site brings you to a website where documentation of some software group is managed.
    
    Why isn't MC kept simple like it used to be? Wasn't that one of the the succesfactors of this piece of software?
    
    Why is there not a simple procedure on the MC site that explains where to get it and how to install it even though the
    redirected links are there?
    
    Last question. What simple filemanager for the HP UNIX 10.20 could I use, where to download and how to install?
    
    Mac
    
    Re: Mc down the drain

    From: Michael Schmidt <[email protected]>
    Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 08:13:41 +0200

    On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 03:40:54PM +0200, Marc wrote:
    > 
    > Where is Midnight commander?
    > 
    [...]
    > Why isn't MC kept simple like it used to be? Wasn't that one 
    > of the the succesfactors of this piece of software?
    
    My personal point of view is that a few people have put too much 
    graphics tittle-tattle and too much feature tittle-tattle into mc, 
    would have been much better to stabilize mc's runtime solidity. 
    
    > Why is there not a simple procedure on the MC site that explains 
    > where to get it and how to install it even though the redirected 
    > links are there?
    
    Don't know, perhaps certain persons do not like that for any reasons.
    Sorry, but one may get this impression.
    
    > Last question. What simple filemanager for the HP UNIX 10.20 
    > could I use, where to download and how to install?
    
    The mc version I have compiled under HPUX-10.20 and which runs here 
    until today without known problems is mc-4.5.33.
    Feel free to get the sources tarball from our site at: 
    ftp://ftp.fh-koblenz.de/pub/gnu/mc/
    
    Have a nice day
    Michael

    [Jan 29, 2001] Linux Orbit - Features The LO Newbie Tests Mouseless (Midnight) Commander

    [Dec 15, 2000] Advanced Midnight Commander

    Suggested by Michael Smirnov <[email protected]>.

    This is a bugfixed and enhanced version of the Midnight Commander 4.1.35. FTP is nearly rewritten, many small bugs are fixed, and some interesting features added, for example:
    - Better syntax highlighting in editor
    - Allow file/dirsize to be > 2GB
    - FTP supports FXP (direct server-to-server connection)
    - FTP transfers without copying to TEMP
    - Fixed ZIPfs, added ESP support.

    [Aug 21, 2000] Midnight thoughts about Midnight Commander

    From: [email protected] (Denis Vlasenko)
    Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 02:04:43 +0300 (UKD)

    Hi MC developers,
    
    I am long standing user of Norton Commander and its clones. I have started using Linux recently and must admit that MC
    helps me a lot to feel comfortable in this new and scary environment ;-).
    
    I think maybe you're interested in newbie's impressions. I know that you've done a great program and don't expect you
    to rush and implement all my wildest dreams. It will be interesting to hear your comments/explanations.
    
    *** ESC key ***
    >From FAQ:
    >2.4 Why does the ESC key behave funny?
    >   Midnight Commander uses the ESC key as a prefix for simulating the
    >   Meta and Alt keys (for terminals which don't have Meta or Alt, see the
    >   three previous questions). For example, pressing ESC-a is the same as
    >   pressing Meta-a. In addition most terminals use ESC for internal
    >   representation of arrow keys, function keys and other enhanced keys.
    >   If you want to use ESC to cancel things you have to press it twice
    >   i.e. ESC-ESC. If you find this cumbersome you can generally use F10 to
    >   cancel. Alternatively turn on the old_esc_mode setting in the
    >   ~/.mc.ini file. The old_esc_mode setting makes ESC work as a prefix
    >   only if another key is pressed within 0.5 seconds. After 0.5 seconds
    >   the ESC key cancels. There is no way to make ESC cancel immediately.
    
    I found this ESC-ESC the most annoying thing in MC.
    
    I understand that on some terminals this is really necessary.
    But lots of people use Linux mostly at 386 PC consoles. I know
    there's a way to remap keys on Linux (loadkeys etc).
    Maybe Commander could remap ESC key to ESC-ESC while user
    is in Commander shell and restore normal mapping
    whenever user starts new program or terminates MC.
    However, I see that it can be problematic:
    1. What if MC gets SIGKILLed?
    2. If keymapping affect ALL consoles, this wouldn't work
       without kernel modifications.
    
    
    *** Panels on/off - Ctrl-O ***
    Norton Commander and its DOS/Win clones usually have only one
    command line. In MC we have two: one when panels are on and
    one when they are off. It's confusing. I'm starting to hate
    "Shell is already running a command" error box.
    What is the reason it is done this way?
    
    Also NC and clones usually allow to show/hide left and
    right panel with Ctrl-F1,F2. It's nice to see output of previous
    command(s) and file panel at the same time. Can it be done in MC?
    
    
    *** Renaming/copy ***
    Imagine you wanted to create directory named "MEMBENCH" but
    typed it as "MEMBRNCH".
    In NC you can hide other panel, press F6 and you'll see:
      Rename or move "MEMBRNCH" to:
      [MEMBRNCH                                      ]
    You can fix your typo easily.
    In MC after F6 you'll see:
      Move directory "MEMBRNCH" with source mask:
      [*                                             ]
      to:
      [/usr/local/and_whatever_other_panel_is_in     ]
    Not that easy, eh?
    
    
    *** Character 0x9B ***
    I need to work with Cyrillic. Now my box loads necessary fonts
    and keyboard mappings at startup. Everything is OK except for
    one Cyrillic letter with code 0x9B. Yes, it's CSI.
    
    Since Linux console provides VT100 emulation, it
    tries to emulate some VT100 quirks too, including
    CSI escape sequence:
      0x9B == ESC [
    This is not 8-bit clean. I patched console.c in kernel
    source tree and now  printf("-> \x9B <-")  does display character
    with code 0x9B. I think it won't break anything, because
    any decent program will print ESC [ sequence instead of
    0x9B. What do you think?
    
    However, MC does not display that character, althought
    other Cyrillic chars are displayed.
    How can I tell MC that it is now safe to print 0x9B?
    In /etc/termcap? In terminfo database? Or I should patch
    ncurses/SLang?
    
    Also my box does nothing under MC when I press key bound to
    emit 0x9B. Maybe it thinks it's a Meta-Escape?
    I haven't a faintest idea how to make it work.
    
    
    *** File Search ***
    When I invoke M-? file search and press F3/F4 to view/edit files
    found, I'd like to have F7 preloaded with the same search string
    as in the M-? dialog.
    
    
    *** FAR's F12 ***
    One of the NC clones, namely FAR Manager, have a very useful feature:
    you can switch to panels from viewer/editor and do what you need,
    even open another viewer/editor! F12 brings list of currently available
    'screens' and you can switch to any of them:
      [0.Panels                                     ]
      [1.View: /etc/fstab                           ]
      [2.Edit: /etc/inittab                         ]
      [3.View: /usr/src/linux/REPORTING-BUGS        ]
    I found this very useful. Turns FAR into _multi-file_ editor.
    
    
    *** Hiding cursor ***
    It would be nice if MC would show cursor only when it is expected
    that user can type something or toggle [x] checkboxes
    and (*) radio buttons. It is more intuitive and saves some (however
    tiny) CPU load when MC runs on framebuffer console or in xterm.
    
