NAME¶
mc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
USAGE¶
mc [-abcCdfhPstuUVx] [-l log] [dir1 [dir2]] [-e [file] ...] [-v file]
DESCRIPTION¶
GNU Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager for Unix-like
operating systems.
OPTIONS¶
- -a, --stickchars
- Disable usage of graphic characters for line drawing.
- -b, --nocolor
- Force black and white display.
- -c, --color
- Force color mode, please check the section Colors for more
information.
- -C arg, --colors=arg
- Specify a different color set in the command line. The format of arg is
documented in the Colors section.
- --configure-options
- Display configure options.
- -d, --nomouse
- Disable mouse support.
- -D N, --debuglevel=N
- Save the debug level for SMB VFS. N is in 0-10 range.
- -e [file], --edit[=file]
- Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on startup.
See also mcedit (1).
- -f, --datadir
- Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander files.
- -F, --datadir-info
- Display extended info about compiled-in paths for Midnight Commander.
- -g, --oldmouse
- Force a "normal tracking" mouse mode. Used when running on
xterm-capable terminals (tmux/screen).
- -k, --resetsoft
- Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo database. Only
useful on HP terminals when the function keys don't work.
- -K file, --keymap=file
- Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.
- -l file, --ftplog=file
- Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
- --nokeymap
- Don't load key bindings from any file, use default hardcoded keys.
- -P file, --printwd=file
- Print the last working directory to the specified file. This option is not
meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used from a special shell script
that automatically changes the current directory of the shell to the last
directory the Midnight Commander was in. Source the file
/usr/lib/mc/mc.sh (bash and zsh users) or /usr/lib/mc.csh
(tcsh users) respectively to define mc as an alias to the
appropriate shell script.
- -s, --slow
- Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks. If the section [Lines] is not
filled, the symbol for the pseudographics frame is a space, otherwise the
frame characters are taken from follow params.
You can redefine the following variables:
- lefttop
- left-top corner
- righttop
- right-top corner
- centertop
- center-top cross
- centerbottom
- center-bottom cross
- leftbottom
- left-bottom corner
- rightbottom
- right-bottom corner
- leftmiddle
- left-middle cross
- rightmiddle
- right-middle cross
- centermiddle
- center cross
- horiz
- default horizontal line
- vert
- default vertical line
- thinhoriz
- thin horizontal line
- thinvert
- thin vertical line
- -S arg, --skin=arg
- Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins is
documented in the Skins section.
- -t, --termcap
- Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it makes the
Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP variable for the
terminal information instead of the information on the system wide
terminal database
- -u, --nosubshell
- Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if the Midnight
Commander has been built with concurrent shell support).
- -U, --subshell
- Enable use of the concurrent shell support (only makes sense if the
Midnight Commander was built with the subshell support set as an optional
feature).
- -v file, --view=file
- Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also mcview
(1).
- -V, --version
- Display the version of the program.
- -x, --xterm
- Force xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals (two screen
modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
- -X, --no-x11
- Do not use X11 to get the state of modifiers Alt, Ctrl, Shift
If both paths are specified, the first path name is the directory to show in the
active panel; the second path name is the directory to be shown in the other
panel.
If one path is specified, the path name is the directory to show in the active
panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to be
shown in the passive panel.
If no paths are specified, current directory is shown in the active panel; value
of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to be shown in the
passive panel.
Overview¶
The screen of the Midnight Commander is divided into four parts. Almost all of
the screen space is taken up by two directory panels. By default, the second
line from the bottom of the screen is the shell command line, and the bottom
line shows the function key labels. The topmost line is the menu bar line. The
menu bar line may not be visible, but appears if you click the topmost line
with the mouse or press the F9 key.
The Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same time. One
of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in the current panel).
Almost all operations take place on the current panel. Some file operations
like Rename and Copy by default use the directory of the unselected panel as a
destination (don't worry, they always ask you for confirmation first). For
more information, see the sections on the Directory Panels, the Left and Right
Menus and the File Menu.
You can execute system commands from the Midnight Commander by simply typing
them. Everything you type will appear on the shell command line, and when you
press Enter the Midnight Commander will execute the command line you typed;
read the Shell Command Line and Input Line Keys sections to learn more about
the command line.
Mouse Support¶
The Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is activated whenever you
are running on an
xterm(1) terminal (it even works if you take a
telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm) or if you
are running on a Linux console and have the
gpm mouse server running.
When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is selected; if
you click with the right button, the file is marked (or unmarked, depending on
the previous state).
Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is an executable
program; and if the extension file has a program specified for the file's
extension, the specified program is executed.
Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function key labels
by clicking on them.
The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400 milliseconds. This may
be changed to other values by editing the ~/.config/mc/ini file and changing
the
mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
If you are running the Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you can get
the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding down the
Shift key.
Keys¶
Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of the
Control
(sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the
Meta (sometimes labeled ALT or
even Compose) keys. In this manual we will use the following abbreviations:
- C-<chr>
- means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>. Thus
C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.
- Alt-<chr>
- means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If there is
no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release it, then type the character
<chr>.
- S-<chr>
- means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.
All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approximation to the GNU Emacs
editor's key bindings (default).
You may redefine key bindings. See
redefine hotkey bindings
for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) relative to
default behavior.
There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are the most
important.
The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands
appearing in the File menu. This section includes the function keys. Most of
these commands perform some action, usually on the selected file or the tagged
files.
The Directory Panels section documents the keys which select a file or tag files
as a target for a later action (the action is usually one from the file menu).
The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are used for entering and
editing command lines. Most of these copy file names and such from the
directory panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typing) or access the
command line history.
Input Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This means both the command
line and the input lines in the query dialogs.
Redefine hotkey bindings¶
Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file). Initially,
Mignight Commander creates key bindings using keymap defined in the source
code. Then, two files
/usr/share/mc/mc.keymap and
/etc/mc/mc.keymap are loaded always, sequentially reassigned key
bindings defined earlier. User-defined keymap-file is searched on the
following algorithm (to the first one found):
-
1) command line option -K <keymap> or
--keymap=<keymap>
2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
3) Parameter keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] of config
file.
4) File ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap
Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file may
contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension .keymap or
without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the first one found):
-
1) ~/.config/mc
2) /etc/mc/
3) /usr/share/mc/
Miscellaneous Keys¶
Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other categories:
- Enter
- if there is some text in the command line (the one at the bottom of the
panels), then that command is executed. If there is no text in the command
line then if the selection bar is over a directory the Midnight Commander
does a chdir(2) to the selected directory and reloads the
information on the panel; if the selection is an executable file then it
is executed. Finally, if the extension of the selected file name matches
one of the extensions in the extensions file then the corresponding
command is executed.
- C-l
- repaint all the information in the Midnight Commander.
- C-x c
- run the Chmod command on a file or on the tagged files.
- C-x o
- run the Chown command on the current file or on the tagged files.
- C-x l
- run the hard link command.
- C-x s
- run the absolute symbolic link command.
- C-x v
- run the relative symbolic link command. See the File Menu section for more
information about symbolic links.
- C-x i
- set the other panel display mode to information.
- C-x q
- set the other panel display mode to quick view.
- C-x !
- execute the External panelize command.
- C-x h
- run the add directory to hotlist command.
- Alt-!
- executes the Filtered view command, described in the view command.
- Alt-?
- executes the Find file command.
- Alt-c
- pops up the quick cd dialog.
- C-o
- when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or under an
xterm, it will show you the output of the previous command. When ran on
the Linux console, the Midnight Commander uses an external program
(cons.saver) to handle saving and restoring of information on the
screen.
When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time and you
will be taken back to the Midnight Commander main screen, to return to your
application just type C-o. If you have an application suspended by using this
trick, you won't be able to execute other programs from the Midnight Commander
until you terminate the suspended application.
Directory Panels¶
This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If you want
to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a look at the section
on Left and Right Menus.
- Tab, C-i
- change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the new current
panel and the old current panel becomes the new other panel. The selection
bar moves from the old current panel to the new current panel.
- Insert, C-t
- to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo sequence). To
untag files, just retag a tagged file.
- M-e
- to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is made from
selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recoding you may
select "directory up" (..) in active panel. To cancel the
charsets in all directories, select "No translation " in the
dialog of encodings.
- Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j
- used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the bottom
one, respectively.
- Alt-t
- toggle the current display listing to show the next display listing mode.
With this it is possible to quickly switch to brief listing, long listing,
user defined listing mode, and back to the default.
- C-\ (control-backslash)
- show the directory hotlist and change to the selected directory.
