Gnu Midnight Commander
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The GNU Midnight Commander, a dual-pane file manager inspired by Norton Commander, sparks nostalgia and discussion among users about its enduring utility and the evolution of file management tools.
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its size was right at the edge of segment (64k) so when a virus appended to the .com binary, volkov stopped working
I made a COM-to-EXE convertor back in time so that I can compress them with LZEXE (I don't remember anything about it, but I guess I just prepended an empty relocation table). It would have been interesting to incorporate that functionality in a virus.
And MC on the *nixes of course.
Go on, ask me how I know ...
I've not had much cause to use it since then though.
How do you know?
That was not a good day, about a week before submission was due. I unmounted the disk the second I realised what I'd done and started to look for guides on finding lost ext2 inodes. MC to the rescue!
If you were quick and unmounted as soon as you had realised what you’d done, and the space had not been re-used for anything, you could often get the file back because rm just unlinked the inodes on ext2 IIRC.
I imagine that the commands it used under the hood were accessible to anyone with the right know-how, but at the time that’s not something I had, and all the guides started with “use midnight commander” so I did :)
(Saying “only way” to recover might be a stretch, it’s true)
For some reason, the technical term for these is Orthodox File Manager, which I've always thought was an obscure cultural in-joke from the countries where these were most popular --- Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
This origin is elaborated at length here: https://softpanorama.org/Articles/introduction_to_orthodox_f...
The term Paradox is a challenging or somewhat contradictory idea.
We also use the term orthodox for a right handed boxer. “Southpaw” is non-orthodox left handed.
Orthodox = orthos + doxasia
Orthos = straight/correct
Doxasia = belief
orthodoxos = correct belief
The word “православный” in a meaning of some object/technology/way being good and true only started being used in Internet culture during 00s, and it still used, but as a slang/joke.
> "what is regarded as true or correct," from Late Latin orthodoxus, from Greek orthodoxos "having the right opinion," from orthos "right, true, straight" + doxa "opinion, praise".
(https://www.etymonline.com/word/orthodox)
But, when referring to dual-pane file managers, it's probably a mix of both meanings ("one true way" and "old-fashioned").
For me (native U.S. English speaker) the religious reference in "orthodox" is more transparent and that in "canonical" is more obscure, so "canonical" sounds more technical or more neutral somehow.
Ортодоксальный doesn't carry these connotations at all.
If anything, it describes something that is stuck in old ways and/or pointlessly rigid.
You describe it as not having this “one true way” connotation, but as having this pointlessly rigid connotation. In English, I think it has both connotations. Although, almost any phrase which has an implication of “one true way” can end up with a double meaning of “pointlessly rigid,” right? (It is context dependent, of course).
It can be contrasted against orthopraxy, right-practice, where the actions are more important than the belief or intent.
Based on the other comments here, these orthodox file browsers are based on a sort of underlying language,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271878
> The "orthodox" comes from a specific type of GUI, namely one that is driven by commands under the hood. UI elements are merely used to trigger commands that have the actual effect, and these commands could just as well be executed by hand, or automated into more complex commands.
It… kind of makes sense actually, if we stretch the definitions a bit, haha. The orthodox UI has some button, which is translated into a sequence of commands that represent the actual user intent.
The alternative is just to have the button do the thing directly, there’s no description of the user intent other than what the button does. It is quite a stretch but maybe we could call that the an Orthoprax UI.
This is an excellent way to build powerful UIs. It is what drives things like Vim, and often why Lisp-based software is so hackable -- think Emacs, StumpWM, etc. Instead of writing plugins against some small plugin API, you're wiring new functionality directly into the application.
The article you reference goes into more detail, as you say.
20-25 years ago when this kind of file managers were all the rage for power users I was in a Fidonet/Usenet discussion group with the most fanatical of these users, often sysadmins, plugin devs, etc. I don't think "orthodox" was used as a term - sometimes it was used as an epithet, maybe, sort of a joke.
But I guess Dr. Nikolai shows us that if you are really committed to introduced a term you can do it, eventually :D
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_file_manager
Now that I am more into the command line, I may need to give it a try.
For GUI file managers, I have to say you can't get better than Dolphin. It has an integrated shell for the current directory, and you can split the view. It can also directly open ssh and SFTP URLs. For local things the combination of Dolphin and it's shell is unbeatable.
You could do the same with Nautilus. But in their infinite wisdom GNOME developers decided to remove that ability.