    
    ******
    I'm not subscribed to any MC-related mailing list.
    Please CC me if you decided to reply.
    Thank you for your attention!
    Have fun,
    --
    Denis Vlasenko
    Email: [email protected]
    

    Re: Midnight thoughts about Midnight Commander

    From: Vlad Harchev <[email protected]>
    Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:38:16 +0500 (SAMST)
    On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Denis Vlasenko wrote:

    Hi, MC user :)

    > Hi MC developers,
    >
    > I am long standing user of Norton Commander and its clones.
    > I have started using Linux recently and must admit that MC
    > helps me a lot to feel comfortable in this new and scary
    > environment ;-).
    >
    > I think maybe you're interested in newbie's impressions.
    > I know that you've done a great program and don't expect you
    > to rush and implement all my wildest dreams. It will be
    > interesting to hear your comments/explanations.
    >
    > *** ESC key ***
    > >From FAQ:
    > >2.4 Why does the ESC key behave funny?
    > > Midnight Commander uses the ESC key as a prefix for simulating the
    > > Meta and Alt keys (for terminals which don't have Meta or Alt, see the
    > > three previous questions). For example, pressing ESC-a is the same as
    > > pressing Meta-a. In addition most terminals use ESC for internal
    > > representation of arrow keys, function keys and other enhanced keys.
    > > If you want to use ESC to cancel things you have to press it twice
    > > i.e. ESC-ESC. If you find this cumbersome you can generally use F10 to
    > > cancel. Alternatively turn on the old_esc_mode setting in the
    > > ~/.mc.ini file. The old_esc_mode setting makes ESC work as a prefix
    > > only if another key is pressed within 0.5 seconds. After 0.5 seconds
    > > the ESC key cancels. There is no way to make ESC cancel immediately.
    >
    > I found this ESC-ESC the most annoying thing in MC.
    >
    > I understand that on some terminals this is really necessary.
    > But lots of people use Linux mostly at 386 PC consoles. I know
    > there's a way to remap keys on Linux (loadkeys etc).
    > Maybe Commander could remap ESC key to ESC-ESC while user
    > is in Commander shell and restore normal mapping
    > whenever user starts new program or terminates MC.

    This would require root privileges.

    > However, I see that it can be problematic:
    > 1. What if MC gets SIGKILLed?
    > 2. If keymapping affect ALL consoles, this wouldn't work
    > without kernel modifications.

    Also, mc runs on many unices, not only on linux.

    >
    > *** Panels on/off - Ctrl-O ***
    > Norton Commander and its DOS/Win clones usually have only one
    > command line. In MC we have two: one when panels are on and
    > one when they are off. It's confusing. I'm starting to hate
    > "Shell is already running a command" error box.
    > What is the reason it is done this way?

    Look at the way it's implemented: when subshell wishes to paint prompt, it
    sends mc a signal (so it decides that shell completed running a command). If
    you type one letter and then press backspace (i.e. completely clearing
    commandline in subshell), shell won't redraw prompt, so mc will think that
    it's running a command. So, just press enter in subshell when commandline is
    empty but mc barks "Shell is already running a command".

    > Also NC and clones usually allow to show/hide left and
    > right panel with Ctrl-F1,F2. It's nice to see output of previous
    > command(s) and file panel at the same time. Can it be done in MC?

    No, it's nearly impossible to implement (terminal io is designed in a such
    way).

    >
    > *** Renaming/copy ***
    > Imagine you wanted to create directory named "MEMBENCH" but
    > typed it as "MEMBRNCH".
    > In NC you can hide other panel, press F6 and you'll see:
    > Rename or move "MEMBRNCH" to:
    > [MEMBRNCH ]
    > You can fix your typo easily.
    > In MC after F6 you'll see:
    > Move directory "MEMBRNCH" with source mask:
    > [* ]
    > to:
    > [/usr/local/and_whatever_other_panel_is_in ]
    > Not that easy, eh?

    I prefer to type 'mv ' and then "Ctrl-Enter" (or Escape-Enter) twice and
    then edit the name in commandline in such cases.

    >
    > *** Character 0x9B ***
    > I need to work with Cyrillic. Now my box loads necessary fonts
    > and keyboard mappings at startup. Everything is OK except for
    > one Cyrillic letter with code 0x9B. Yes, it's CSI.

    > Since Linux console provides VT100 emulation, it
    > tries to emulate some VT100 quirks too, including
    > CSI escape sequence:
    > 0x9B == ESC [
    > This is not 8-bit clean. I patched console.c in kernel
    > source tree and now printf("-> \x9B <-") does display character
    > with code 0x9B. I think it won't break anything, because
    > any decent program will print ESC [ sequence instead of
    > 0x9B. What do you think?
    >
    > However, MC does not display that character, althought
    > other Cyrillic chars are displayed.
    > How can I tell MC that it is now safe to print 0x9B?
    > In /etc/termcap? In terminfo database? Or I should patch
    > ncurses/SLang?
    >
    > Also my box does nothing under MC when I press key bound to
    > emit 0x9B. Maybe it thinks it's a Meta-Escape?
    > I haven't a faintest idea how to make it work.

    I don't know either.

    >
    > *** File Search ***
    > When I invoke M-? file search and press F3/F4 to view/edit files
    > found, I'd like to have F7 preloaded with the same search string
    > as in the M-? dialog.

    Yes, I would like to too. I hope somebody will hack this in.

    >
    > *** FAR's F12 ***
    > One of the NC clones, namely FAR Manager, have a very useful feature:
    > you can switch to panels from viewer/editor and do what you need,
    > even open another viewer/editor! F12 brings list of currently available
    > 'screens' and you can switch to any of them:
    > [0.Panels ]
    > [1.View: /etc/fstab ]
    > [2.Edit: /etc/inittab ]
    > [3.View: /usr/src/linux/REPORTING-BUGS ]
    > I found this very useful. Turns FAR into _multi-file_ editor.

    I think this will be difficult to implement in mc. Use 'screen' (window
    manager for any terminal) or twin (nice window manager for linux
    console or X terminal) to run several terminal sessions on one terminal.

    >
    > *** Hiding cursor ***
    > It would be nice if MC would show cursor only when it is expected
    > that user can type something or toggle [x] checkboxes
    > and (*) radio buttons. It is more intuitive and saves some (however
    > tiny) CPU load when MC runs on framebuffer console or in xterm.

    Yes, I think it would be nice to implement this. But a lot of more important
    things to do are waiting mc hackers. If you have time, welcome to hacking mc.

    >
    > ******
    > I'm not subscribed to any MC-related mailing list.
    > Please CC me if you decided to reply.
    > Thank you for your attention!
    > Have fun,
    > --
    > Denis Vlasenko
    > Email: [email protected]
    >

    Thanks for expressing your thoughts on mc.

    Best regards,
    -Vlad

    mc.hlp in russian is available

    From: Vlad Harchev <[email protected]>
    Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 21:14:24 +0500 (SAMST)

    Hello, Pavel!

    I just looked at the gnome cyrillization patch located at
    ftp://ftp.comprice.ru/pub/linux/abiword.rus/gnomeoffcyr1.tar.bz2

    It contains mc.hlp for mc-4.5.51 (fully?) translated to russian by Albert
    Sultanov <[email protected]> (the size of mc.hlp is 178K, size of entire archive
    is 1.67M). I put the mc.hlp for your convenience here
    www.hippo.ru/~hvv/patches/not-mine/mc.hlp.koi8.gz

    Pavel, could you consider integrating it into mc cvs?

