4sysops - GNU Midnight Commander: Norton Commander for Linux

If you are old enough, you might remember the time when it was quite usual to work on the command line even on a Microsoft system. I am talking about the era of the good old MS DOS. My favourite file manager was the Norton Commander. When I switched to Windows this was the only tool I really missed. Nowadays, it is still usual to work on the command line on Linux boxes, especially when you log on over a WAN. Now, GNU Midnight Commander is one of my favourite tools under Linux. It looks exactly like the good old Norton Commander and has the same functionality plus some Linux specific features like browsing RPM files.
This tool eanbles you to easily copy, move, delete and edit files without typing any command. Yes, I really hate typing commands. One doesn’t need a gui enviornment like KDE or Gnome to run this tool. It runs from any terminal window and works perfectly fine with putty for example.

Midnight Commander has two panes that show the contents of two folders. To move the cursor to the other pane you press CTRL-I. To change a folder in a pane you can use the cursor keys or the mouse. The function keys are for managing files. For example you use F5 to copy a file from one pane (folder) to another. Editing files is as easy as it with notepad. No vi expertise is needed. There are many key-shortcuts. Press F9 to access the menu of Midnight Commander to learn more about them. There you will see that this tool has all important features of a modern file manager.

I suppose that all Linux distributions come with an installation package for Midnight Commander. For instance on a SuSE box you would use yast to install it. To start Midnight Command you just type mc on the command line. At the beginning I always typed nc, as I was used to do it under DOS. Yeah, I am really not good at typing. I was really surprised that I remembered all the shortcuts of Norton Commander after so many years. If you are also a DOS veteran, you should have this tool just for nostalgia’s sake.