Midnight Commander

From Leo's Notes
Last edited on 30 December 2021, at 01:16.

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.