    Best regards,
    -Vlad

    Re How to compile Midnight Commander

    Jim Balter wrote:
    > 
    > Bill Bartley wrote:
    > >
    > > Hi to all,
    > >
    > > I just installed the gnu-win32 system, and as my first project
    > > I was trying to compile Midnight Commander using the configure
    > > script. But - after a long struggle - configure exits with
    > > no Makefile created, even though I mounted the drive with
    > > the -m option which is supposed to prevent configure from
    > > deleting the Makefile at the end of its processing.
    > 
    > Where did you here that?  The -m flag has no effect in the latest
    > version of cygwin, and even if it did, it wouldn't have anything to
    > do with configure deleting Makefiles; why would configure ever
    > delete a Makefile after going to all the trouble of making one?
    > 
    > > Can configure actually work? Or do I have to create the
    > > Makefile by hand? Any hints on how to do this?
    > 
    > Your chances of receiving help will increase if you bother to
    > include useful information, like the output you got when you
    > ran configure.  Generally, configure runs a bunch of tests,
    > printing out the results of those tests.  It also produces
    > a config.h, config.status, a config.cache, and config.log,
    > which you should certainly examine, and finally, if all went well,
    > a Makefile.  Odds are it didn't all go well, but you have not provided
    > a single clue as to what might have gone wrong, and without telepathic
    > or remote viewing powers no one reading the mailing list could know.
    > 
    > --
    > <J Q B>
    
    Jim, thanks for responding. Here is an answer to one of your questions,
    plus the files you
    suggested.
    
    1. Why I thought configure may have deleted the Makefile:
    
    (This is from faq.html#SEC22)
    
    "Mixed Case Filenames
    
    ;-) 

    Info-search tips for Midnight Commander users Linux Gazette

    Mon, 31 Jan 2000
    From: Ben Okopnik <[email protected]>

    Funny thing; I was just about to post this tip when I read Matt Willis' "HOWTO searching script" in
    LG45. Still, this script is a good bit more flexible (allows diving into subdirectories, actually
    displays the HOWTO or the document whether .gz or .html or whatever format, etc.), uses the Bash shell
    instead of csh (well, _I_ see it as an advantage <grin>...), and reads the entire /usr/doc
    hierarchy - perfect for those times when the man page isn't quite enough. I find myself using it about as
    often as I do the 'man' command.

    You will need the Midnight Commander on your system to take advantage of this (in my opinion, one of
    the top three apps ever written for the Linux console). I also find that it is at its best when used
    under X-windowsi, as this allows the use of GhostView, xdvi, and all the other nifty tools that aren't
    available on the console.

    Here's the script.

    To use it, type (for example)

    doc xl

    and press Enter. The script will respond with a menu of all the /usr/doc subdirs beginning with 'xl'
    prefixed by menu numbers; simply select the number for the directory that you want, and the script will
    switch to that directory and present you with another menu. Whenever your selection is an actual file, MC
    will open it in the appropriate manner - and when you exit that view of it, you'll be presented with the
    menu again. To quit the script, press 'Ctrl-C'.

    A couple of built-in minor features (read: 'bugs') - if given a nonsense number as a selection, 'doc'
    will drop you into your home directory. Simply 'Ctrl-C' to get out and try again. Also, for at least one
    directory in '/usr/doc' (the 'gimp-manual/html') there is simply not enough scroll-back buffer to see all
    the menu-items (526 of them!). I'm afraid that you'll simply have to switch there and look around;
    fortunately, MC makes that relatively easy!

    Oh, one more MC tip. If you define the 'CDPATH' variable in your .bash_profile and make '/usr/doc' one
    of the entries in it, you'll be able to switch to any directory in that hierarchy by simply typing 'cd
    <first_few_letters_of_dir_name>' and pressing the Tab key for completion. Just like using 'doc', in
    some ways...

    Hope this is of help.

    Midnight Commander tips

    Midnight Commander - NC clone for Unix shell (!!!!!!!)
    http://www.gnome.org/mc/
    1) Esc-1 = F1 ... Esc-0 = F10
    2) ^x-c - CHMOD (like Drabek's PROTECT).
    3) Display Mode - contains submenu where you cal select full/brief, etc.
    Under tree view there are subcommands:
    f2 - rescan
    f4 - static/dynamic - ?
    4) TAB works, so does copy and delete.
    5) Hotkey work in menus.
    6) ^F - PgDn.
    7) Filters work - ura!
    8) 'Info about files' in right/display - same as Info in VC.
    9) Options/menu file edit - 1st time you do this it creates
    local menu for you!
    I already defined a menu item! Woiks!
    10) Dir tree - use right and left to move up and down level.
    11) Find File - works.
    12) Options/config/verbose - should turn off dialog for
    copying file, but doesn't work.
    13) ^U works (swaps panels).
    14) Command history works.
    15) What about speedsearch ?
    16) Meta key is ESC, for example Esc-* inverts selection.
    17) Installed on CRL - yay!
    Reading FAQ...
    18) In viewer: Space- PgDn, ^B - PgUp.
    19) Found Netterm font that supports graf chars -
    MS Linedraw!!! And garbage on the screen disappeared.
    20) After pressing F9 you can access menu thru shortcut.
    21) How to PgDn in fileman ? ^V and ESC V to go back, like EMACS.
    22) How to ins filename in cmdline ? ESC-ENTER!
    23) Cmdline history window - F9 c h. Only stores cmds that
    are entered with panels on.
    24) White '*' works to invert selection. And '+' works too.
    25) Esc-Tab - filename completion. Press again to show
    window of choices if prefix is ambiguous.
    26) Gooky errmsg: 'shell is already running a command'.
    Then segmentation fault comes if you ^O.
    Sounds like bug.
    27) Find out what 'network link' is for. It is for comp
    that runs mcserv.
    28) Checking TAR support - supposedly you can read it like dir (yay!) - works!
    29) Closing FTP link - '..' in root dir. Same with TAR file.
    O, ftp supports urls!
    Can also do cd ftp://xyz - works!
    This is very fast way to browse archives, because don't need to
    dl thru modem. So is Lynx, though.
    30) F9 C E - edit extension file.
    31) I mapped by Inlink account - left panel CRL and right Inlink.
    Vou!!!!!!!!!!!
    Also, saved inlink as dir in hotlist.
    Cannot rexec commands.
    32) ESC-ESC is documented key - single ESC is used as Meta.
    F10 also works as Cancel in dialogs.
    33) View for man page does not work - 'terminal Tascii unknown'.
    34) F9 O S - save setup.
    F9 L F - left filter.
    F9 C C - compare directories.
    35) See if there is online MC manual. There is, on their homepage!
    36) mc -c - color mode.
    -v - load internal viewer (Use LIST alias).
    37) Can pass 2 dir names to MC - for IPL.
    38) If you have no permission to enter dir, MC quietly ignores your
    attempt.
    39) ^X P - pastes selected panel name into cmdline.
    ^X ^P - same for unselected panel.
    ^X T - paste names of selected files to cmdline - o, something
    other commanders can't do!
    ^X ^T - for unsel panel.
    ESC P, ESC N - goto to prev/next command in history.

    ESC F, ESC B - move word forward/backward in cmdline (and this is
    key for TCSH too, I bet... It is!).
    ^D - DELCHAR (TCSH too).
    ^K - ERASE EOL.
    ESC BS - delword backward
    40) ^T - tag file.
    41) There is hint mode in MC - shows hints over cmdline.
    42) You can map FTP drives to both panels and copy files directly.

