Foxplane52

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. When I got my Mac and with it my introduction to the wonderful world of Mac OS X, coming from a Linux background, among the first things I tried to install was the GNU Midnight Commander, mc.mc is a very efficient console file manager which makes manipulating files and browsing your system a breeze. Those of us who spent a good part of their lives using Norton Commander and its countless. Insert key for Mac OS X: For Midnight commander it seem to be ^/Ctrl+T=Insert. The more generic Insert function is supposed to be Fn+Return/Enter=Insert, see this other question1 for more discussion and details.

I loathe this program. Avoid it like the plague. Most annoying is that once you start it there are no instructions on how to stop it. <p>
I learned to hate it because I frequently typo the unix 'mv' and 'mc' then end up having to kill the terminal window to get out ouf it. Yuck.

The keyboard mapping depends on used terminal, but in general esc-0 is same as F10, esc-9 - F9 and so on. So to exit mc you just need esc-0 or simply type exit and hit enter.

The point of my hint was exactly that thankfully things have come along far enough for mc to work 'out of the box' without any such annoyances on OS X that a simple act such as quitting it would pose a problem.
Which is to say, you can quit by pressing F10, as clearly noted all the time on the bottom of the screen. :)
Also, by following the above instructions, you will have working subshell support in mc, so you can also quit by typing 'exit'
It's quite understandable that you would loathe a program which doesn't register your key presses correctly. In this case, it's not really the program's fault though, but due to unfortunate legacy of all the many terminals and terminal emulators.
If your keyboard doesn't work properly in mc, chances are, you'll have the same problems in lynx, elinks, pine etc. - basically any console program which tries to be more ambitious than driven by a command line.
So it's worth taking your time to get things set up correctly, and, for the first time for me in Mac OS X, with Panther it's finally quite easy to achieve this goal. With Apple's own Terminal.app, no less.
In Jaguar and earlier a replacement third-party Terminal was almost a requirement.

next time the ESC - 0 (zero) sequence will be your best friend. :-)

This program helped make unix much easier to learn. Though it may have been a crutch, it really save me when plunged into no window gui (i.e. tweeking xf86config in linux)! Just for novelty sake, I tried installing it with fink a while back and that didn't work too well, as mentioned. It is unfortunate that now, it is much faster for me to use the cli than mc. But this just shows how far Mac os x is with being able to install/compile good ol unix programs. None of these compiles complained at all! Oh, fyi, the menu 'numbers' are accessed by typing the option key and then the number. For example option + 9 accesses the pulldown menu.

Midnight Commander Mac Os X Dmg Not Recognized

How do you access other drives using MuCommander? Mine only accesses the Hard drive.
I'm also a former Total Commander user and I loved it, but it's not available on the Mac.
Thanks

I compile all the bits and they installed fine.
Then when I compile mc during the ./configure it errors with
checking if nroff accepts -Tlatin1 or -Tascii... -Tlatin1
checking for file... true
checking for -L option to file command... yes
checking for subshell support... yes
configure: error: Value of the screen library is incorrect
I don't know how to fix this.

I fixed it, doh!! I am daft
spot the mistake I made!!!
./configure --without-x --with-screen=mcurses

I have a far far shorter version of this hint:
[code] fink install mc [code]
This will install everything you need, that is the function of fink. In addition, when you get fed up with typing 'mc' when you meant 'mv' you can just type 'fink remove mc' (or you could just learn that command+F10 quits mc). Yes, repeat after me: package managment is good, package managment is your friend, without package managment we would all be living in the stone age of windows DLL insanity.
Anyway, one should use fink for absolutely everything for which one can possibly use it for. Installing midnight commander is litterally the command above.
Now I'll admit that some programs are broken or not avaialble in fink. For these, it's not hard to learn how to modify fink's .info files manually. At any given time I maintain between 5 and 8 variant .info files in my /sw/fink/10.3/stable directory and fink warns me of every single one every time it selfupdates by printing a little ?. If I ever get a conflict, I just take a look at what their new .info file has to offer and probably switch over. Obviously, traditional mac users will never be effected by this last comment, as they will never even know about the programs which fink does not do well.
If you have not done so, try typing 'fink list | more' sometime (assuming that you have at least installed fink). You will see that fink really has a lot more to offer then a random selection of haphazardly installed programs recommended off macosxhints.com.

