Manage files and more

Midnight Commander can do more than just copy, move or delete files. Some would argue that it’s as versatile as Shashank Sharma.

- Shashank Sharma

OUR EXPERT

Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for memorable geeky memorabilia.

By standing orders of Linux Format’s beloved Editor (your cheque’s in the post – Ed), these two pages are reserved each issue to highlight text-based utilities that generally enliven your CLI experience. As we’re celebrating 30 years of the Linux kernel this issue, we’ve decided to focus on a wonderful command-line project that’s been around for nearly as long. Midnight Commander is an orthodox file manager that features a split-pane interface and is one of the oldest file managers that’s still being actively developed.

Currently under the GPLv3+ license, Midnight Commander is part of the GNU project. First released in 1994, Midnight Commander quickly became a favourite of most of the Linux crowd. Despite its soaring popularity, with the ever-increasing focus on GUI applications in the late 90s to early 2000s, Midnight Commander slowly fell away by the wayside.

This explains why none of the popular desktop distributions offer it as part of the default installation. And yet, you can gauge the continuing popularity of the application from the simple fact that all distributions feature it in their software repositories, making it a breeze to install.

If you’re on a Debian/Ubuntu-based distribution, you can run the sudo apt install mc command to install it. You can similarly use the sudo dnf install mc command to install Midnight Commander on RPM-based distributions such as Fedora.