Midnight Commander 4.6.0 review

GNU Midnight Commander is a user-friendly yet powerful file manager and visual shell, useful to novice and guru alike

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 3640K Developer: Miguel de Icaza

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GNU Midnight Commander is a user-friendly yet powerful file manager and visual shell, useful to novice and guru alike. It provides a clear, user-friendly, and somewhat protected interface to a Unix system while making many frequent file operations more efficient and preserving the full power of the command prompt. After some practice, you will wonder how you could ever live without it.

Being a text mode application, GNU Midnight Commander can be used locally or remotely, on the console or under X Window System. By using full screen space of the terminals, it provides an intuitive user interface to the operating system, aiming to be a useful tool for users with any level of experience, from a newbie to a guru.

GNU Midnight Commander used to support a GNOME interface, which was historically the first file manager for the GNOME project. This interface is no longer part of GNU Midnight Commander.

GNU Midnight Commander runs on POSIX (Unix-like) operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX and others. It can also be compiled under Cygwin on Windows.

GNU Midnight Commander uses GNU Autoconf which should automatically configure it for every Unix clone. Following configurations have been tested in the past (this list is very old):

i386-*-linux1.x, 2.x
alpha-linux-linux2
sparc-linux-linux2.x
sparc64-linux-linux2.1
mips-sgi-irix5.x, 6.x
mips-dec-ultrix4.3
rs6000-ibm-aix3.2.5
sparc-sun-sunos4.1
sparc-sun-solaris2.3, 2.4, 2.5
sparc-sun-netbsd1.0
hppa-hp-hpux9
hppa-hp-hpux7
m68k-apple-aux
unixware
mc88110-aviion-dgux5.4R2.01
i386-*-sco3.2v4.2
i386-*-sco3.2v5

Because GNU Midnight Commander is a full screen program it doesn't run on dummy terminals but anything more advanced will do (like vt100). If your terminal works with vi, emacs, elm or pine it will work with GNU Midnight Commander.



Requirements:
You need a POSIX (Unix compatible) operating system. If you are running Windows, use Cygwin.

To compile any edition you need to have glib 1.2.x or newer installed. It's available at ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/. If you don't have glib installed already, please note that glib 2.x is much harder to compile, so your first choice should be glib 1.2.10.

If you want to use mouse on the Linux console you need the gpm daemon from ftp://ftp.systemy.it/pub/develop/. You need nothing extra to use mouse on xterm.

If you do not want to use the S-Lang library you could try using ncurses version 4.1 and above.