- + (plus)
- this is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander will
prompt for a selection options. When Files only checkbox is on,
only files will be selected. If Files only is off, as files as
directories will be selected. When Shell Patterns checkbox is on,
the regular expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (*
standing for zero or more characters and ? standing for one character). If
Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with
normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive
checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters. If
Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
- \ (backslash)
- use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the
opposite of the Plus key.
- up-key, C-p
- move the selection bar to the previous entry in the panel.
- down-key, C-n
- move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.
- home, a1, Alt-<
- move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
- end, c1, Alt->
- move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
- next-page, C-v
- move the selection bar one page down.
- prev-page, Alt-v
- move the selection bar one page up.
- Alt-o
- If the currently selected file is a directory, load that directory on the
other panel and moves the selection to the next file. If the currently
selected file is not a directory, load the parent directory on the other
panel and moves the selection to the next file.
- Alt-i
- make the current directory of the current panel also the current directory
of the other panel. Put the other panel to the listing mode if needed. If
the current panel is panelized, the other panel doesn't become
panelized.
- C-PageUp, C-PageDown
- only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the
currently selected directory respectively.
- Alt-y
- moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to clicking the
< with the mouse.
- Alt-u
- moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to clicking the
> with the mouse.
- Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H
- displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v' with the
mouse.
Quick search¶
The Quick search mode allows you to perform fast file search in file panel.
Press
C-s or
Alt-s to start a filename search in the directory
listing.
When the search is active, the user input will be added to the search string
instead of the command line. If the
Show mini-status option is enabled
the search string is shown on the mini-status line. When typing, the selection
bar will move to the next file starting with the typed letters. The
Backspace or
DEL keys can be used to correct typing mistakes. If
C-s is pressed again, the next match is searched for.
If quick search is started with double pressing of C-s, the previous quick
search pattern will be used for current search.
Besides the filename characters, you can also use wildcard characters '*' and
'?'.
Shell Command Line¶
This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when entering
shell commands.
- Alt-Enter
- copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
- C-Enter
- same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some terminals.
- C-Shift-Enter
- copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the command
line. May not work on remote systems and some terminals.
- Alt-Tab
- does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname completion for
you.
- C-x t, C-x C-t
- copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged files, the selected file)
of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other panel (C-x C-t) to the
command line.
- C-x p, C-x C-p
- the first key sequence copies the current path name to the command line,
and the second one copies the unselected panel's path name to the command
line.
- C-q
- the quote command can be used to insert characters that are otherwise
interpreted by the Midnight Commander (like the '+' symbol)
- Alt-p, Alt-n
- use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p takes you to
the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
- Alt-h
- displays the history for the current input line.
General Movement Keys¶
The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common code to
handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same keys. Each of them also
accepts some keys of its own.
Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same movement keys, so
this section may be of use for those parts too.
- Up, C-p
- moves one line backward.
- Down, C-n
- moves one line forward.
- Prev Page, Page Up, Alt-v
- moves one page up.
- Next Page, Page Down, C-v
- moves one page down.
- Home, A1
- moves to the beginning.
- End, C1
- move to the end.
The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addition the to
ones mentioned above:
- b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete
- moves one page up.
- Space bar
- moves one page down.
- u, d
- moves one half of a page up or down.
- g, G
- moves to the beginning or to the end.
The input lines (they are used for the command line and for the query dialogs in
the program) accept these keys:
- C-a
- puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
- C-e
- puts the cursor at the end of the line.
- C-b, move-left
- move the cursor one position left.
- C-f, move-right
- move the cursor one position right.
- Alt-f
- moves one word forward.
- Alt-b
- moves one word backward.
- C-h, Backspace
- delete the previous character.
- C-d, Delete
- delete the character in the point (over the cursor).
- C-@
- sets the mark for cutting.
- C-w
- copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer and
removes the text from the input line.
- Alt-w
- copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer.
- C-y
- yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
- C-k
- kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
- Alt-p, Alt-n
- Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p takes you to
the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
- Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace
- delete one word backward.
- Alt-Tab
- does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname completion for
you.
The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse on the top row of the
screen. The menu bar has five menus: "Left", "File",
"Command", "Options" and "Right".
The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appearance of the left and
right directory panels.
The File Menu lists the actions you can perform on the currently selected file
or the tagged files.
The Command Menu lists the actions which are more general and bear no relation
to the currently selected file or the tagged files.
The Options Menu lists the actions which allow you to customize the Midnight
Commander.
Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus¶
The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the
Left and
Right menus (they are named
Above and
Below when the
horizontal panel split is chosen from the Layout options dialog).
Listing Mode...¶
The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are four
different listing modes available:
Full,
Brief,
Long and
User. The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file
and the modification time.
The brief view shows only the file name and it has two columns (therefore
showing twice as many files as other views). The long view is similar to the
output of
ls -l command. The long view takes the whole screen width.
If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to specify the
display format.
The user display format must start with a panel size specifier. This may be
"half" or "full", and they specify a half screen panel and
a full screen panel respectively.
After the panel size, you may specify the two columns mode on the panel, this is
done by adding the number "2" to the user format string.
After this you add the name of the fields with an optional size specifier. This
are the available fields you may display:
- name
- displays the file name.
- size
- displays the file size.
- bsize
- is an alternative form of the size format. It displays the size of
the files and for directories it just shows SUB-DIR or UP--DIR.
- type
- displays a one character wide type field. This character is similar to
what is displayed by ls with the -F flag - * for executable files,
/ for directories, @ for links, = for sockets,
- for character devices, + for block devices, | for
pipes, ~ for symbolic links to directories and ! for stale
symlinks (links that point nowhere).
- mark
- an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
- mtime
- file's last modification time.
- atime
- file's last access time.
- ctime
- file's status change time.
- perm
- a string representing the current permission bits of the file.
- mode
- an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.
- nlink
- the number of links to the file.
- ngid
- the GID (numeric).
- nuid
- the UID (numeric).
- owner
- the owner of the file.
- group
- the group of the file.
- inode
- the inode of the file.
Also you can use following keywords to define the panel layout:
- space
- a space in the display format.
- |
- add a vertical line to the display format.
To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add
:
followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If the number
is followed by the symbol
+, then the size specifies the minimal field
size - if the program finds out that there is more space on the screen, it
will then expand that field.
For example, the
Full display corresponds to this format:
half type name | size | mtime
And the
Long display corresponds to this format:
full perm space nlink space owner space group space size space mtime space name
This is a nice user display format:
half name | size:7 | type mode:3
Panels may also be set to the following modes:
- Info
- The info view display information related to the currently selected file
and if possible information about the current file system.
- Tree
- The tree view is quite similar to the directory tree feature. See the
section about it for more information.
- Quick View
- In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced viewer that displays the
contents of the currently selected file, if you select the panel (with the
tab key or the mouse), you will have access to the usual viewer
commands.
Sort Order...¶
The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modification time, by access
time, and by inode information modification time, by size, by inode and
unsorted. In the Sort order dialog box you can choose the sort order and you
may also specify if you want to sort in reverse order by checking the reverse
box.
By default directories are sorted before files but this can be changed from the
Panel options menu (option
Mix all files).
Filter...¶
The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern (for example
*.tar.gz) which the files must match to be shown. Regardless of the
filter pattern, the directories and the links to directories are always shown
in the directory panel.
Reread¶
The reread command reload the list of files in the directory. It is useful if
other processes have created or removed files.
The Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard shortcuts for commands
appearing in the file menu. The escape sequences for the function keys are
terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals without function key
support, you can achieve the same functionality by pressing the ESC key and
then a number in the range 1 through 9 and 0 (corresponding to F1 to F9 and
F10 respectively).
The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in parentheses):
Help (F1)
Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the help viewer, you can use
the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to follow that link. The
keys Space and Backspace are used to move forward and backward in a help page.
Press F1 again to get the full list of accepted keys.
Menu (F2)
Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way to provide users with a
menu and add extra features to the Midnight Commander.
View (F3, F13)
View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the Internal File
Viewer but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an
external file viewer specified by the
VIEWER environment variable. If
VIEWER is undefined, the
PAGER environment variable is tried. If
PAGER is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If
you use F13 instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting
or preprocessing to the file.
See parameters for external viewer for explain how you may specify an extended
command line options for external viewers.
Filtered View (Alt-!)
This command prompts for a command and its arguments (the argument defaults to
the currently selected file name), the output from such command is shown in
the internal file viewer.
Edit (F4, F14)
Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually F14) to start the
editor with a new, empty file. Currently they invoke the
vi editor, or
the editor specified in the
EDITOR environment variable, or the
Internal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
See parameters for external editor for explain how you may specify an extended
command line options for external editors.