    More 2 Cent Tips & Tricks LG #81

    Sat, 6 Jul 2002 13:40:26 -0500 (COT)
    RE Otta (obob from qwest.net)
    Previous Tip by Ashwin M ([email protected])
    This is in reply to the LG issue 80, 2c Tip #18.

    It is simpler to use Midnight Commander. Click on the rpm file like you would a directory and transverse the rpm as you would a branch of the directory tree. Locate the file or files and copy them to an actual directory with the copy button. Simple and effective!

    [John Karns] I've found that some mc versions changed the rpm handling behavior. I had grown quite accustomed to viewing rpm contents and copying parts via mc, then after installing SuSE 7.1 on my laptop, was no longer able to view more than a partial list of the files in the rpm; specifically the rpm headers (description, etc.). I was able to correct the problem finding the mc scripts used for rpm handling, and changing one to agree with a previous mc version script.
    One other point is that for very large rpm files (over 2 or 3 MB), the process can be very slow. When dealing with rpm files containing large tar balls of source code, I usually just "install" the rpm, which copies the desired file to /usr/src/packages/SOURCES.

    mc-cdrtools by Sami Lempinen

    This utility contains four user menu entries for manipulating CD-Rs:

    They are quite handy for quickly moving stuff over to a CD-R.

    Note that mkisofs and cdrecord are required. You may want to edit the entries to suit your taste for the command line options for mkisofs, write speed and SCSI unit for cdrecord etc.

    More 2 Cent Tips & Tricks LG #51

    Info-search tips for Midnight Commander users

    Mon, 31 Jan 2000 14:57:13 -0800
    From: Ben Okopnik <[email protected]>

    Funny thing; I was just about to post this tip when I read Matt Willis' "HOWTO searching script" in LG45. Still, this script is a good bit more flexible (allows diving into subdirectories, actually displays the HOWTO or the document whether .gz or .html or whatever format, etc.), uses the Bash shell instead of csh (well, _I_ see it as an advantage ...), and reads the entire /usr/doc hierarchy - perfect for those times when the man page isn't quite enough. I find myself using it about as often as I do the 'man' command.

    You will need the Midnight Commander on your system to take advantage of this (in my opinion, one of the top three apps ever written for the Linux console). I also find that it is at its best when used under X-windows, as this allows the use of GhostView, xdvi, and all the other nifty tools that aren't available on the console.

    Here's the script.

    To use it, type (for example)

    doc xl

    and press Enter. The script will respond with a menu of all the /usr/doc subdirs beginning with 'xl' prefixed by menu numbers; simply select the number for the directory that you want, and the script will switch to that directory and present you with another menu. Whenever your selection is an actual file, MC will open it in the appropriate manner - and when you exit that view of it, you'll be presented with the menu again. To quit the script, press 'Ctrl-C'.

    A couple of built-in minor features (read: 'bugs') - if given a nonsense number as a selection, 'doc' will drop you into your home directory. Simply 'Ctrl-C' to get out and try again. Also, for at least one directory in '/usr/doc' (the 'gimp-manual/html') there is simply not enough scroll-back buffer to see all the menu-items (526 of them!). I'm afraid that you'll simply have to switch there and look around; fortunately, MC makes that relatively easy!

    Oh, one more MC tip. If you define the 'CDPATH' variable in your .bash_profile and make '/usr/doc' one of the entries in it, you'll be able to switch to any directory in that hierarchy by simply typing 'cd <first_few_letters_of_dir_name>' and pressing the Tab key for completion. Just like using 'doc', in some ways...

    Hope this is of help.

    Black screen after Ctrl-O

    If you see a black screen after using CTRL+O в Midnight Commander you might benefit from setting everywhere (in .Xdefaults, /etc/X11/Xdefaults) option:
    XTerm*VT100*titeInhibit: off

    It might be that options in /etc/X11/Xdefaults has higher priority and does not always overright options in ~/.XDefaults

    [Debian] When I work with MC via xterm there are some problems with keys

    The first that you should do is to tune local and Xkb. Withouth it to tume mc keys is a lot of pain. If you have problem with Alt=<key> you need to modify /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm. At the end of the file you need to add:

    *VT100*translations: #override \
     aReturn: string(0x1b) string(0x0d) \n\
     aTab: string(0x1b) string(0x09) \n\
     aspace: string(0x1b) string(" ") \n\
     aa: string(0x1b) string("a") \n\
     ab: string(0x1b) string("b") \n\
     ac: string(0x1b) string("c") \n\
     ad: string(0x1b) string("d") \n\
     ae: string(0x1b) string("e") \n\
     af: string(0x1b) string("f") \n\
     ag: string(0x1b) string("g") \n\
     ah: string(0x1b) string("h") \n\
     ai: string(0x1b) string("i") \n\
     aj: string(0x1b) string("j") \n\
     ak: string(0x1b) string("k") \n\
     al: string(0x1b) string("l") \n\
     am: string(0x1b) string("m") \n\
     an: string(0x1b) string("n") \n\
     ao: string(0x1b) string("o") \n\
     ap: string(0x1b) string("p") \n\
     aq: string(0x1b) string("q") \n\
     ar: string(0x1b) string("r") \n\
     as: string(0x1b) string("s") \n\
     at: string(0x1b) string("t") \n\
     au: string(0x1b) string("u") \n\
     av: string(0x1b) string("v") \n\
     aw: string(0x1b) string("w") \n\
     ax: string(0x1b) string("x") \n\
     ay: string(0x1b) string("y") \n\
     az: string(0x1b) string("z")
    
    

    [svlug] About mc

    Marc MERLIN [email protected]
    Sun Jan 20 23:45:02 2002


    On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 11:23:13PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > Not quite.  While mc does have some keyboard rebinding as we went
    > over the last time round, it doesn't support keyborad binding to the
    > extent I want (rebinding alpha keys).  
    
    True, just like vi, there are commands that you only get with
    CTRL-X CTRL-key, and you can't change 'key' easily
    
    On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 11:58:17PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > Loosely what I want is single pane, single directory view with the
    > ability to interactively (in the move the cursor about and hit
    > command keys sense) copy, move, rename, etc files with a very fast
    
    which mc can all do, in a single pane if you wish.
    
    > large file viewer that doesn't insist on loading them into memory.
    
    Neither does mc's
    I actually use mc's viewer to do binary in place edits, and they are done on
    the right disk block without loading the file in memory.
    
    > If the command keys are letter based (c=copy, d=delete, m-move,
    > r=rename, etc I'm fine and configurability is not needed.  I don't
    
    Different philosophy. With  mc, alphanum keys  go in the command  line since
    you can build a command line at  all times (equivalent of the select command
    line you  were talking about),  so obviously you can't  use c for  copy, you
    have to use some other key.
    But eh, you're fond of mc, regardless of technical attributes, so for you it
    is going to be better.
    
    > want to launch editors, run scripts, or handle spiffy regxes -- just
    > text mode point, select, and shoot.  Not particularly interested in
    
    mc does that.
    
    > an internal command line.  Don't want help.  Copy destination can be
    
    Well, you get both.
    
    > typed in, or can be walked to and then copy invoked.  Can't think of
    > any reason I'd be interested in ALT-TAB.
    
