Midnight Commander

Tutorial for the Linux text-mode file manager Midnight Commander.

Topics:

00:06 Installation
00:19 Function keys and Escape
01:27 Terminal settings
01:52 Appearance
02:14 Lynx-like directory navigation
03:10 The built-in command line
03:44 Useful hotkeys (see also Mini-Cheatsheet below)
06:36 Editors
07:47 Other functions

Mini-Cheatsheet:

Ctrl+o Full-screen shell toggle
Alt+. Hidden file toggle
Alt+i Make other panel's path identical
Alt+t Cycle through different display modes
Alt+Tab Auto-complete (Alternative: Esc Tab)
Alt+Enter Copy selected filename to command line
Alt+p Previous history line
Alt+n Next history line
Ctrl+s Search
Ctrl+r Refresh
Insert Select files (for copy or move)

[ssg]

Great intro, straight to the point, no extra talking. :)

[kuzmicheff]

Thanks a lot! I can finally use my mc efficiently!

[tjd]

Great review of MC, short and on point. Also by the end of the video I feel like I'm at least 1% German now :)

[damjan]

very good. i discovered this on my 386 back in 90s

[HeIsTheBluesCat]

Midnight Commander sounds like the name of a real cool game

[rcrum]

Thank you so much, coming from Windows machines my entire life I had such a hard time with this. You made it so simple I am now feeling like idiot for making it so much harder than it really was. Excellent video!

[retrowikid]

Midnight Commander is a very good spiritual follower of Norton Commander. Despite its bare presentation and lack of certain features, I still think that MC is a great tool to get anyone much more comfortable in using Linux and understanding the way in which the files are organized. I think that it would be wise to present MC in a video as well, just as I reviewed the old Norton Commander.

[musicbobo]

PURE EXCELLENCE - mc is great, superlative tutorial, thank you

[DazThor]

Great video! I love how much useful information you were able to fit in, very succinct.

[weedeater]

Thank you so much. This is THE mc video everyone needs to watch.

Most, or many anyway assume that MC will behave is it does on a TTY.

This video is a must watch for using MC in a GUI terminal emulator.

That part about disabling the F-keys in your terminal emulator, priceless.

I discovered today that MC behaves more as expected in the ST terminal emulator from Suckless. In fact I have a new alias..

alias mc='stterm -g 125x40 -f DejaVuSansMono-13 -e mc &'

[rohanprakash]

Thank You, the video was well made and very useful.

[Edditoria]

Your tutorial provide enough information to get start. Thanks for your video! 👍

I'm trying this nice tidy file manager via mosh connection on iPad.
Menu bar and Hint/tips are important for me, same reason to use Micro Editor in Terminal.

[absmustang]

Thank you. Yes, it was useful. The mini cheatsheet in the description is a nice touch!

[yallaoui]

Hi JN
Excellent tutorial. Many thanks.

[SuperMegaDima]

Thanks for the review! Do you know what is the keyboard shortcut for the [^] button on the top right of each panel that shows visited directories list?

[無名-lb]

some things doesnt seem to work on the windows version

[svenwindpassinger]

Wei not in dschörmen?

Liebe Grüße
Sven

[andreasklindt]

Midnight Commander is my favourite file manger since my early days in linux about 20 years ago. What I also absolutly love about mc is its capability to treat archives like *.zip *.gz *.tar.bz as a folder. This feature, which mc inherited from Norton Commander if I remember correctly, makes it superior to ranger in my opinion. ranger can only show you the file list of an archive, but it can't let you copy files in and out from it. Since ranger lags this feature by default (don't know if there's a plugin, don't care tbh...), mc remains my favourite probably for the next 20 years as well...