Midnight Commander Development Revived 304
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."
Re:bleh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Text displays in today's environment? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [krusader.org]? It seriously needs some love.
Re:bleh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"inability to specify ssh connection port" (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Text displays in today's environment? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader [krusader.org]? It seriously needs some love.
Ah, again the myth that open source developers are a free workforce you can redirect between projects on your whim... It just doesn't go like that, people work on whatever happens to interest them at the time.
(this comes from another Krusader user btw - by the look of their web page, they seem to be doing alright)
Re:Text displays in today's environment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do text apps still have a place in today's world?
Not on the desktop, but there are large number of computer users who work on headless computers, and frankly don't want anything more than a console open with ssh.
I just completed a four year ph.d, during which my *entire* research effort was conducted using a linux cluster to which I connected via putty or bash, depending on where I was.
Yes I know, and so did my colleagues, that its possible with todays faster conection speed to run a gui over that connection, but why bother when you can already get so much done in a console window?
I use GUI apps a lot, they have an important place in the world of modern computing, but so do CLI apps.
Re:And I thought it finally safe... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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".
Re:Arg! not mc again!! (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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...
Re:And I thought it finally safe... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:bleh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IANACLH (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Updating the Windows Port would be nice (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [ghisler.com] 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).
Re:Text displays in today's environment? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who needs MC ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Text displays in today's environment? (Score:3, Insightful)
> and this is why there will never be a year of the linux desktop
Yes... because we can't or won't pull an Office 2007 whereby everyone has
their nice comfortable and old tools forcibly ripped away from them just
so they can be forced to use the flavor of the month.
Forget about "consistency" between apps. How about consistency over time.
Re:Arg! not mc again!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Midnight Commander is nice; Worker is better. (Score:1, Insightful)
Requires X11. Immediate non-starter for those of us who spend most of the time in a terminal emulator.