I like things that work. Somehow that makes me a luddite!
I wish mc could browse remote URLs, and I'm tempted to author an mc clone in Go to address this particular pain-point. Maybe some day handcrafting bespoke rsync/rclone commands will frustrate me enough to motivate me.
Try <https://krusader.org>. Same KDE underpinnings, but orthodox interface.
It doesn't simply select them like some other file managers do, it searches within the name and not just the prefix (again, like some other file managers), you don't have to press anything beforehand. When you get used to it, it's hard to go without it.
https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt
For those preferring lightweight environments, it has far fewer dependencies than dolphin.
BTW, do you know if it can build for macOS, or is that a non-starter?
Very nice, but no longer as well maintained.
https://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/
Because that's what I miss most in my shell.
And of course, if the latest file isn't what I wanted, then it should be possible to easily go to the latest file before that.
[1] https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/newest.md*
[0]: https://yazi-rs.github.io/
I see it can even do file previews with kitty which is perfect as I already use kitty as my default terminal.
it was renamed somewhere around 1995
> ..a “Ctrl + dot” keyboard shortcut for opening the current directory in the terminal
https://9to5linux.com/gnome-49-brescia-desktop-environment-o...
Super nice especially when adding music to my library with Beets...
Better yet! (one-line) shell prompt is always available and has some nifty integrations via <Ctrl+X>. For example, one has a bunch of files visually tagged (selected) on current panel, and wants to tar them up as "/tmp/foo.tgz". Well...
I thought mc and mcedit was cool, but needed something small and portable within a fairly locked-down environment ( "No [root] for you!" as the admin would say.) =3
(pun totally coincidental)
It was originally written by Miguel de Icaza who became a semi-famous for his work on Mono and others.
Starting when I wrote the Chess program that Apple distributed on their Apple II demo cassette tape, I have been interested in writing games for fun. Unfortunately, while I can code, I need artists and generally people with ‘game design style’ to do anything decent - I had that when I worked at Angel Studios.
Gnome is a parody of its former self.
For people who like the power of Emacs dired, there used to be Sunrise Commander but last I looked it wasn't so actively maintained and had some bugs, so I've sadly gone back to regular dired.
https://source.midnight-commander.org/man/mc.html
I moved from England to Czechia in 2014 and was amazed to discover almost everyone used them. My first job in a Windows company, it had a site licence to Total Commander, and it was preinstalled on all machines.
When I told them I found the Windows Explorer to be perfectly fine, people genuinely gaped in amazement at me as if I said I chose to type with my feet or something. But I do. It's very keyboard-controllable, and was fast and efficient until MS started to cram the ribbon UI into it. Since Windows 8 it's been destroyed.
I used the Windows 3 UI, complete with File Manager, until 1996. I didn't mind it at all. But I thought the Windows 95 Explorer was an amazing tool when it was launched, and as soon as Win NT got Explorer with NT 4, I switched to it.
I have never been unhappy.
I can tile 2 windows side-by-side in moments if I want that old source-and-destination layout. It works absolutely great.
I tried Total Commander, and Midnight Commander too, and they don't do anything I can't do in seconds anyway. I really don't get it. It's not that I dislike them, but I am perfectly happy with the replacement.
I am not saying anything is wrong with the OFM model but when it went away in the OSes I used 30 years ago, I didn't miss it.
Delighted to find there are some Linux versions!
It now even supports true keyboard reporting (through Kitty TTY protocol on compatible terminals) for SSH connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nnn_(file_manager)
They're exactly the same as Norton Commander had been since the 80s.
It sure is a generational thing, I have the same problem with Emacs. But not with Vim.
For example i've worked three Polish gamedev companies and in every single one of them most people (including people who weren't even born in the days of Norton Commander) used Total Commander (it is GUI-based but the shortcut keys and overall layout are almost the same).
(FWIW Notepad++ was ubiquitous too)
I'm using GUI File Manager only for multimedia (photos, movies, pdf files).
Today, the DOS Think is far less prevalent.
Midnight Commander's screenshots would have looked a little off to OFM users with DOS Think. Today, it's the original MS/PC/DR-DOS tools that will appear odd to novices. They did things like have a narrow 8.3 filename column, omit the dots, use graphics in the filename for system files, use glyphs that one could only obtain through poking C0-range codes into video RAM, change UI elements as one pressed and released the Alt key, and so forth.
https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20191228133344.GA4943@...
Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder
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