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I was a Norton Commander fan back in the days of DOS, and so when I moved to Linux, I've always had a soft-spot for Midnight Commander... just, you know, not en

I was a Norton Commander fan back in the days of DOS, and so when I moved to Linux, I've always had a soft-spot for Midnight Commander... just, you know, not enough to actually use it for anything. It's always puzzled me that Norton Commander was so indispensable for DOS, but Midnight Commander is not so useful under Linux. I think the reason is just that the file-management I do these days is very different from what I needed to do under DOS; I don't have to copy files around to or from floppies to transfer them, nor do I have to shuffle files around from one partition to another to maintain enough disk space. I don't even have to navigate between all the different directories where my apps are installed, because in Linux they're all on my $PATH. Using MC, I really miss bash's tab-completion (Esc-Tab completion isn't the same) although ^S incremental search helps. The NC copy/move/rename dialogs are really designed around the MS-DOS semantics of filename globbing (under DOS, you can say "copy .doc .bak" to make a backup of every document, but "cp .doc .bak" does something very different in Linux), so coping/moving/renaming files in Midnight Commander feels weird. I dunno, I want to like Midnight Commander, but I just think it's a brilliantly-designed user-interface for solving problems that don't exist, or don't exist in the same form, as they did in MS-DOS.

dredmorbius 14y ago
As someone who dislikes GUI file navigators, the two uses I find for MC are as a file archive explorer and for remote file operations. MC will open tarballs of various compression variants, ar archives, etc., and in particular, RPM and DEB files). Want to dig out something without expanding and digging through the archive? Use MC. Similarly, you can access remote systems (via ssh) as if they were local, though I'll more often use lftp's fish:// protocol. Or lately, sshfs. Which I suppose more or less makes your point that under Linux these are mostly solved problems.

dredmorbius 14y ago

As someone who dislikes GUI file navigators, the two uses I find for MC are as a file archive explorer and for remote file operations. MC will open tarballs of various compression variants, ar archives, etc., and in particular, RPM and DEB files). Want to dig out something without expanding and digging through the archive? Use MC. Similarly, you can access remote systems (via ssh) as if they were local, though I'll more often use lftp's fish:// protocol. Or lately, sshfs. Which I suppose more or less makes your point that under Linux these are mostly solved problems.