Manage your files with mc (Midnight Commander)

Once upon a time, there was a operating system called MS-DOS. It was a pretty limited system and awkard to use, but at the same time, it was a lot more useful than the graphical systems built on the DOS. To help the users, many companies created proprietary software that was sold to the end-users.

One of the most popular applications was Norton Commander or simply nc. The first version 1.0 was released as early as in 1986 [1]. This application set the standards for file managers for a long time. In fact, many file managers even today follow the concept of showing files simultaneously in two panels.

In addition to GUI file managers, the command line junkies can use the Midnight Commander, mc. It is available for probably every possible distribution in use. If you like to use Linux on an old computer, you might well try this application that does not steal all the resources of your old computer.



Midnight Commander provides all the usual functionality one expects from a file manager. With it, it is possible to copy, delete, archive, view and edit files or, for example, view man pages, It might not handle everything konqueror handles, but it does well what it is intended to do.

See also: Burn CDs and DVDs with cdw | Remind is a lightweight tool for reminders | Lightest WWW browsers for Linux

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In 8 years of using Linux, I've never used MC. I have started it up a few times, and wondered what the point was.

I use lynx to browse the filesystem. By the time I installed Linux, I'd been using Lynx as my browser for five years, at the shell at my ISP. It made more sense to continue to use the familiar, which I still use as my main browser, than use a secondary program for a subset of the functions.

Lynx does just about anything you need. Easy movement from directory to directory, you can invoke an editor from within it to edit a file, you can do the key file handling things like deleting files and changing permission. You can set up lynx to invoke zgv or seejpeg to view graphic files. I likely use lynx far more than anything else, I've always got a few instances of it running in various consoles.

When I first tried Linux in late 2000, it was with a 240meg hard drive. One of the few things I could install was Lynx, but then it took care of a lot of what I'd need.

When I got an Aspire One a few months ago, about the first thing I did was install Lynx. It made things a whole lot easier.

Michael

Mikko said...

Cool tip! I had never realized one can use Lynx for browsing the file system, even if I have used it for more than a decade to browse the web when using a real Unix system provided by the university (e.g. Tru64) over a ssh connection.