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I still use Midnight Commander on the daily basis. It is immensely useful for e.g. exploring a large codebase. I don’t know why it is frowned upon by many peopl

I still use Midnight Commander on the daily basis. It is immensely useful for e.g. exploring a large codebase. I don’t know why it is frowned upon by many people.

fb03 6y ago
I am sure the reason is irrational and involves pseudo geek points for 'hey, i am not using anything graphical at all!' Midnight Commander is awesome and together with Byobu you're all set for full fledged terminal-only speedy filesystem exploration.
mlukaszek 6y ago
This. Installing Midnight Commander is one of the first things I do on a fresh *nix system, next to installing vim. :) Heck, I even have it installed on Windows in WSL - it's a life saver, allowing to navigate really fast, as well as connect to remote locations (SCP, SFTP...) to copy files around.
Yaa101 6y ago
MC is great but very slow when copying or moving a lot of small files, when I have a task like that I use SpaceFM in the GUI.
azalemeth 6y ago
Meant genuinely and with 0% troll: why? What does it get you that ls (-ltr and optionally |less) doesn't? I know that some people love mc and I've never...got it. I've never really asked them in great detail. What are the 'killer features' of MC over the more "usual" *nix tools of find/grep/ls/awk/sed/vim? I'd love to know if I'm missing a trick!
- blackfawn 6y ago
  What I like most about MC is oddly off by default. Under "Options" > "Panel options" there is an option under "Navigation" for "Lynx-like motion". Once this is on, you can navigate in/out of directory structures with the left and right arrows on your keyboard. It makes it super quick and easy to move around a file system without a bunch of successive cd/ls/etc commands (or other tools)
  - coribuci 6y ago
    This is also the killer feature for me. You can "scan" a filesystem in a couple of minutes.
- atemerev 6y ago
  Exploration — you are entering the unknown codebase, and you _see_ file and directory structure, presented before you. The unix tools are good if you planned beforehand what are you going to do; mc is great for when you don’t know yet. Targeted selection — it is really easy to select 20-30 files arbitrarily to e.g. copy them to the new directory. With cp/ls, it takes much more time.

I still use Midnight Commander on the daily basis. It is immensely useful for e.g. exploring a large codebase. I don’t know why it is frowned upon by many people.

fb03 6y ago

I am sure the reason is irrational and involves pseudo geek points for 'hey, i am not using anything graphical at all!' Midnight Commander is awesome and together with Byobu you're all set for full fledged terminal-only speedy filesystem exploration.

mlukaszek 6y ago

This. Installing Midnight Commander is one of the first things I do on a fresh *nix system, next to installing vim. :) Heck, I even have it installed on Windows in WSL - it's a life saver, allowing to navigate really fast, as well as connect to remote locations (SCP, SFTP...) to copy files around.

Yaa101 6y ago

MC is great but very slow when copying or moving a lot of small files, when I have a task like that I use SpaceFM in the GUI.

azalemeth 6y ago

Meant genuinely and with 0% troll: why? What does it get you that ls (-ltr and optionally |less) doesn't? I know that some people love mc and I've never...got it. I've never really asked them in great detail. What are the 'killer features' of MC over the more "usual" *nix tools of find/grep/ls/awk/sed/vim? I'd love to know if I'm missing a trick!

blackfawn 6y ago
What I like most about MC is oddly off by default. Under "Options" > "Panel options" there is an option under "Navigation" for "Lynx-like motion". Once this is on, you can navigate in/out of directory structures with the left and right arrows on your keyboard. It makes it super quick and easy to move around a file system without a bunch of successive cd/ls/etc commands (or other tools)
- coribuci 6y ago
  This is also the killer feature for me. You can "scan" a filesystem in a couple of minutes.
atemerev 6y ago
Exploration — you are entering the unknown codebase, and you _see_ file and directory structure, presented before you. The unix tools are good if you planned beforehand what are you going to do; mc is great for when you don’t know yet. Targeted selection — it is really easy to select 20-30 files arbitrarily to e.g. copy them to the new directory. With cp/ls, it takes much more time.