Midnight Commander

GNU Midnight Commander, mc short, is a free clone of the DOS tools Norton Commander (→ two-column view) and is one of the most famous console programs under Linux.

About a VFS also a transparent access to archives and network servers is possible, such as FTP or Samba.

History

The Midnight Commander was developed in 1994 by Miguel de Icaza and was its first contribution to the GNU Project. About his intention to write the mc says Icaza himself:

"I wanted to have a good file manager because I came from the DOS world, where there was a similar tool that was pretty good. "

In previous versions, from 1999 to 2001 mc also had a graphical user interface gmc and was the first file manager of the Gnome project, but was considered very wrong. After the integration of Nautilus as the default file manager in GNOME graphical functions were removed from mc. However, the lack of GUI is also an advantage, since the mc so through a Telnet or SSH connection ( which runs in a console) can be on a target system use.

In the meantime, two Windows ports of the Midnight Commander have been implemented, but both are currently no longer being developed.

The development of the Midnight Commander stood still several years before reviving and version 4.6.2 released it in early 2009 a group of programmers. Despite the relatively long interval, in which the project was not further developed, it still has a very wide spread today.