There are a lot of free file managers. There is Nautilus in GNOME environment (with GTK libraries), KDE users have Konqueror and Krusader. There is also more and more useful Dolphin, which is destined to be default file manager to KDE 4. Fast Thunar can be found in less “heavy” graphical environment — XFCE 4. All those applications offer great functionality. However, they share a common feature which in unfavorable conditions would be considered as a defect — they enjoy as a rule very intertwined interdependences, they demand a lot of libraries connected with their graphical environment, and (which is obvious) they need X Window System server running. Of course, console zealots and users looking for “light” solutions are not left alone. They have MC!

Midnight Commander (mc for short) is the most popular console (command line) file manager. Its design was inspired by classic two-panel interface found in the famous Norton Commander, a DOS file manager. Midnight Commander is equipped in many functions:

• native support of archives and deb and rpm packages, the files are treated like directories a user may enter and copy to/from files,
• ability to connect to servers using ssh, ftp, and smb protocols,
• possibility to mark many files a time and work on file groups using meta characters,
• syntax highlighting in mcedit - mc embedded editor,
• ability to issuing user commands against selected (marked) files,

and many others. It’s worth mentioning that MC’s DEB package is only 2 MB in size! Unfortunately, the default application do not support UTF-8 coding. There are patches only for openSUSE, Red HAT, and Gentoo distros. It can be interesting to say that MC was a default file manager for the first versions of GNOME, but it was ditched in behalf of graphical manager.

Installation

Because MC is distributed with every known GNU/Linux system and as a port for BSD systems’ family, its installation is trivial and rely on making use of a favorite package manager. It suffices to issue the following command in Debian/Ubuntu systems:

apt-get install mc

In Fedora/CentOS/Scientific Linux/Red Hat systems:

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Original link: http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/midnight-commander-in-action/