Copy (F5, F15)
Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file (or the
tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the directory/filename
you specify in the input dialog. The destination defaults to the directory in
the non-selected panel. Space for destination file may be preallocated
relative to preallocate_space configure option. During this process, you can
press C-c or ESC to abort the operation. For details about source mask (which
will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$ depending on setting of Use shell
patterns) and possible wildcards in the destination see Mask copy/rename.
F15 (usually F15) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the selected
panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of any tagged
files.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by clicking on
the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog box). The Background
Jobs is used to control the background process.
Link (C-x l)
Create a hard link to the current file.
Absolute symlink (C-x s)
Create a absolute symbolic link to the current file.
Relative symLink (C-x v)
Create a relative symbolic link to the current file.
To those of you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a file is a
bit like copying the file, but both the source filename and the destination
filename represent the same file image. For example, if you edit one of these
files, all changes you make will appear in both files. Some people call links
aliases or shortcuts.
A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there is no way of telling
which one is the original and which is the link. If you delete either one of
them the other one is still intact. It is very difficult to notice that the
files represent the same image. Use hard links when you don't even want to
know.
A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original file. If the original
file is deleted the symbolic link is useless. It is quite easy to notice that
the files represent the same image. The Midnight Commander shows an
"@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic link to
somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a tilde (~)). The original file
which the link points to is shown on mini-status line if the
Show
mini-status option is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to avoid
the confusion that can be caused by hard links.
When you press "C-x s" Midnight Commander will automatically fill in
the complete path+filename of the original file and suggest a name for the
link. You can change either one.
Sometimes you may want to change the absolute path of the original into a
relative path. An absolute path starts from the root directory:
/home/frodo/mc/mc -> /home/frodo/new/mc
A relative link describes the original file's location starting from the
location of the link itself:
/home/frodo/mc/mc -> ../new/mc
You can force Midnight Commander to suggest a relative path by pressing
"C-x v" instead of "C-x s".
Rename/Move (F6, F16)
Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file (or the
tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the directory/filename
you specify in the input dialog. The destination defaults to the directory in
the non-selected panel. For more details look at Copy (F5) operation above,
most of the things are quite similar.
F16 (usually F16) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the selected
panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of any tagged
files.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by clicking on
the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog box). The Background
Jobs is used to control the background process.
Mkdir (F7)
Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory specified.
Delete (F8)
Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in the currently selected
panel. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort the operation.
Quick cd (Alt-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full command line
and want to cd somewhere.
Select group (+)
This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander will
prompt for a selection options. When
Files only checkbox is on, only
files will be selected. If
Files only is off, as files as directories
will be selected. When
Shell Patterns checkbox is on, the regular
expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (* standing for
zero or more characters and ? standing for one character). If
Shell
Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
expressions (see ed (1)). When
Case sensitive checkbox is on, the
selection will be case sensitive characters. If
Case sensitive is off,
the case will be ignored.
Unselect group (\)
Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of the
Select
group command.
Quit (F10, Shift-F10)
Terminate the Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when you want to quit and
you are using the shell wrapper. Shift-F10 will not take you to the last
directory you visited with the Midnight Commander, instead it will stay at the
directory where you started the Midnight Commander.
Quick cd¶
This command is useful if you have a full command line and want to cd somewhere
without having to yank and paste the command line. This command pops up a
small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter after
cd on
the command line and then you press enter. This features all the things that
are already in the internal cd command.
Command Menu¶
The Directory tree command shows a tree figure of the directories.
The "Find file" command allows you to search for a specific file.
The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the two directory
panels.
The "Switch panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell
command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD console.
The "Compare directories" command compares the directory panels with
each other. You can then use the Copy (F5) command to make the panels
identical. There are three compare methods. The quick method compares only
file size and file date. The thorough method makes a full byte-by-byte
compare. The thorough method is not available if the machine does not support
the
mmap(2) system call. The size-only compare method just compares the file
sizes and does not check the contents or the date times, it just checks the
file size.
The "External panelize" allows you to execute an external program, and
make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
The "Command history" command shows a list of typed commands. The
selected command is copied to the command line. The command history can also
be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-n.
The "Directory hotlist" command makes changing of the current
directory to often used directories faster.
The "Screen list" command shows a dialog window with the list of
currently running internal editors, viewers and other MC modules that support
this mode.
The "Edit extension file" command allows you to specify programs to
executed when you try to execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other thing on
files with certain extensions (filename endings).
The "Edit Menu File" command may be used for editing the user menu
(which appears by pressing F2).
Directory Tree¶
The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the directories. You can
select a directory from the figure and the Midnight Commander will change to
that directory.
There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory tree command is
available from Commands menu. The other way is to select tree view from the
Left or Right menu.
To get rid of long delays the Midnight Commander creates the tree figure by
scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the directory which
you want to see is missing, move to its parent directory and press C-r (or
F2).
You can use the following keys:
General movement keys are accepted.
Enter. In the directory tree, exits the directory tree and changes to
this directory in the current panel. In the tree view, changes to this
directory in the other panel and stays in tree view mode in the current panel.
C-r, F2 (Rescan). Rescan this directory. Use this when the tree figure is
out of date: it is missing subdirectories or shows some subdirectories which
don't exist any more.
F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure. Use this to
remove clutter from the figure. If you want the directory back to the tree
figure press F2 in its parent directory.
F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic navigation mode (default)
and the static navigation mode.
In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to select a
directory. All known directories are shown.
In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to select a
sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent directory, and the Right
key to move to a child directory. Only the parent, sibling and children
directories are shown, others are left out. The tree figure changes
dynamically as you traverse.
F5 (Copy). Copy the directory.
F6 (RenMov). Move the directory.
F7 (Mkdir). Make a new directory below this directory.
F8 (Delete). Delete this directory from the file system.
C-s, Alt-s. Search the next directory matching the search string. If
there is no such directory these keys will move one line down.
C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search string.
Any other character. Add the character to the search string and move to
the next directory which starts with these characters. In the tree view you
must first activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The search string is
shown in the mini status line.
The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They aren't
supported in the tree view.
F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.
The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See also the section
on mouse support.
Find File¶
The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the search and the
filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree button you can select the
start directory from the directory tree figure.
Option form whole words. Like grep -w.
You can start the search by pressing the OK button. During the search you can
stop from the Stop button and continue from the Start button.
You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow keys. The Chdir button
will change to the directory of the currently selected file. The Again button
will ask for the parameters for a new search. The Quit button quits the search
operation. The Panelize button will place the found files to the current
directory panel so that you can do additional operations on them (view, copy,
move, delete and so on). After panelizing you can press C-r to return to the
normal file listing.
The 'Enable ignore directories' checkbox and input field below it allow to set
up the list of directories that should be skip during the search files (for
example, you may want to avoid searches on a CD-ROM or on a NFS directory that
is mounted across a slow link). List components must be separated with a
colon, here is an example:
/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
Relative paths are supported also. The following example shows how to skip
special directories of version control systems:
/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs:.svn:.git:CVS
Attention: input field can contain a dot (.), this means the current absolute
path.
You may consider using the External panelize command for some operations. Find
file command is for simple queries only, while using External panelize you can
do as mysterious searches as you would like.
External panelize¶
The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and make the
output of that program the contents of the current panel.
For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the panels all the symbolic
links in the current directory, you can use external panelization to run the
following command:
find . -type l -print
Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no longer be
the directory listing of the current directory, but all the files that are
symbolic links.
If you want to panelize all of the files that have been downloaded from your FTP
server, you can use this awk command to extract the file name from the
transfer log files:
awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/xferlog
You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive name, so
that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the command on the
input line and pressing Add new button. Then you enter a name under which you
want the command to be saved. Next time, you just choose that command from the
list and do not have to type it again.
Hotlist¶
The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the directories in the
directory hotlist. The Midnight Commander will change to the directory
corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dialog, you can remove
already created label/directory pairs and add new ones. To add new directories
quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist command (C-x h), which adds the
current directory into the directory hotlist, asking just for the label for
the directory.
This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using the
CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
Edit Extension File¶
This will invoke your editor on the file
~/.config/mc/mc.ext. The format
of this file following:
All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
keyword/expr, i.e. everything after the slash until new line is
expr.
keyword can be:
- shell
- - expr is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name
ends with expr. Example: shell/.tar matches
*.tar.
- regex
- - expr is a regular expression. File matches if its name matches
the regular expression.
- directory
- - expr is a regular expression. File matches if it is a directory
and its name matches the regular expression.
- type
- - expr is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
file %f without the initial "filename:" part matches
regular expression expr.
- default
- - matches any file. expr is ignored.