    With  mc, you  can type  "cp", select  your files,  CTRL-X T,  and type  the
    destination if you with (including tab completion)
    
    > The emphasis is on speed and simplicity.  One of the things I really
    
    Anyone who sees me use mc usually can't follow what I do :-)
    It's all about knowing the tool.
    
    On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 02:57:42AM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
    > which offers better navigation (searching, marks etc)). I just tried to
    > open 22MB file (kernel bz2) and it opened it in lot less then 1 second,
    > so I am pretty sure it does not load the whole file into memory, at
    > least not in the beginning.
     
    It does not, you  can open /dev/sdax, and it'll load block  on demand, as it
    should.
    
    On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 01:36:32PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > The bindings I'd like would be something like:
    > 
    >   ENTER -- (on file) less, on directory CD
    >   SPACE -- tag
    >   C -- copy
    >   D -- delete
    >   M -- move
    >   R -- rename (mv)
    >   L -- hard link
    >   Q -- quit
    >   S -- sym-link
     
    This is clearly incompatible with the command line feature in mc, which you
    may not use, but that's not the point.
     
    > I have use for a file manager no more than once or twice a month.
    
    I can do complex  copies, moves and rename with mc faster  than you can type
    them.
    
    > > It is kinda arrogant from a program to not let you assign any
    > > keybindings but IMO it's not serious usability problem.
    > 
    > I generally consider it critical.
     
    I guess that's why you use emacs and not vi then :-)
    I, for one, am  damn happy that vi users don't get to  remap all the keys to
    anything they'd like, otherwise it'd be a complete mess.
    
    
    On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 04:43:27PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > > in mc they are right in front of you. you don't have to learn
    > > anything.
    > 
    > I find myself having to read the function key labels near every
    > time.  I'd rather not, especially as they're abbreviated.
     
    Tss, tss...
     
    > Silly examples: The may MC handles cross-directory operations is the
    > exact opposite of what I prefer.  mc requires the other pane to be
    > on the target and the current pane to be the source.  Aaaargh!  That
    
    That's how most  people seem to want  it, but if you really  want to, CTRL-U
    will exchange both panes, but mc was  meant to emulate nc, so it does behave
    the same as a result (only better)
    
    > catches me almost every time.  The second confirm/edit/etc step
    > under mc when doing a tagged file operation is something I've never
    > wanted (or used) and would really like to never see.  
    
    Well, then instead of complaining, you could go in the Options/Confirmation
    menu, and disable them.
    
    >   ObNote: I'd also much prefer it if mc left me in the directory it
    >   was viewing when I exited, rather than the directory I started it
    >   from.
    
    Then it wasn't installed properly.
    In Red Hat and Debian:
    root@gandalf:~# type mc
    mc is a function
    mc () 
    { 
        MC=/tmp/mc$$-"$RANDOM";
        /usr/bin/mc -P "$@" >"$MC";
        cd "`cat $MC`";
        /bin/rm "$MC";
        unset MC
    }
    
    > Arguably that's little different from list.
    > 
    > > jojda:~>time mc
    > 
    >   $ time mc
    >   real    0m0.469s
    >   user    0m0.000s
    >   sys     0m0.040s
     
    On my system,
    real    0m0.239s
    user    0m0.050s
    sys     0m0.020s
    
    but who's counting?
    Both are  plenty fast, and  quibbling about  sub second launch  time, coming
    from an emacs user is middly ironic I think...
    
    Marc
    -- 
    Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                          .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
      
    Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/   |   Finger [email protected] for PGP key
    

    [svlug] About mc

    Erik Steffl [email protected]
    Sun Jan 20 23:49:01 2002


    J C Lawrence wrote:
    > 
    > On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 23:58:50 -0800
    > Erik Steffl <[email protected]> wrote:
    > > J C Lawrence wrote:
    > >> On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 02:57:42 -0800 Erik Steffl
    > >> <[email protected]> wrote:
    > 
    > >> I have use for a file manager no more than once or twice a month.
    > >> I'm not going to learn the keys, and if I do I'm unlikely to
    > 
    > > in mc they are right in front of you. you don't have to learn
    > > anything.
    > 
    > I find myself having to read the function key labels near every
    > time.  I'd rather not, especially as they're abbreviated.
    
      ? most of them are not:
    
    1Help   2Menu   3View   4Edit   5Copy   6RenMov 7Mkdir  8Delete 9PullDn
    10Quit 
    
      the only confusion is menu <-> pullDn (menu is user menu, pull down is
    the application menu).
    
      a little bit more detail about function keys (Fn <-> esc-n):
    
      mc uses ctrl and meta modifiers, if meta is not available it uses esc
    (esc, then key). since the function keys are not as common and generally
    it's harder to make them work the meta n (n=1, ..9, 0) double the
    function of Fn. So the safest bet is to hit esc-n, that should work in
    most situations. I wasn't sure why you dislike function keys - if the
    reason was that they are not as widely available (or don't work) then
    esc-n would be a good solution.
    
      as far as speed goes you can also use meta-n instead, that way you do
    not have to leave the home row. on debian (i386 arch) the meta seems to
    be the window key (at least that's what it is on my system and I don't
    remember doing any changes in this area). it's still not as good as
    whatever you want it to remap to but it's somewhat better as far as
    typing goes.
    
    ...
    > > it doesn't limit you in any way and it's simpler than ctrl-z
    > > etc. (nothing prevents you from using ctrl-z though).
    > 
    > Except that Ctrl-Z works everywhere, with everything.
    
      so use it with mc just like you would with list. it's hardly a fault
    of mc that it provides additional functionality (that does not limit you
    in any way).
    
    ...
    > > generally traversing the directory trees is easier using file
    > > manager (less keystrokes, you see what's happening)
    > 
    > TAB completion is your friend.  ido.el under (X)Emacs make it
    
      yes, but not a (boy)|(girl)friend/spouse, i.e. it's ok to have more
    than one friend.
    
    ...
    > > not modern destop design, modern desktop machines: there are no
    > > space (HD or RAM) constraints that would excuse lack of readily
    > > available on-line doc (man page, context sensitive help etc.). how
    > > else would you learn how to use a program?
    > 
    > A man page is not context sensitive help.  However it, and perhaps a
    > README, is enough for the majority of cases.  For the rest throwing
    > something under /usr/share/doc handles most other cases.
    
      for a gui program there is no excuse not to have context sensitive
    help. why should a user have to go someplace else and go through
    irrelevant info when program knows exactly where the user is a can
    provide relevant help information?
    
    > >> SELECT <file-spec> <command>
    > >>
    > >> Brought up a scrolling text list of the matching files which
    > >> could be cursored among and tagged/untagged with SPACE.  Hitting
    > >> ENTER ran the provided command on all tagged entries.
    > >>
    > >> That alone under bash would remove 90% of my need/wish for a file
    > >> manager (I faintly understand you can do something not entirely
    > >> dissimilar under zsh, but I haven't looked into that yet).
    > 
    > > it's not exactly the same but that kind of functionality is
    > > covered by command line auto-completion,
    > 
    > Aye, that's a standard (and heavily used) feature here.  it doesn't
    > do much however for the "I want to run this command on some
    > arbitrary selection of those files" case.
    
      mc can be used then, even though the order of operations is slightly
    different:
    
      1: mc
      2a: select files
      2b: type the command
      3: hit ctrl-x t<enter>
      then F10 if you don't want to use mc anymore...
    
      it has the same effect as you describe, it's a little bit less
    effective as far as typing goes (but not much) - it shouldn't matter if
    you use it rarely, if you'd use it more often you would probably already
    be in mc.
    
