Goal: Configuring Midnight Commander under Mac OS X bash terminal. Acknowledgement: My gratitude goes to the open source community and especially to: Miguel de Icaza – creator of Midnight Commander, Gnome, Mono, Gnumeric (and I guess other cool stuff) Let’s get started! Installation: I’m a huge fan of homebrew (thanks Max!) and I advise. How to Run Homebrew & x86 Terminal Apps on M1 Macs. If you’re one of the early adopters who acquired an M1 Apple Silicon Mac and find that Homebrew and many other x86 terminal apps don’t yet have support for the new Arm architecture, you’ll be happy to know there’s a fairly simple workaround. Midnight Commander Alternatives for Mac. There are many alternatives to Midnight Commander for Mac if you are looking to replace it. The most popular Mac alternative is Double Commander, which is both free and Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Midnight Commander and many of them are. Midnight Commander is a file manager program for managing files and archives in operation system and user shell with text-mode full-screen interface. MC works in text based mode and provide most of the necessary actions: viewing files and directories, editing, copying and renaming files, etc. Analog Commander X or Double Commander.
Abstract : Midnight Commander (MC) is one of the few tools I’m still using since I’ve been inducted into software engineering more than 10 years ago (for comparison I’ve changed 5 integrated development environments (IDE) ). MC is classified as “a visual file manager” but for me is something much more, it’s an engineering booster. In fact it’s my fist IDE (MCedit supports color highlighting for various programming languages). In short, MC is one of those few things that changes your world. That’s why I’m going to show you how you can painlessly integrate MC with Mac OS X bash terminal.
Goal : Configuring Midnight Commander under Mac OS X bash terminal
Acknowledgement : My gratitude goes to the open source community and especially to:
Miguel de Icaza – creator of Midnight Commander, Gnome, Mono, Gnumeric (and I guess other cool stuff)
Let’s get started!
Installation: I’m a huge fan of homebrew (thanks Max!) and I advise you to install it and work with it. In short, Homebrew is “the missing package manager for OS X”. Installing Homebrew is as easy as running the following command in the terminal prompt:
Midnight Commander Mac Os X Dmg Update
Once you have Homebrew, installing MC is exactly three words:
Side note: You may wish to install bash-completion and take advantage of the Tab key on the terminal prompt. If so, do the following:
… and ensure that your .bash_profile has the following content inside:
Note that you have to perform:
or re-open your terminal for the changes to take effect.
Mac OS X – fixing the shortcuts mess: No, I have no idea why the Apple guys have created such a big mess with the keyboard shortcuts. And yes, it’s up to you, my dearest reader, to decide if you want to fix it as I suggest. Here is what I’ve done so that I can use my Functional keys (the F keys):
Go to:
… and make sure you have All controls checked
After that go to:
… and make sure you have Use all F1, F2 etc. keys as standard function keys checked
Next open a Terminal and go to:
… and make sure you have Use option as meta keyunchecked.
Now, every F9 will enable MC menu bar and every F10 button press will exit MC (instead of doing a complex fingers split which may not work but which will certainly hurt your hand).
Playing with MC shortcuts: What about the cool MC shortcuts? Before I present you with some of the shortcuts mapping you should be aware that pressing two times the Esc button will close any MC pop-up or search box, and that there are three types of shortcuts:
- Pressing (and releasing) Esc and then pressing another key
- Pressing and holding Ctrl and then pressing another key
- Using the Functional key
Here are some mappings:
Keeping working directory after exiting MC: Now, I find this MC feature really cool but of course it’s up to you to decide if you want to enabled it or not. In case you want, make sure you have the following (or similar, depending on the midnight commander version) line in your .bash_profile:
Note that you have to perform:
Midnight Commander Mac Os X Dmg Full
or re-open your terminal for the changes to take effect.