Midnight Commander

Wiki > Midnight Commander

Intro

GNU Midnight Commander (also known as mc, the command used to start it) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager and a clone of Norton Commander. It was started by Miguel de Icaza in 1994.

It's a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included.

Midnight Commander is based on versatile text interfaces, such as Ncurses or S-Lang, which allows it to work on a regular console, inside an X Window terminal, over SSH connections and all kinds of remote shells.

Installation

Connect to your slot through SSH

Download the latest source tarball

 wget http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/mc-4.8.27.tar.xz

Extract the source tarball
```
 tar xvJf mc-4.8.27.tar.xz
```
Enter the source directory
```
 cd mc-4.8.27
```

Configure the installation

 ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-screen=ncurses

Begin compiling the application. This process may take some time to complete.
```
 make
```
Install the application
```
 make install
```
(Optional) Remove the source code:
```
 cd ..
 rm -r mc-4.8.27
```

Usage

Add the bin directory to your PATH (if you've done this previously, you do not need to do it again)
```
 echo "PATH=\$HOME/bin:\$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
```
Start Midnight Commander
```
 mc
```

For more usage examples and documentation use mc's documentation

PuTTY

Follow these steps to allow Midnight Commander to work better with PuTTY:

Add the following line to your .bashrc file by running this command
```
 echo "export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1" >> ~/.bashrc
```
Reload your .bashrc file
```
 source ~/.bashrc
```

Mouse Support

Follow these steps if Midnight Commander does not work with your mouse:

Add the following line to your .bashrc file by running this command
```
 echo "alias mc='TERM=linux mc -x'" >> ~/.bashrc
```
Reload your .bashrc file
```
 source ~/.bashrc
```

Updating

To update Midnight Commander, follow the installation steps again using the latest version.