Slashdot Mirror
Midnight Commander Development Revived
richlv writes "Popular Unix console file manager Midnight Commander has experienced a stall for the last few years. Most distributions (including the conservative Slackware) shipped patched packages or snapshots. Despite that, everybody had a favorite bug or two — either inability to specify ssh connection port, or problems with interrupted FTP sessions. Or maybe copying of larger datasets. Or maybe the infamous 'shell is still active' message, which often brought unexpected changes of current directory with it. Whatever it was, we either cursed it every time, or learned to live with it. It seems that finally something many were waiting for has happened — there's some activity on mc development. Check out the new homepage, and let's hope revival is both healthy and lengthy."
What kind of minimum installation includes midnight commander but doesn't include cp?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As Midnight Commander is a text mode application. It can be used locally and/or remotely, on the console or under the X Window System.
Do text apps still have a place in today's world? Heck, network speeds and capacities (read bandwidth) have improved a great deal. I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader ? It seriously needs some love.
The cp command doesn't allow for the arbitrary point-and-shoot selection of files to copy, and it also doesn't have some of the more useful related functionality (e.g., directory comparison) that I use all the time in mc.
It's an *addition* to the standard admin toolset, not a replacement. IMO.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I've spent quite a bit of time on Digg, and I can tell you that Digg is not a technology site. It's a social networking site where users share the latest and greatest information in whatever area suites their fancy. As Slashdot's tagline "News for Nerds" suggests, Slashdot is for nerds. Midnight Commander news is certainly nerdy and therefore on topic.
Furthermore, the "Stuff that matters" part is intended to assure that Slashdot news won't be quite a banal as Digg's news. Digg users may care that user X just managed to get a four day old story to "pop", but the world outside of Digg's user-networks really doesn't care.
So with all respect intended, your complaints are duly noted and ignored. Now get off my lawn, ya' darn kids!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...To mistype "mv".
This is the first thing I thought of when I saw this article, and I had a bet with myself that someone else would mention it, too. There aren't many shell commands more common than "mv", and the 'c' key is sitting there right next to the 'v'. Yes, you can alias your way out of this, but I found it simpler and more satisfying to just "rm /usr/bin/mc".
> The two programs that drive me bonkers are mc and vi. Why?
> because I'm not savvy to their syntax and their is no obvious way
> to get out of them once you launch them.
So F10 for QUIT is too hard, especially when it's actually printed on the key bar (which in every distro I tried was always set to be displayed by default)?
C'mon man...
Um...or you could just remove the package properly. And complain to the idiot devs of your distro for installing such a niche package by default.
Define better. GUIs are sometimes faster and sometimes the commandline is faster. Both have ups and downs in terms of both speed and security. I like to use them both.
Here be signatures
Okay, now transfer this six-level-deep application directory tree to the new server using only the command-line ftp client found on a vanilla Solaris 8 server.
There are many ways to do that.
Easy: tar, ftp, tar /dest /source ; tar -cf - * ) | ssh dest 'cd dir ; tar -xf -'
No disk space: NFS mount, find source | cpio -pmudv
Crazy: dd over netcat
Encrypted for the internet: ( cd
MC isn't the only way to copy files, it isn't even a good way to copy files.
While MC is by far the best file manager on Linux (and a very handy text editor too), you don't really need it in Windows.
Total Commander is much better in that environment. And while it is not Free, you can still use it for free if you accept an additional click when starting it. I have bought 3 licenses for my home machines, but use it constantly on all my client's machines in it's non-paid incarnation. The little nag screen really doesn't bother me.
The OS which is most lacking in this regard is actually Mac. A good Total Commander clone is the only thing I'm really missing when working on Macs. (yes, I know about (and use) muCommander).
gitfm is lacking sorely in a number of areas. Here're just a couple major ones:
- no vfs so you can't enter tar.gz files or rpms, or cpio files
- keybinding support is inconsistent. For example often times F10 is mapped by the terminal or the windowing system to a particular function. Normally you'd expect that F10 and Esc-0 are the same. But this is not the case in gitfm. Although Esc-0 works from the main screen, you cannot use it to exit the "view" mode.
- no apparent way to change directories in gitfm without drilling down.
For the few things I use mc for (checking out rpms, cpios, etc), gitfm just doesn't work.
Except that if you're running MC in gnome-terminal, F10 doesn't work (it brings up the window menu. Now you might say why am I running MC in GT, but we all know that linux users can't stay away from the command line...
Requires X11. Immediate non-starter for those of us who spend most of the time in a terminal emulator.