      2a and 2b can be done in any order.
    
      2a: there are several ways to select files you want to use:
    
        insert tags/untags files
        + enables you to type in shell patter or regexp (configurable)
        meta-? is a simple version of find+grep
        ctrl-x ! let's you run any program that returns list of files (e.g.
    find)
    
      you do not have to use all the fancy file picking mechanizms, if you
    want to stay simple you can use insert and possibly +
    
      3: you can edit the resulting command line before hitting enter
    (unfortunately not using your shell, it gets into shell history though).
    
      you have to know the ctrl-x t spell though. then again, you have to
    know select if you want to use it so it's basically the same (and
    there's context sensitive help in mc when you forget the keybinding).
    
      note that while what I describe is somewhat complicated you can use it
    in very simple form, in that case it's basically the same as select. the
    additional functionality does not stand in your way...
    
    ...
    > Err, to repeat the point, I don't.  File management is perhaps less
    > than 3% of my time, if that.
    
      what I was saying is that I am not all the way on the other side (as
    you suggested). In fact if it weren't for mc I would probably use file
    managers less than 10% (at least that was the case before I've found mc)
    and be quite happy.
    
    ...> > I don't get it. What is it that LIST does that mc does not?
    > 
    > Faster, smaller, lighter, more unobtrustive, easier/more-intuitive
    > cross-directory operations, default/expected key bindings, less
    > cruft.  I don't want a swiss army knife.  I just want a small fruit
    > knife.
    
    
      smaller: yes (but who cares?)
    
      faster: NO, see the timing of startup/exit below, and there doesn't
    seem to be any detectable speed difference during operation.
    
      more unobtrusive: mc even let's you work in your shell, how can it be
    any less obtrusive? you can have nothing but panel on the screen...
    
      intuitive: list is not intuitive at all, without using the help screen
    you wouldn't be able to do almost anything. 'c' does not copy. v is for
    NV (arc viewer) [linux version, IIRC it is somewhat better in DOS
    version] etc. mc is not anymore intuitive than that but at least it is
    easy to get help, it displays basic keys on the screen (if you want it
    to) and lot of keys are the same as nc uses (which is/was sort of de
    facto standard)
    
      cross directory ops: linux list doesn't seem to have any. haven't find
    a way to copy a file (intuitive???). what I remember from dos version is
    that it brings up dialog where you can type in the destination, which is
    exactly what mc does. mc provides the oposite panel's directory as
    default but you can start typing your own destination right away so it
    doesn't slow you down at all, it even provides auto-completion
    (meta-tab).
    
      key bindings: list definitely does NOT provide expected key bindings,
    specially the linux version. the dos version - perhaps and if you like
    those then that's a valid point against mc. still - you cannot change
    them so how is it that you know what to expect when you hit r? is it
    remove or rename? intuitive?
    
      the knife analogy is not a valid one in this case. the extra
    functionality of mc does not come at significant cost - the only
    difference is that the program is bigger, it does not have almost any
    difference on start-up time (that's the only possible difference). the
    HD space it takes up is not of concern (today and even less concern in
    the future). How is the extra functionality of mc standing in your way?
    If you don't know about the extra keybindings you simply don't use them.
    What's the problem?
    
    ...
    > >> mc enforces a UI which I find nearly unusable and supports a raft
    > >> of features that I find distracting from what I'm
    > 
    > >  ? every UI program enforces its UI. every CLI program enforces
    > > its UI as well. LIST does. not sure why you are singling mc out.
    > 
    > Because I don't like mc's choices?
    
      in one panel configuration it is basically the same as list...
    
    ...
    > Silly examples: The may MC handles cross-directory operations is the
    > exact opposite of what I prefer.  mc requires the other pane to be
    > on the target and the current pane to be the source.  Aaaargh!  That
    
      (sort of repeated from above) no it does not. it just provides it as
    default, you can immediately type in your own destination just as if the
    default wasn't there. it even provides auto-completion. what more (or
    less) do you want? how is list better than that?
    
    > catches me almost every time.  The second confirm/edit/etc step
    > under mc when doing a tagged file operation is something I've never
    > wanted (or used) and would really like to never see.
    
      you get the same dialog in list. how else would you specify the
    destination? it does not make any sense. what do you mean?
    
    >   ObNote: I'd also much prefer it if mc left me in the directory it
    >   was viewing when I exited, rather than the directory I started it
    >   from.
    
      list or any other program does not do that either. and cannot. that's
    why cd is internal shell command (child cannot change the parent process
    environment, cwd etc.)
    
      however, there's a sort of solution for this, here's a relevant quote
    from man page:
    
          -P     At  program  end, the Midnight Commander will print
                  the last working directory.  This  function  should
                  not  be  used  directly, instead, it should be used
                  from a special shell function that  will  automati­
                  cally  change the current directory of the shell to
                  the last directory the Midnight  Commander  was  in
                  (thanks  to Torben Fjerdingstad and Sergey for con­
                  tributing this function and the  code  implementing
                  this      option).       Source      the      files
                  /usr/lib/mc/bin/mc.sh (bash and zsh users)  respec­
                  tively /usr/lib/mc/bin/mc.csh (tcsh users) in order
                  to have this function defined.
    
    
    > > you can fire it off anytime you want and quit it with single
    > > keystroke, it's not a monster that would take forever to start up:
    > 
    > Arguably that's little different from list.
    > 
    > > jojda:~>time mc
    > 
    >   $ time mc
    >   real    0m0.469s
    >   user    0m0.000s
    >   sys     0m0.040s
    > 
    >   $ time list
    >   real    0m0.098s
    >   user    0m0.070s
    >   sys     0m0.020s
    
    jojda:~/skusobna/list>time ./list
    0.010u 0.000s 0:00.10 10.0%     0+0k 0+0io 217pf+0w
    jojda:~/skusobna/list>time mc
    
    0.020u 0.000s 0:00.10 20.0%     0+0k 0+0io 388pf+0w
    jojda:~/skusobna/list>
    
      I compiled the list (crowe's version for linux) and above are the
    results on my machine. I would say that you cannot distinguish between
    list and mc (as far as start-up time goes). Not sure how to measure
    anything else but from visually judging the speed I don't think there's
    any significant difference.
    
      btw on your computer it says that real time was 0.469s while the sum
    of other times was a lot less - that means that there was something else
    going on on the system. Or perhaps it was waiting for a disk to load the
    file (mc itself, that would mean that you'd have to wait for about .5s
    when you start mc first time/after a very long time - that's not such a
    big deal).  Since I already ran mc I obviously cannot test the first
    start right now...
    
    > No promises on not having a slow finger, tho I tried not to.
    > 
    > > you can even run it with command line, it's not some internal
    > > funky CLI, it's your login shell, basically unchanged, you just
    > > hit ctrl-o to make panels disappear (but you _don't_ _have_ to use
    > > this feature, you can just quit mc or use ctrl-z)
    > 
    > I like the bash command line and want it to be my default CLI UI.
    
      good. as far as comparison between list and mc goes: mc is basically
    the same but provides you with you shell even from within mc (and yes,
    it's bash shell (or whatever your login shell is), not some internal
    funky shell).
    