- include
- - denotes a common section. expr is the name of the section.
Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the format:
keyword=command (with no spaces around =), where
keyword should
be:
Open (invoked on Enter or double click),
View (F3),
Edit (F4) or
Include (to add rules from the common section).
command is any one-line shell command, with the simple macro
substitution.
Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If the
appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule didn't match
(i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and View action is missing
in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View action from the second entry
will be used).
default should match all the actions.
Background Jobs¶
This lets you control the state of any background Midnight Commander process
(only copy and move files operations can be done in the background). You can
stop, restart and kill a background job from here.
The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized by the user.
When you access the user menu, the file .mc.menu from the current directory is
used if it exists, but only if it is owned by user or root and is not
world-writable. If no such file found, ~/.config/mc/menu is tried in the same
way, and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide menu /usr/share/mc/mc.menu.
The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with anything but
space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in order to be able to use
it like a hot key, the first character should be a letter). All the lines that
start with a space or a tab are the commands that will be executed when the
entry is selected.
When an option is selected all the command lines of the option are copied to a
temporary file in the temporary directory (usually /usr/tmp) and then that
file is executed. This allows the user to put normal shell constructs in the
menus. Also simple macro substitution takes place before executing the menu
code. For more information, see macro substitution.
Here is a sample mc.menu file:
A Dump the currently selected file
od -c %f
B Edit a bug report and send it to root
I=`mktemp ${MC_TMPDIR:-/tmp}/mail.XXXXXX` || exit 1
vi $I
mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < $I
rm -f $I
M Read mail
emacs -f rmail
N Read Usenet news
emacs -f gnus
H Call the info hypertext browser
info
J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
K Make a release of the current subdirectory
echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
read tar
ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
cd ..
tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
tar xzvf %f
Default Conditions
Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condition must start from
the first column with a '=' character. If the condition is true, the menu
entry will be the default entry.
Condition syntax: = <sub-cond>
or: = <sub-cond> | <sub-cond> ...
or: = <sub-cond> & <sub-cond> ...
Sub-condition is one of following:
y <pattern> syntax of current file matching pattern?
(for edit menu only)
f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
t <type> current file of type?
T <type> other file of type?
x <filename> is it executable filename?
! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according to the
shell patterns option. You can override the global value of the shell patterns
option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first line of the menu
file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).
Type is one or more of the following characters:
n not a directory
r regular file
d directory
l link
c character device
b block device
f FIFO (pipe)
s socket
x executable file
t tagged
For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't' type is a
little special because it acts on the panel instead of the file. The condition
'=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the current panel and false if
not.
If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be shown
whenever the value of the condition is calculated.
The conditions are calculated from left to right. This means
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
is calculated as
( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
Addition Conditions
If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it is an
addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will be included
in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will not be included in
the menu.
You can combine default and addition conditions by starting condition with '+='
or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you want to use two
different conditions, one for adding and another for defaulting, you can
precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one starting with '+' and
another starting with '='.
Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start with '#',
space or tab.
The Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and off in
several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options are enabled if
they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.
The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change most of
settings of the Midnight Commander.
The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of options
how mc looks like on the screen.
The Panel options command pops up a dialog from which you specify options of
file manager panels.
The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which actions
you want to confirm.
The Appearance command pops up a dialog from which you specify the skin.
The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select which
characters is your terminal able to display.
The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys which are
not working on some terminals and you may fix them.
The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS related
options.
The Save setup command saves the current settings of the Left, Right and Options
menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.
Configuration¶
The options in this dialog are divided into several groups: "File operation
options", "Esc key mode", "Pause after run" and
"Other options".
File operation options
Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and Delete
operations are verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each operation). If you
have a slow terminal, you may wish to disable the verbose operation. It is
automatically turned off if the speed of your terminal is less than 9600 bps.
Compute totals. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander
computes total byte sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy, Rename
and Delete operations. This will provide you with a more accurate progress bar
at the expense of some speed. This option has no effect, if
Verbose
operation is disabled.
Classic progressbar. If this option is enabled, the progressbar of
Copy/Move/Delete operations is always grown form left to right. If disabled,
the growing direction of progressbar follows to direction of Copy/Move/Delete
operation: from left panel to right one and vice versa. Enabled by default.
Mkdir autoname. When you press F7 to create a new directory, the input
line in popup dialog will be filled by name of current file or directory in
active panel. Disabled by default.
Preallocate space. Preallocate space for whole target file, if possible,
before copy operation. Disabled by default.
Esc key mode.
By default the Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key prefix. Therefore,
you should press Esc code twice to exit a dialog. But there is a possibility
to use a single press of ESC key for that action.
Single press. By default this option is disabled. If you'll enable it,
the ESC key will act as a prefix key for set up time interval (see
Timeout option below), and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC
key is interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).
Timeout. This options is used to setup the time interval (in
microseconds) for single press of ESC key. By default, this inrerval is one
second (1000000 microseconds). Also the timeout can be set via
KEYBOARD_KEY_TIMEOUT_US environment variable (also in microseconds), which has
higher priority than Timeout option value.
Pause after run
After executing your commands, the Midnight Commander can pause, so that you can
examine the output of the command. There are three possible settings for this
variable:
Never. Means that you do not want to see the output of your command. If
you are using the Linux or FreeBSD console or an xterm, you will be able to
see the output of the command by typing C-o.
On dumb terminals. You will get the pause message on terminals that are
not capable of showing the output of the last command executed (any terminal
that is not an xterm or the Linux console).
Always. The program will pause after executing all of your commands.
Other options
Use internal editor. If this option is enabled, the built-in file editor
is used to edit files. If the option is disabled, the editor specified in the
EDITOR environment variable is used. If no editor is specified,
vi is used. See the section on the internal file editor.
Use internal viewer. If this option is enabled, the built-in file viewer
is used to view files. If the option is disabled, the pager specified in the
PAGER environment variable is used. If no pager is specified, the
view command is used. See the section on the internal file viewer.
Ask new file name. If this option is enabled, file name is asked before
open new file in editor.
Auto menus. If this option is enabled, the user menu will be invoked at
startup. Useful for building menus for non-unixers.
Drop down menus. When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will be
activated as soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only get the
menu title, and you will have to activate the menu either with the arrow keys
or with the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using hotkeys.
Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Filter commands will
use shell-like regular expressions. The following conversions are performed to
achieve this: the '*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more characters); the '?'
is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and '.' by the literal dot. If the
option is disabled, then the regular expressions are the ones described in
ed(1).
Complete: show all. By default the Midnight Commander pops up all
possible completions if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
Alt-Tab for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as
much as possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this option if you
want to see all possible completions even after pressing
Alt-Tab the
first time.
Rotating dash. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander shows a
rotating dash in the upper right corner as a work in progress indicator.
Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes the Midnight Commander to
follow the logical chain of directories when changing current directory either
in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default behavior of bash.
When unset, the Midnight Commander follows the real directory structure, so cd
.. if you've entered that directory through a link will move you to the
current directory's real parent and not to the directory where the link was
present.
Safe delete. If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory
hotlist entries unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default selection
in the confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from "Yes" to
"No". This option is disabled by default.
Auto save setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit the Midnight
Commander the configurable options of the Midnight Commander are saved in the
~/.config/mc/ini file.
Layout¶
The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout of
screen. The options in this dialog are divided into several groups:
"Panel split", "Console output" and "Other
options".
Panel split
The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory panels. You can
specify whether the area is split to the panels in
Vertical or
Horizontal direction. Panel layout can be changed using Alt-,
(Alt-comma) shortcut.
Equal split. By default, panels have equal sizes. Using this option you
can specify an unequal split.
Console output
On the Linux or FreeBSD console you can specify how many lines are shown in the
output window. This option is available if Midnight Commander runs on native
console only.
Other options
Menu bar visible. If enabled, main menu of Midnight Commander is always
visible on the top row of screen above panels. Enabled by default.
Command prompt. If enabled, command line is avalable. Enabled by default.
Keybar visible. If enabled, 10 lables associated with F1-F10 keys are
located at the bottom row of screen. Enabled by default.
Hintbar visible. If enabled, the one-line hints are visible below panels.
Enabled by default.
XTerm window title. When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight
Commander sets the terminal window title to the current working directory and
updates it when necessary. If your terminal emulator is broken and you see
some incorrect output on startup and directory change, turn off this option.
Enabled by default.
Show free space. If enabled, free space and total space of current file
system is shown at the bottom frame of panel. Enabled by default.
Panel options¶
Main panel options
Show mini-status. If enabled, one line of status information about the
currently selected item is shown at the bottom of the panels. Enabled by
default.
