Midnight Commander
Midnight Commander is a terminal-based file manager. It provides a terminal-based user interface for navigating through the local filesystem, remote FTP/Samba filesystems, viewing contents of archives, and viewing and editing text files.
Cheat sheet
M- key refers to the Alt key by default. Here are some common keyboard shortcuts to know. You can also find the rest in the menu.
| Keyboard | Description |
|---|---|
| Tab | Switches left/right panel focus |
| Scroll / up / down arrow | Scroll through the directory |
| Pg-up Pg-down | page up or down the directory |
| left / right arrow | Go up one directory / enter a directory (with lynx-like motion enabled) |
| Ctrl-o | toggle console |
| Ctrl-R | refresh/rescan directory |
| M-Shift-/ | Find file |
| Ctrl \ | Directory hotlist |
| Ctrl-x d | compare directories |
| Ctrl-x [c,o,s,l] | chmod, chown, symlink, link |
| M-c | quick cd |
| + | select by pattern |
| * | reverse selection |
| \ | unselect by pattern |
Configuration
The configuration file is located in ~/.config/mc.
To change the listing mode columns, edit ~/.config/mc/panels.ini and change user_format in each of the panels. What I'd like to see in the file listing is the owner and group. To do this, I changed the user_format line to:
user_format=half type name | mtime | perm | owner:20 | group:20 | size
To use an external editor, disable using the internal editor or viewer. This will make mc use the editor defined in the $EDITOR or $VIEWER environment variables.