    > Nothing else, just bash as configured by my .bashrc, under an xterm
    > as configured (and keys re-bound) as per my .Xdefaults.  I like
    > that and would like to stay with it, augmenting it only in the areas
    > mentioned, not replacing or changing large chunks of it.
    
      OK. that's what I do as well. whether you augment it using list or
    using mc there's no difference in obtrusiveness, I would argue that mc
    is less obtrusive because it lets you use you shell even when you run mc
    (again, this functionality does not come at a price - if you don't want
    it just don't use it, it does not prevent you from using ctrl-z or quite
    mc etc.).
    
    > > also: menu bar, command line, status line, hint line can all be
    > > turned off so you're left with panel(s) only.
    > 
    > I'd rather (almost always) have visible the bottom end of scrollback
    > (usually the last 20 or 100 lines depending on window size, with a
    > further 5K lines available under PgUp/PgDn)).  That I find useful
    > and use dozens of times a day.  The vast majority of the time I
    > don't have a use for the panes.
    
      so at those time do not run the file manager or use ctrl-o with mc (or
    ctrl-z), that's what I do as well. have an xterm, sometime run mc in it,
    depending on what I do. when I want to use command line again (in the
    same xterm) I either quit mc or use ctrl-o (depending on what I think I
    will be doing).
    
      ctrl-o has an advantage of keeping the directories of shell and mc in
    synch - if you are in mc and change directory the shell's cwd changes as
    well, if you hit ctrl-o and cd in shell the mc's cwd changes too (that
    wouldn't happen if you used ctrl-z). again: you do not have to use this
    feature and it doesn't cost you anything... IMO it makes perfect sense,
    specially for people who do significant amount of work using command
    line but that's just me - you might not find it useful and you do not
    have to use it (or even know about it). it's not forced on you.
    
    > > mc is not an integrated solution.
    > 
    > We disagree.
    
      how is mc more integrated solution than list? you can use it in the
    same way that you use list (in principle, it's, of course, not exactly
    the same).
    
    > Stylistically I'd prefer something that handled mail far closer to
    > the way MH approaches handling mail than the way that any of the
    > mbox-based tools do.
    
      what is this about? and BTW as far as email goes the best way to store
    it is to use IMAP (which IIRC is what you do, or at least advocate).
    
    > >> Hurm.  John Crowe's list (OSS) seems a fairly good starting
    > >> point.  Its got most of the basic supports there already.  I
    > >> really should take some time off and just hack it into shape.
    > 
    > > he recommends mc as well:-) just checked the web page.
    > 
    > Yeah, I know.
    > 
    > > the more you're explaining the more I find your position strange.
    > > everything that you write (apart from keybindings configuration)
    > > points to mc. yet you don't like it. is it something personal?
    > 
    > Nope, just what I've written.
    
      but based on what you've written you want mc! (overall, apart from the
    keybindings) I am quite confused - what you're saying about how you work
    makes sense (I work in similar way even though not on the same kind of
    tasks) but when it comes to mc you're suddenly strange... well, one way
    or another, I guess that's it from me, I hope you didn't find it too
    pushy... (=unless you want to continue discussion I am not goin to
    continue with my mc evangelism).
    
    	erik

    [svlug] About mc

    Erik Steffl [email protected]
    Mon Jan 21 02:18:01 2002


    J C Lawrence wrote:
    > 
    > On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 23:48:18 -0800
    > Erik Steffl <[email protected]> wrote:
    ...
    > > mc provides the oposite panel's directory as default but you can
    > > start typing your own destination right away so it doesn't slow
    > > you down at all, it even provides auto-completion (meta-tab).
    > 
    > Arrrgh.  Why not TAB like everything else?  Why M-TAB?  Yeesh!
    > (don't answer that, I know the answer, I just don't like it).
    
      actually that's one key-binding you can redefine in learn keys dialog
    (all others are basically keys, just this one is sort-of-function
    completion/m-tab). the consequence is that you cannot use tab to move
    between panels (AFAIK you have to use mouse) but if you only use one
    panel it might not matter that much (tab is also used in dialogs but you
    can use arrows for that).
    
    ...
    > I'll assume from prior comments that you use vi instead of XEmacs.
    > Why?
    
      not sure, I learned it first, then I discovered vim and I am quite
    happy with it, don't feel that everything has to be part of editor, I
    rather use external tools.
    
    > Take your answers and apply them in reverse and I suspect you'll
    > find many of my reasons for not wishing to use mc and looking for a
    > much more vi-like tool (well, minus vi key bindings).
    
      as I see it you want ed instead of vi:-)
    
      I mean I understand if you don't want to use nautilus or some other
    megaloman of a filemanger but mc? it is lean and mean and does
    filemanagement, doesn't have a flight simulator in it or programming
    language or whatever extra stuff that some other programs include (not
    that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that not everybody
    likes that style)
    
    ...
    > In mc:
    > 
    >   In pane 1 tag some files.
    > 
    >   Move to pane 2
    > 
    >   Navigate to a directory.
    > 
    >   Hit copy key (forget what it is).
    > 
    > Fails.  Why?  mc requires focus to be in the source of the tagged
    > operation, not the target.
    
      that's because that's how it works basically everywhere. even in list,
    you select source, hit c, specify target; apart from the patological
    case you described (if directory is selected, the tagged files are
    copied into it).
    
    ...
    > If I haven't indicated, in any possible way, a target, then I can
    > live with a dialog.  If I have indicated a possible target, for
    > instance by having the cursor on a dir (LIST behaviour), then use
    > that and don't ask me.
    
      that's not possible* when using two panels (it might be a possible
    enhancement of single panel mode), it's also surprising because that's
    not how it works in most other applications (and somewhat inconsistent)
    
      * it is possible but would be even more confusing than when it's a
    single panel, it would also mean that you basically have to go to target
    panel before copy/move etc., quite a mess.
    
    > >> ObNote: I'd also much prefer it if mc left me in the directory it
    > >> was viewing when I exited, rather than the directory I started it
    > >> from.
    > 
    > > list or any other program does not do that either. and
    > > cannot. that's why cd is internal shell command (child cannot
    > > change the parent process environment, cwd etc.)
    > 
    > Actually you can but you need to use a wrapper ala the one Marc
    
      hey, that's what I posted as well (a quote from man page).
    
    	erik

    [svlug] About mc

    J C Lawrence [email protected]
    Mon Jan 21 12:14:01 2002


    On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 01:51:22 -0800 
    Erik Steffl <[email protected]> wrote:
    > J C Lawrence wrote:
    >> On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 23:48:18 -0800 Erik Steffl
    >> <[email protected]> wrote:
    
    >> Take your answers and apply them in reverse and I suspect you'll
    >> find many of my reasons for not wishing to use mc and looking for
    >> a much more vi-like tool (well, minus vi key bindings).
    
    >   as I see it you want ed instead of vi:-)
    
    For a file manager?  Kinda, yes, tho more in an MH style.
    
    > I mean I understand if you don't want to use nautilus or some
    > other megaloman of a filemanger but mc? it is lean and mean and
    > does filemanagement, doesn't have a flight simulator in it or
    > programming language or whatever extra stuff that some other
    > programs include (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's
    > just that not everybody likes that style)
    
    I want leaner and meaner, and far more atomic.
    