Use SI size units. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander will use
SI units (powers of 1000) when displaying any byte sizes. The suffixes (k, m
...) are shown in lowercase. If disabled (default), Midnight Commander will
use binary units (powers of 1024) and the suffixes are shown in upper case (K,
M ...)
Mix all files. If this option is enabled, all files and directories are
shown mixed together. If the option is disabled (default), directories (and
links to directories) are shown at the beginning of the listing, and other
files below.
Show backup files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show files
ending with a tilde. Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls option -B).
Enabled by default.
Show hidden files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show all files
that start with a dot (like ls -a). Disabled by default.
Fast directory reload. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander
will use a trick to determine if the directory contents have changed. The
trick is to reload the directory only if the i-node of the directory has
changed; this means that reloads only happen when files are created or
deleted. If what changes is the i-node for a file in the directory (file size
changes, mode or owner changes, etc) the display is not updated. In these
cases, if you have the option on, you have to rescan the directory manually
(with C-r). Disabled by default.
Mark moves down. If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you
mark a file (with Insert key). Enabled by default.
Reverse files only. Allow revert selection of files only. Enabled by
default. If enabled, the reverse selection is applied to files only, not to
directories. The selection of directories is untouched. If off, the reverse
selection is applied to files as well to directories: all unselected items
become selected, and vice versa.
Simple swap. If both panels contain file listing, simple swap means that
panels exchange its screen positions: left panel become right one, and vice
versa. If this option is unchecked, file listing panels exchange its content
keeping listing format and sort options. Unchecked by default.
Auto save panels setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit the
Midnight Commander the current settings of panels are saved in the
~/.config/mc/panels.ini file. Disabled by default.
Navigation
Lynx-like motion. If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows keys
to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory and the
shell command line is empty. By default, this setting is off.
Page scrolling. If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the
display when the cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel,
otherwise it will just scroll a file at a time.
Mouse page scrolling. Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse wheel is
done by pages or line by line on the panels.
File highlight
You can specify whether
permissions and
file types should be
highlighted with distinctive Colors. If the permission highlighting is
enabled, the parts of the
perm and
mode display fields which
apply to the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with the color
defined by the
selected keyword. If the file type highlighting is
enabled, file names are colored according to rules described in
/etc/mc/filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for more info.
Quick search
You can specify how the Quick search mode should works: case insensitively, case
sensitively or be matched to the the panel sort order: case sensitive or not.
Confirmation¶
In this dialog you configure the confirmation options for file deletion,
overwriting files, execution by pressing enter, quitting the program,
directory hotlist entries deletion and history cleanup.
Appearance¶
In this dialog you can select the skin to be used.
See the Skins section for technical details about the skin definition files.
Display bits¶
This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the screen. This
setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/curses supports only seven output bits,
ISO-8859-1 displays all the characters in the ISO-8859-1 map and full 8 bits
is for those terminals that can display full 8 bit characters.
Learn keys¶
This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor arrows and
some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal. They often don't,
since many terminal databases are incomplete or broken.
You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h' left, 'j'
down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor movement key and it is
recognized, you can use that key as well.
You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a key and it is
recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name of that key. Once a key
is marked OK it starts working as usually, e.g. F1 pressed the first time will
just check that the F1 key works, but after that it will show help. The same
applies to the arrow keys. The Tab key should be working always.
If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after pressing
one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by pressing the button
with the name of that key (either by the mouse or by Enter or Space after
selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then a message box will appear
asking you to press that key. Do it and wait until the message box disappears.
If you want to abort, just press Escape once and wait.
When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions for the
keys you have redefined will be written into the [terminal:TERM] section of
your ~/.config/mc/ini file (where TERM is the name of your current terminal).
The definitions of the keys that were already working properly are not saved.
Virtual FS¶
This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File System.
The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some of the
virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the file system
(for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).
Also, in order to access the contents of compressed files (for example,
compressed tar files) the Midnight Commander needs to create temporary
uncompressed files on your disk.
Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk take up
resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached information to
decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of access to frequently
used file systems.
Because of the format of the tar archives, the
Tar filesystem needs to
read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most tar files are
usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in extinction), the tar
file system has to uncompress the file on the disk in a temporary location and
then access the uncompressed file as a regular tar file.
Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk, it's
common that you will leave a tar file and then re-enter it later. Since
decompression is slow, the Midnight Commander will cache the information in
memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires, all the resources
associated with the file system are released. The default timeout is set to
one minute.
The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote FTP
servers. It has several options.
ftp anonymous password is the password used when you login as
"anonymous". Some sites require a valid e-mail address. On the other
hand, you probably don't want to give your real e-mail address to untrusted
sites, especially if you are not using spam filtering.
ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a cache. The
cache expire time is configurable with the
ftpfs directory cache
timeout option. A low value for this option may slow down every operation
on the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a request to the
FTP server.
You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern firewalls
are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below), so FTP proxies are
considered obsolete.
If
Always use ftp proxy is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to
enable proxy for certain hosts. See FTP File System for examples.
If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
/usr/lib/mc/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names that are local
(if the host name starts with a dot, it is assumed to be a domain) and to
assume that any hostnames without dots in their names are directly accessible.
All other hosts will be accessed through the specified FTP proxy.
You can enable using
~/.netrc file, which keeps login names and passwords
for ftp servers. See netrc (5) for the description of the .netrc format.
Use passive mode enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection for
data transfer is initiated by the client, not by the server. This option is
recommended and enabled by default. If this option is turned off, the data
connection is initiated by the server. This may not work with some firewalls.
Save Setup¶
At startup the Midnight Commander will try to load initialization information
from the ~/.config/mc/ini file. If this file doesn't exist, it will load the
information from the system-wide configuration file, located in
/usr/share/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration file doesn't exist, MC
uses the default settings.
The
Save Setup command creates the ~/.config/mc/ini file by saving the
current settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
If you activate the
auto save setup option, MC will always save the
current settings when exiting.
There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To change these
settings you have to edit the setup file with your favorite editor. See the
section on Special Settings for more information.
Executing operating system commands¶
You may execute commands by typing them directly in the Midnight Commander's
input line, or by selecting the program you want to execute with the selection
bar in one of the panels and hitting Enter.
If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, the Midnight Commander
checks the extension of the selected file against the extensions in the
Extensions File. If a match is found then the code associated with that
extension is executed. A very simple macro expansion takes place before
executing the command.
The cd internal command¶
The
cd command is interpreted by the Midnight Commander, it is not passed
to the command shell for execution. Thus it may not handle all of the nice
macro expansion and substitution that your shell does, although it does some
of them:
Tilde substitution. The (~) will be substituted with your home directory,
if you append a username after the tilde, then it will be substituted with the
login directory of the specified user.
For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while ~/guest is
the directory guest in your home directory.
Previous directory. You can jump to the directory you were previously by
using the special directory name '-' like this:
cd -
CDPATH directories. If the directory specified to the
cd command
is not in the current directory, then The Midnight Commander uses the value in
the environment variable
CDPATH to search for the directory in any of
the named directories.
For example you could set your
CDPATH variable to ~/src:/usr/src,
allowing you to change your directory to any of the directories inside the
~/src and /usr/src directories, from any place in the file system by using its
relative name (for example cd linux could take you to /usr/src/linux).
Macro Substitution¶
When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension dependent command, or
running a command from the command line input, a simple macro substitution
takes place.
The macros are:
- %i
- The indent of blank space, equal the cursor column position. For edit menu
only.
- %y
- The syntax type of current file. For edit menu only.
- %k
- The block file name.
- %e
- The error file name.
- %m
- The current menu name.
- %f and %p
- The current file name.
- %x
- The extension of current file name.
- %b
- The current file name without extension.
- %d
- The current directory name.
- %F
- The current file in the unselected panel.
- %D
- The directory name of the unselected panel.
- %t
- The currently tagged files.
- %T
- The tagged files in the unselected panel.
- %u and %U
- Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are untagged.
You can use this macro only once per menu file entry or extension file
entry, because next time there will be no tagged files.
- %s and %S
- The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise the
current file.
- %cd
- This is a special macro that is used to change the current directory to
the directory specified in front of it. This is used primarily as an
interface to the Virtual File System.
- %view
- This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer. This macro can be used
alone, or with arguments. If you pass any arguments to this macro, they
should be enclosed in brackets.
- The arguments are: ascii to force the viewer into ascii mode;
hex to force the viewer into hex mode; nroff to tell the
viewer that it should interpret the bold and underline sequences of nroff;
unformatted to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff commands for
making the text bold or underlined.
- %%
- The % character
- %{some text}
- Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text inside the
braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted by the text typed by
the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to cancel. This macro doesn't work
on the command line yet.
