File Management in the Terminal with Midnight Commander
If you remember computers as far back as the late 1980s, you might remember how Peter Norton came to prominence with the three-floppy (was it three?) Norton Utilities suite. There were a lot of cool tools in that pack, especially Norton Commander, which suddenly made file management a breeze.
Midnight Commander (or just mc) is the GNU version of that utility, with an identical layout and similar color scheme. mc should be available in most linux distribution’s repo’s.
Old-timers will rejoice at that screenshot. Two-panel file management, with options for a quick-view, syntax-colored file preview, file info, filesystem tree, and a mess of other features. Opens tar, bz2, gz and some other compressed packages like folders and has implicit shell access as well. mc reads mouse input without gpm, handles transparent X terminal emulators and can access smb and ftp directly.
For sheer speed and power, it’s hard to top such a mature, full-featured and well-rounded file access utility, and after using it for a week or so, you’ll wonder why you put up with sluggish, incomplete graphical file managers that only do a fraction of what mc does natively. This is one of those programs that has so many options and so many possibilities that I really do it a disservice my glazing over it like this. But alas, this is how it has to be. Perhaps in the future
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Tags: , command line, file manager