Unfortunately, the Fink copy is barely usable...

- using Apple's Terminal.app, mc starts in full color with all F1-F10 function keys and arrow keys properly working in xterm mode
- that you can use Ctrl-O
- that it no longer installs endless amounts of packages which are absolutely unnecessary for a console-mode mc (as opposed to the Gnome version)
- that invoking mc -V says 'With subshell support as default,' as opposed to without subshell support...

If the answer to all of the above is yes, then I too can wholeheartedly recommend going with the Fink copy.

Ok..I've hit a snag.
I got to the ./configure part of glib and I got the error:
checking for pkg-config... no
configure: error: *** pkg-config not found. See http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/
before I saw the correction. Now, how do I recover from this? After making the path correction, I'm still getting errors and none of the other setup are working.

I'm very sorry for not spotting the dependancy on /usr/local/bin being in your PATH before submitting the hint.

If you are still having problems, I'd be glad to assist if you post what kind of error you are getting. That is, if you are running at least 10.3 Panther, because problems are to be expected on Jaguar and earlier.

Tested this today on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and it works a treat!
Lifes a bit of a nightmare with mc.
Thanks to the original poster.

I have a different problem. I am running 10.3.5. I used fink to install glib. I jumped to step 2, downloaded the software and tried to issue the ./configure command and received this result:
./configure --without-x --with-screen=ncurses
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... no
checking for nawk... no
checking for awk... awk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking build system type... powerpc-apple-darwin7.5.0
checking host system type... powerpc-apple-darwin7.5.0
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
Can you think of what the problem might be?

mc does one thing that I haven't been able to easy do with muCommander, XFolders and the like: run as root. This is needed to do installs or copy files into the lib/site-packages folder of your Python install (among others).
I'd use something else if there were a way to authenticate when needed, rather than have the product complain about permissions, then stop.
---
Calgary, Alberta
Mac Mini

Thank you very much for this hint!
I followed your instructions and just installed mc successfully on OS X 10.4.10 without any problem. I used
gettext-0.16.1
glib-2.12.13
mc-4.6.1 and
pkg-config-0.22
Midnight Commander on OS X :) Finally!

Under 10.5.3
With...
mc 4.6.1
glib 2.2.3
gettext 0.17
pkg-config 0.18.1
installs prior to mc seem to go ok (I mean, who could tell with all that text flashing by?), at least, I don't finish with error messages;
but install of mc itself fails to find glib during configure and quits:
'test for glib failed'
It gives the following impenetrable remark:
'If GLIB was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin in in your path,
or set the GLIB_CONFIG environment variable to the full path to
glib-config.'
So I locate (using spotlight) glib-config, which is deep in my user source dir underneath the source code for glib, which I am deeply suspicious of. Anyway, I set the GLIB_CONFIG variable using export to that location. I try again. Now it goes a step further, but I suspect that glib actually didn't install; odd that it would be in my src directory and not somewhere more general.
So now I turn to 'PREFIX'. What the heck is 'PREFIX'? typing env does not turn up a variable named prefix. I presume it is some kind of path for something, but what? So how to find PREFIX/bin?
Lord, I despair of the entire GNU/foss installation nightmare. I can't think of one blinking install that actually went as advertised. :(
Can anyone tell me what obvious thing I'm missing here? I'd love to run mc on my Mac, I miss it terribly. I use it all the time on my linux systems.
And yeah, I tried the Java fu[] thing... it isn't mc, that's for sure. I'm in and out of my shell all the time. Need mc. Sniffle.
---
--fyngyrz

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:

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:

1. Pressing (and releasing) Esc and then pressing another key
2. Pressing and holding Ctrl and then pressing another key
3. 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:

Midnight Commander Mac Os X Dmg Full

Note that you have to perform:

or re-open your terminal for the changes to take effect.