- %var{ENV:default}
- If environment variable ENV is unset, the default is
substituted. Otherwise, the value of ENV is substituted.
The subshell support¶
The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the shells: bash,
tcsh and zsh.
When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander will spawn a
concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the
SHELL variable
and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run it in
a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time you execute a
command, the command will be passed to the subshell as if you had typed it.
This also allows you to change the environment variables, use shell functions
and define aliases that are valid until you quit the Midnight Commander.
If you are using
bash you can specify startup commands for the subshell
in your ~/.local/share/mc/bashrc file and special keyboard maps in the
~/.local/share/mc/inputrc file.
tcsh users may specify startup commands
in the ~/.local/share/mc/tcshrc file.
When the subshell code is used, you can suspend applications at any time with
the sequence C-o and jump back to the Midnight Commander, if you interrupt an
application, you will not be able to run other external commands until you
quit the application you interrupted.
An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the prompt displayed by the
Midnight Commander is the same prompt that you are currently using in your
shell.
The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can control the subshell
code.
Chmod¶
The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of files and
directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key combination.
The Chmod window has two parts -
Permissions and
File.
In the File section are displayed the name of the file or directory and its
permissions in octal form, as well as its owner and group.
In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons which correspond to
the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute bits, you can see the
octal value change in the File section.
To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons) use the
arrow
keys or the
Tab key. To change the state of the check buttons or to
select a button use
Space. You can also use the hotkeys on the buttons
to quickly activate them. Hotkeys are shown as highlighted letters on the
buttons.
To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on the bits
you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits you want to change,
you select one of the action buttons (Set marked or Clear marked).
Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use the
[Set all] button, which will act on all the tagged files.
[Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected files
[Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected files
[Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files
[Set] set the attributes of one file
[Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
Chown¶
The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot key for
this command is C-x o.
Advanced Chown¶
The Advanced Chown command is the Chmod and Chown command combined into one
window. You can change the permissions and owner/group of files at once.
File Operations¶
When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander shows the file
operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed and uses up to
three progress bars. The file bar indicates the percentage of the current file
that has been processed so far. The count bar shows how many of the tagged
files have been handled. The bytes bar indicates the percentage of the total
size of the tagged files that has been handled. If the verbose option is off,
the file and bytes bars are not shown.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip button will
skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort button will abort the
whole operation, the rest of the files are skipped.
There are three other dialogs which you can run into during the file operations.
The error dialog informs about error conditions and has three choices. Normally
you select either the Skip button to skip the file or the Abort button to
abort the operation altogether. You can also select the Retry button if you
fixed the problem from another terminal.
The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or move a file on the top
of an existing file. The dialog shows the dates and sizes of the both files.
Press the Yes button to overwrite the file, the No button to skip the file,
the All button to overwrite all the files, the None button to never overwrite
and the Update button to overwrite if the source file is newer than the target
file. You can abort the whole operation by pressing the Abort button.
The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to delete a directory which is
not empty. Press the Yes button to delete the directory recursively, the No
button to skip the directory, the All button to delete all the directories and
the None button to skip all the non-empty directories. You can abort the whole
operation by pressing the Abort button. If you selected the Yes or All button
you will be asked for a confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are
really sure you want to do the recursive delete.
If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the files on
which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped files are left
tagged.
Mask Copy/Rename¶
The copy/move operations let you translate the names of files in an easy way. To
do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and usually in the trailing
part of the destination specify some wildcards. All the files matching the
source mask are copied/renamed according to the target mask. If there are
tagged files, only the tagged files matching the source mask are renamed.
There are other options which you can set:
Follow links
determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source directory
(recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target directory or whether
would you like to copy their content.
Dive into subdirs
determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be copied, but the
target directory already exists. The default action is to copy the contents of
the source directory into the target directory. Enabling this option causes
copying the source directory itself into the target directory.
For example, you want to copy directory
/foo containing file
bar
to
/bla/foo, which is an already existing directory. Normally (when
Dive into subdirs is not set), mc would copy file
/foo/bar into
the file
/bla/foo/bar. By enabling this option the
/bla/foo/foo
directory will be created, and
/foo/bar will be copied into
/bla/foo/foo/bar.
Preserve attributes
determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you are root)
the ownership of the original files. If this option is not set, the current
value of the umask will be respected.
Use shell patterns
When this option is on you can use the '*' and '?' wildcards in the source mask.
They work like they do in the shell. In the target mask only the '*' and
'\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wildcard in the target
mask corresponds to the first wildcard group in the source mask, the second
'*' corresponds to the second group and so on. The '\1' wildcard corresponds
to the first wildcard group in the source mask, the '\2' wildcard corresponds
to the second group and so on all the way up to '\9'. The '\0' wildcard is the
whole filename of the source file.
Two examples:
If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is
"/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz",
the copy will be "foo.tgz" in "/bla".
Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
"*.*" and the destination is "\2.\1".
Use shell patterns off
When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic grouping
anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source mask to specify
meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is more flexible but also
requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are similar to the situation when
the shell patterns option is on.
Two examples:
If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
"/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz",
the copy will be "/bla/foo.tgz".
Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
"^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".
Case Conversions
You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u' or '\l' in the
target mask, the next character will be converted to uppercase or lowercase
correspondingly.
If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will be
converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next '\E' or
next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.
The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
For example, if the source mask is '*' (
Use shell patterns on) or
'^\(.*\)$' (
Use shell patterns off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the
file names will be converted to have initial upper case and otherwise lower
case.
You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is a backslash and
'\*' is an asterisk.
Stable symlinks
commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the target, so
that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With absolute
symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative one, it will
recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other directory parts and making
the value as short as possible (most modern filesystems keep short symlinks
inside inodes and thus don't waste much disk space).
Select/Unselect Files¶
The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection. The input
line allow enter the regular expression of filenames that will be
selected/unselected.
When
Files only checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If
Files
only is off, as files as directories will be selected. When
Shell
Patterns checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ? standing
for one character). If
Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files
is done with normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When
Case
sensitive checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters.
If
Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
Internal Diff Viewer¶
The mcdiff is a visual diff tool. You can compare two files and edit them
in-place (diffs are updated dynamically). You can browse and view a working
copy from popular version control systems (GIT, Subversion, etc).
Following shortcuts are available in internal diff viewer of Midnight Commander.
F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
F2 Save modified files.
F4 Edit file of the left panel in the internal editor.
F14 Edit file of the right panel in the internal editor.
F5 Merge the current hunk. Only the current hunk will be merged.
F7 Start search.
F17 Continue search.
F10, Esc, q Exit from diff viewer.
Alt-s, s Toggle show of hunk status.
Alt-n, l Toggle show of line numbers.
f Maximize left panel.
= Make panels equal in width.
> Reduce the size of the right panel.
< Reduce the size of the left panel.
c Toggle show of trailing carriage return (CR) symbol as ^M.
2, 3, 4, 8 Set tabulation size
C-u Swap contents of diff panels.
C-r Refresh the screen.
C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
Enter, Space, n Find next diff hunk.
Backspace, p Find previous diff hunk.
g Go to line.
Down Scroll one line forward.
Up Scroll one line backward.
PageUp Move one page up.
PageDown Mves one page down.
Home, A1 Moves to the line beginning.
End Moves to the line end.
C-Home Move to the file beginning.
C-End, C1 Move to the file end.
Internal File Viewer¶
The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To toggle
between modes, use the F4 key.
The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or the file
type to display the information. Some character sequences, which appear most
often in preformatted manual pages, are displayed bold and underlined, thus
making a pretty display of your files.
When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and constant
numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing the quotes. Each
number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text with constants like this:
"String" -1 0xBB 012 "more text"
Note that 012 is an octal number. -1 is converted to 0xFF.
Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Midnight
Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
F4 Toggle the hex mode.
F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and will display
that line.
F6, /. Regular expression search.
?, Reverse regular expression search.
F7 Normal search / hex mode search.
C-s, F17, n. Start normal search if there was no previous search
expression else find next match.
C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search expression else
find next match.
F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or if
a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the output
from the filter. Current mode is always the other than written on the button
label, since on the button is the mode which you enter by that key.
F9 Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on the viewer
will interpret some string sequences to show bold and underline with different
colors. Also, on button label is the other mode than current.
F10, Esc. Exit the internal file viewer.
next-page, space, C-v. Scroll one page forward.
prev-page, Alt-v, C-b, Backspace. Scroll one page backward.
down-key Scroll one line forward.
up-key Scroll one line backward.
C-l Refresh the screen.