    >> In mc:
    >> 
    >> In pane 1 tag some files.
    >> 
    >> Move to pane 2
    >> 
    >> Navigate to a directory.
    >> 
    >> Hit copy key (forget what it is).
    >> 
    >> Fails.  Why?  mc requires focus to be in the source of the tagged
    >> operation, not the target.
    
    > that's because that's how it works basically everywhere. 
    
    I can't comment on everywhere, but I've not noticed that behaviour
    in other tools before and its not the way I expect or want.
    
    > even in list, you select source, hit c, specify target; apart from
    > the patological case you described (if directory is selected, the
    > tagged files are copied into it).
    
    Uhh, but that is a way of specifying target.  If I run mc in dual
    pane mode, and do the above, why shouldn't/wouldn't it accept it as
    a default/intended target?
    
    >> If I haven't indicated, in any possible way, a target, then I can
    >> live with a dialog.  If I have indicated a possible target, for
    >> instance by having the cursor on a dir (LIST behaviour), then use
    >> that and don't ask me.
    
    > that's not possible* when using two panels
    
    Sure it is.  Just take the above example and have the copy work.
    
    > (it might be a possible enhancement of single panel mode), it's
    > also surprising because that's not how it works in most other
    > applications (and somewhat inconsistent)
    
    Oddly enough its exactly what I expect and is what seems most
    obvious to me:
    
      Okay, I want these files >here< and I want to move them over, umm,
      (fiddle, fiddle, fiddle) yeah, over here.
    
    mc dictates instead:
    
      Okay, I want these files >here< and I want to move them over, umm,
      (fiddle, fiddle, fiddle) yeah, over here, but oh yeah, where were
      those files again?
    
    Can't comment on any other applications.  Inconsistent?  
    
    >   * it is possible but would be even more confusing than when it's
    > a single panel, it would also mean that you basically have to go
    > to target panel before copy/move etc., quite a mess.
    
    No.  Just have both work.  If there is a second panel, always accept
    it as the default target of a copy, no matter where focus is UNLESS
    the cursor is on a valid target (eg directory) in either panel, in
    which case accept that instead by default (as long as its not
    tagged).
    
    				-+-
    
    I wandered thru http://chuck.burkins.net/LinuxFile.html yesterday.
    
      Asides from being X11 based SFM is rather nice.  Pleasingly small
      and pleasingly hackable.  Wish it were text mode.  Basic key
      bindings can be lived with, but can be changed (source edits)
      without too much difficulty.  There's a .deb as well.  
    
    In looking thru sunsite/ibiblio I found hm:
    
      http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/managers/hm-3.1.tar.gz
    
    Fairly promising.  Will need some source hacking to fix the key
    bindings and get rid of the confirms on things like `rm`.
    Annoyingly it fails to respond to window resizes which I do a lot
    of.
    
    More interestingly zselx approaches the SELECT problem.  
    
      http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/managers/zselx-1.1.tar.gz
    
    I need to play with it more.  It would be considerably nicer if it:
    
      -- accepted the command to run on the command line
      -- accepted a filespec (eg *.c) instead of just a directory spec.
      -- could accept multiple filespecs on the command line
      -- could accept the list of files to display from stdin (kinda
      tough with a CURSES app I know)
    
    -- 
    J C Lawrence                
    ---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
    [email protected]               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
    http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
    

    [svlug] About mc

    Marc MERLIN [email protected]
    Mon Jan 21 14:01:01 2002


    On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:19:24AM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > Quite.  For what you do, especially as a SysAdm, mc is invaluable.
    > I, umm, don't tend to do that much SysAdm, especially not on a daily
    > basis.
     
    Fair enough.
     
    > I just checked, and perhaps I'm missing something in playing just
    > now, but I don't see anything in the options that disabled (for
    > instance) the dialog on a tagged copy which asks:
    > 
    >   Copy # files with source mask to:
    > 
    >   To: 
     
    I  thought you  were talking  about confirm  delete/overwrite and  so forth.
    Indeed, for copy and move, you do  get a window, but it's not a confirmation
    window, it's  a window that  lets you change  the destination (if  you don't
    want to be using  the second pane), lets you rename  files by regex patterns
    are you copy/move them, select how  to copy symlinks and file attributes and
    so forth.
     
    > > Then it wasn't installed properly.  
    > 
    > On a Debian system:
    > 
    >   $ type mc
    >   mc is /usr/bin/mc
     
    You are right, it's a damn shame. I guess I forgot that on all my debian
    systems, the function came from me.
    On Red Hat and other distros, the function gets installed with the package.
     
    On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:23:12AM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    > On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 23:42:53 -0800 
    > Marc MERLIN <[email protected]> wrote:
    > 
    > > I, for one, am damn happy that vi users don't get to remap all the
    > > keys to anything they'd like, otherwise it'd be a complete mess.
    > 
    > Why?  I assume you would never use that capability, but those that
    > would, could, and their user-local configs (~.vimrc?) would not
    > affect you unless you logged in as them for some reason (in which
    > case you get what's coming to you).
    
    I guess I'm biased because I get to experience that when the user comes and
    asks for help and that I have to use their keyboard.
    It's just  as annoying than a  user with a  DVORAK keyboard who needs  me to
    type on their keyboard.
    
    Marc
    -- 
    Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                          .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
      
    Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/   |   Finger [email protected] for PGP key
    
    

    [svlug] About mc

    J C Lawrence [email protected]
    Mon Jan 21 14:21:01 2002


    On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:00:07 -0800 
    Marc MERLIN <[email protected]> wrote:
    > On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:19:24AM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
    
    >> Why?  I assume you would never use that capability, but those
    >> that would, could, and their user-local configs (~.vimrc?) would
    >> not affect you unless you logged in as them for some reason (in
    >> which case you get what's coming to you).
    
    > I guess I'm biased because I get to experience that when the user
    > comes and asks for help and that I have to use their keyboard.
    > It's just as annoying than a user with a DVORAK keyboard who needs
    > me to type on their keyboard.
    
    Hurm, an option to define what RC to use would seem to solve that
    (eg point i at yours).
    
    -- 
    J C Lawrence                
    ---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
    [email protected]               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
    http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

    How to avoid launching Midnight Commander by accident Linux Gazette

    Commander by accident
    Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:31:51 -0500

    Allan Peda (apeda from linkshare.com)

    I've typed "mc foo bar" one time too many when I really meant to type "mv foo bar". Removing Midnight
    commander is not an option, because that breaks some file exploror type GUI utilities, so I cooked up a
    bash script to double confirn that I wanted to type what I (probably mis-)typed :

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    A long time ago, on another computing platform, Peter Norton Computing released Norton Commander. This became my favorite file management program. As I wandered further and further into the UNIX realm, I found it hard to believe that a program like this wasn't available on UNIX. Finally, I came across Midnight Commander, as shown in Figure A. It offers more features than Norton Commander and, unlike Norton Commander, it runs on a variety of different computing platforms.

    Please note that you need to use bash for mc: some capabilities like an integrated shell windows (Ctrl-O) does not work with ksh or other shells.

    Precompiled MC can be downloaded from http://sunfreeware.com/.
    Attention: before installation glibc needs to be installed. After that check LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It should include the target directory (/usr/local/lib).
    Other possible sources of MC for Solaris include:

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