C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
[n] m Set the mark n.
[n] r Jump to the mark n.
C-f Jump to the next file.
C-b Jump to the previous file.
Alt-r Toggle the ruler.
Alt-e to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding
is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recoding
you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look at the
Edit Extension File section
Internal File Editor¶
The internal file editor is a full-featured full screen editor. It can edit
files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files. The internal
file editor is invoked using
F4 if the
use_internal_edit option
is set in the initialization file.
The features it presently supports are: block copy, move, delete, cut, paste;
key for key undo; pull-down menus; file insertion; macro commands; regular
expression search and replace; shift-arrow text highlighting (if supported by
the terminal); insert-overwrite toggle; word wrap; autoindent; tunable tab
size; syntax highlighting for various file types; and an option to pipe text
blocks through shell commands like indent and ispell.
Sections:
- Options of editor in ini-file
The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring. To see what keys do
what, just consult the appropriate pull-down menu. Other keys are: Shift
movement keys do text highlighting.
Ctrl-Ins copies to the file
mcedit.clip and
Shift-Ins pastes from mcedit.clip.
Shift-Del cuts to
mcedit.clip, and
Ctrl-Del deletes
highlighted text. Mouse highlighting also works, and you can override the
mouse as usual by holding down the shift key while dragging the mouse to let
normal terminal mouse highlighting work.
To define a macro, press
Ctrl-R and then type out the key strokes you
want to be executed. Press
Ctrl-R again when finished. You can then
assign the macro to any key you like by pressing that key. The macro is
executed when you press
Ctrl-A and then the assigned key. The macro is
also executed if you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the assigned key, provided
that the key is not used for any other function. Once defined, the macro
commands go into the file
~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/mcedit.macros You
can delete a macro by deleting the appropriate line in this file.
To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is made from
selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recoding you may select
"<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
F19 will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or
C
or
C++ code or another). This is controlled by the file
/usr/share/mc/edit.indent.rc which is copied to
~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/edit.indent.rc in your home directory the
first time you use it.
The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When editing binary files,
you should set
display bits to 7 bits in the options menu to keep the
spacing clean.
Options of editor in ini-file¶
Some editor options of ini-file are described in this section. Options are
placed in [Midnight-Commander] section
- editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file
- Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from begin of
file to cursor position (0)
Screen selector¶
Midnight Commander supports running many internal modules (such as editor,
viewer and diff viewer) simultaneously and switching between them without
closing open files. Using several file managers at a time, however, is not
currently supported.
Let's call each of these modules a screen. There are three ways to switch
between screens, using one of these global shortcuts:
- Alt-}
- switch to the next screen;
- Alt-{
- switch to the previous screen;
- Alt-`
- open a dialog window with the list of currently open screens (or use the
"Screen list" menu item).
Completion¶
Let the Midnight Commander type for you.
Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC attempts
completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins with
$),
username (if the text begins with
~), hostname (if the text begins with
@) or command (if you are on the command line in the position where you
might type a command, possible completions then include shell reserved words
and shell built-in commands as well) in turn. If none of these matches,
filename completion is attempted.
Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input lines,
command completion is command line specific. If the completion is ambiguous
(there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the following action
depends on the setting of the Complete: show all option in the Configuration
dialog. If it is enabled, a list of all possibilities pops up next to the
current position and you can select with the arrow keys and
Enter the
correct entry. You can also type the first letters in which the possibilities
differ to move to a subset of all possibilities and complete as much as
possible. If you press
Alt-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in
the listbox, otherwise the first item which matches all the previous
characters will be highlighted. As soon as there is no ambiguity, dialog
disappears, but you can hide it by canceling keys
Esc,
F10 and
left and right arrow keys. If Complete: show all is disabled, the dialog pops
up only if you press
Alt-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC
just beeps.
Apply escaping of
?,
* and
& symbols (as
\?,
\*,
\& ) in filenames to disallow use them as metasymbols in
regular expressions when substitution is performed in the input line.
Virtual File System¶
The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file system;
this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch. The virtual file
system switch allows the Midnight Commander to manipulate files not located on
the Unix file system.
Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with some Virtual File Systems
(VFS): the
local file system, used for accessing the regular Unix file
system; the
ftpfs, used to manipulate files on remote systems with the
FTP protocol; the
tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed tar
files; the
undelfs, used to recover deleted files on ext2 file systems
(the default file system for Linux systems),
fish (for manipulating
files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh). If the code was compiled
with
sftpfs (for manipulating files over SFTP connections). If the code
was compiled with
smbfs support, you can manipulate files on remote
systems with the SMB (CIFS) protocol.
A generic
extfs (EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to
easily expand VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.
The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will forward
them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one of the file
systems is described later in their own section.
FTP File System¶
The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote machines.
To actually use it, you can use the
FTP link item in the menu or
directly change your current directory using the
cd command to a path
name that looks like this:
ftp://[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
The
user,
port and
remote-dir elements are optional. If you
specify the
user element, the Midnight Commander will login to the
remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the
login name from the
~/.netrc file. The optional
pass element is
the password used for the connection. Using the password in the VFS directory
name is not recommended, because it can appear on the screen in clear text and
can be saved to the directory history.
To enable using FTP proxy, prepend
! (an exclamation sign) to the
hostname.
Examples:
ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
ftp://!behind.firewall.edu/pub
ftp://guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
ftp://miguel:xxx@server/pub
Please check the Virtual File System dialog box for ftpfs options.
Tar File System¶
The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar files and
compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change your directory to a
tar file, you change your current directory to the tar file by using the
following syntax:
/filename.tar/utar://[dir-inside-tar]
The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means that
usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter into the tar
file, see the Edit Extension File section for details on how this is done.
Examples:
mc-3.0.tar.gz/utar://mc-3.0/vfs
/ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar/utar://
The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
FIle transfer over SHell filesystem¶
The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use this,
the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have bash-compatible
shell.
To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special directory
which name is in the following format:
sh://[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]
The
user, options and
remote-dir elements are optional. If
you specify the
user element, the Midnight Commander will try to login
on the remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
The available
options are:
'C' - use compression;
'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
port - specify the port used by remote server.
If the
remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the
remote machine will be set to this one.
Examples:
sh://onlyrsh.mx:r/linux/local
sh://joe@want.compression.edu:C/private
sh://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
sh://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) filesystem¶
The SFTP file system is a network based file system that allows you to
manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local.
To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special directory
which name is in the following format:
sftp://[user@]machine:[port]/[remote-dir]
The
user, port and
remote-dir elements are optional. If you
specify the
user element, the Midnight Commander will try to login on
the remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
port - specify the port used by remote server (22 by default). If the
remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the remote
machine will be set to this one.
Examples:
sftp://onlyrsh.mx/linux/local
sftp://joe:password@want.compression.edu/private
sftp://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
sftp://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
Undelete File System¶
On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs undelete facilities,
you will have the undelete file system available. Recovery of deleted files is
only available on ext2 file systems. The undelete file system is just an
interface to the ext2fs library to retrieve all of the deleted files names on
an ext2fs and provides and to extract the selected files into a regular
partition.
To use this file system, you have to chdir into the special file name formed by
the "
undel://" prefix and the file name where the actual file system
resides.
For example, to recover deleted files on the second partition of the first SCSI
disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:
undel://sda2
It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information before you
start browsing files there.
SMB File System¶
The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB (or CIFS)
protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups, Windows 9x/ME/XP, Windows NT,
Windows 2000 and Samba. To actually use it, you may try to use the panel
command "SMB link..." (accessible from the menubar) or you may
directly change your current directory to it using the cd command to a path
name that looks like this:
smb://[user@]machine[/service][/remote-dir]
The
user,
service and
remote-dir elements are optional. The
user,
domain and
password can be specified in an input
dialog.
Examples:
smb://machine/Share
smb://other_machine
smb://guest@machine/Public/Irlex
EXTernal File System¶
extfs allows you to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU
Midnight Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.
Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:
1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing file.
They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree. You can invoke
them by typing '
cd fsname://' where fsname is an extfs short name (see
below). Examples of such filesystems include audio (list audio tracks on the
CD) or apt (list of all Debian packages in the system).
For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type
cd audio://
2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent contents
of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files compressed in an
archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages in a mailbox (mailfs) or
parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such filesystems '
fsname://'
should be appended to the archive name. Note that the archive itself can be on
another vfs.
For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type
cd documents.zip/uzip://
In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For instance,
you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory history. An
important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell commands inside extfs,
just like any other non-local VFS.
Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:
- a
- access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette (cd a://).
- apt
- front end to Debian's APT package management system (cd
apt://).
- audio
- audio CD ripping and playing (cd audio:// or cd
device/audio://).
- bpp
- package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution (cd
file.bpp/bpp://).
- deb
- package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.deb/deb://).
- dpkg
- Debian GNU/Linux installed packages (cd deb://).
- hp48
- view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator (cd hp48://).
- lslR
- browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs (cd
filename/lslR://).
- mailfs
- mbox-style mailbox files support (cd mailbox/mailfs://).
- patchfs
- extfs to handle unified and context diffs (cd
filename/patchfs://).
- rpm
- RPM package (cd filename/rpm://).
- rpms
- RPM database management (cd rpms://).
- ulha, urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha
- archivers (cd archive/xxxx:// where xxxx is one of: ulha,
urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha).
You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in the Edit
Extension File section. Here is an example entry for Debian packages:
regex/.deb$
Open=%cd %p/deb://
Colors¶
The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports color using
the terminal database and your terminal name. Sometimes it gets confused, so
you may force color mode or disable color mode using the -c and -b flag
respectively.
If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager instead of ncurses, it
will also check the variable
COLORTERM, if it is set, it has the same
effect as the -c flag.
You may specify terminals that always force color mode by adding the
color_terminals variable to the Colors section of the initialization
file. This will prevent the Midnight Commander from trying to detect if your
terminal supports color. Example:
[Colors]
color_terminals=linux,xterm
color_terminals=terminal-name1,terminal-name2...
The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang, ncurses does not
provide a way to force color mode: ncurses uses just the information in the
terminal database.
The Midnight Commander provides a way to change the default colors. Currently
the colors are configured using the environment variable
MC_COLOR_TABLE
or the Colors section in the initialization file.
In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a
terminal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:
[Colors]
base_color=
xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
The format for the color definition is:
<keyword>=<fgcolor>,<bgcolor>,<attributes>:<keyword>=...
The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal, selected, disabled,
marked, markselect, errors, input, inputmark, inputunchanged, commandlinemark,
reverse, gauge, header, inputhistory, commandhistory. Button bar colors are:
bbarhotkey, bbarbutton. Status bar color: statusbar. Menu colors are:
menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, menuinactive. Dialog colors are:
dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus, dtitle. Error dialog colors are:
errdfocus, errdhotnormal, errdhotfocus, errdtitle. Help colors are:
helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink, helptitle. Viewer
colors are: viewnormal, viewbold, viewunderline, viewselected. Editor colors
are: editnormal, editbold, editmarked, editwhitespace, editlinestate. Popup
menu colors are: pmenunormal, pmenusel, pmenutitle.
header determines the color of panel header, the line that contains
column titles and sort mode indicator.
input determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.
gauge determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar
(gauge), which is used to show the user the progress of file operations, such
as copying.
disabled determines the color of the widget that cannot be selected.
The dialog boxes use the following colors:
dnormal is used for the normal
text,
dfocus is the color used for the currently selected component,
dhotnormal is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in
normal components, whereas the
dhotfocus color is used for the
highlighted color in the currently selected component.
Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel
and menuinactive tags instead.
Help uses the following colors:
helpnormal is used for normal text,
helpitalic is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual
page,
helpbold is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the
manual page,
helplink is used for not selected hyperlinks and
helpslink is used for selected hyperlink.
Popup menu uses following colors:
pmenunormal is used for non-selected
menu items and as a main color of popup menu window,
pmenusel is used
for selected menu item,
pmenutitle is used for popup menu title.
The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, brightgreen, brown,
yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan, brightcyan, lightgray
and white. And there is a special keyword for transparent background. It is
'default'. The 'default' can only be used for background color. Another
special keyword "base" means mc's main colors. When 256 colors are
available, they can be specified either as color16 to color255, or as rgb000
to rgb555 and gray0 to gray23. Example:
[Colors]
base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default
Attributes can be any of bold, underline, reverse and blink, appended by a plus
sign if more than one are desired. The special word "none" means no
attributes, without attempting to fall back to base_color. Example:
menuhotsel=yellow;black;bold+underline
Skins¶
You can change the appearance of Midnight Commander. To do this, you must
specify a file that contain descriptions of colors and lines to draw boxes.
Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible with the assignment of colors,
as described in Section Colors.
If your skin contains any of 256-color definitions, you should define the
'256colors' key set to TRUE value in [skin] section.
A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one found):
-
1) command line option -S <skin> or --skin=<skin>
2) Environment variable MC_SKIN
3) Parameter skin in section [Midnight-Commander] in config
file.
4) File /etc/mc/skins/default.ini
5) File /usr/share/mc/skins/default.ini
Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file may
contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini or without
it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one found):
- 1) ~/.local/share/mc/skins/
2) @sysconfdir@/mc/skins/
3) /usr/share/mc/skins/
For getting extended info, refer to:
- Description of section and parameters
Color pair definitions
Draw lines
Compatibility
Description of section and parameters¶
Section
[skin] contain metainfo for skin-file. Parameter
description contain short text about skin.
Section
[filehighlight] contain descriptions of color pairs for filenames
highlighting. Name of parameters must be equal to names of sections into
filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for getting more info.
Section
[core] describes the elements that are used everywhere.
- _default_
- Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not contain color
definitions
- selected
- cursor
- marked
- selected data
- markselect
- cursor on selected data
- gauge
- color of the filled part of the progress bar
- input
- color of input lines used in query dialogs
- inputmark
- color of input selected text
- inputunhanged
- color of input text before first modification or cursor movement
- commandlinemark
- color of selected text in command line
- reverse
- reverse color
Section
[dialog] describes the elements that are placed on dialog windows
(except error dialogs).
- _default_
- Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
- dfocus
- Color of active element (in focus)
- dhotnormal
- Color of hotkeys
- dhotfocus
- Color of hotkeys in focused element
Section
[error] describes the elements that are placed on error dialog
windows
- _default_
- Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
- errdhotnormal
- Color of hotkeys
- errdhotfocus
- Color of hotkeys in focused element
Section
[menu] describes the elements that are placed in menu. This
section describes system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus (called by
F2 in panels and by F11 in editor).
- _default_
- Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
- entry
- Color of menu items
- menuhot
- Color of menu hotkeys
- menusel
- Color of active menu item (in focus)
- menuhotsel
- Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item
- menuinactive
- Color of inactive menu
Section
[help] describes the elements that are placed on help window.
- _default_
- Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
- helpitalic
- Color pair for element with italic attribute
- helpbold
- Color pair for element with bold attribute
- helplink
- Color of links
- helpslink
- Color of active link (on focus)
Section
[editor] describes the colors of elements placed in editor.
- _default_
- Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
- editbold
- Color pair for element with bold attribute
- editmarked
- Color of selected text
- editwhitespace
- Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting
- editlinestate
- Color for line state area
Section
[viewer] describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.
- viewunderline
- Color pair for element with underline attribute
Color pair definitions¶
Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.
Color pairs described as two colors and the optional attributes separated by
';'. First field sets the foreground color, second field sets background
color, third field sets the attributes. Any of the fields may be omitted, in
this case value will be taken from default color pair (global color pair or
from default color pair of this section).
Example:
[core]
# green on black
_default_=green;black
# green (default) on blue
selected=;blue
# yellow on black (default)
# underlined yellow on black (default)
marked=yellow;;underline
Possible colors (names) and attributes are described in Colors. section.
Draw lines¶
Lines sets in section
[Lines] into skin-file. By default single lines are
used, but you may redefine to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to lines, for
example).
WARNING!!! When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen
library usage of drawing lines is limited! Possible only drawing a single
lines. For all questions and comments please contact the developers of
Ncurses.
Descriptions of parameters
[Lines]:
- lefttop
- left-top line fragment.
- righttop
- right-top line fragment.
- centertop
- down branch of horizontal line
- centerbottom
- up branch of horizontal line
- leftbottom
- left-bottom line fragment
- rightbottom
- right-bottom line fragment
- leftmiddle
- right branch of vertical line
- rightmiddle
- left branch of vertical line
- centermiddle
- cross of lines
- horiz
- horizontal line
- vert
- vertical line
- thinhoriz
- thin horizontal line
- thinvert
- thin vertical line
Compatibility¶
Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with the appointment of the
colors described in Colors. section.
In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin file and is
complementary.
Filenames Highlight¶
Section [filehighlight] in current skin-file contains key names as highlight
groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented in Skins section.
Rules of filenames highlight are placed in /usr/share/mc/filehighlight.ini file
(~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini). Name of section in this file must be equal
to parameters names in [filehighlight] section (in current skin-file).
Keys in these groups are:
- type
- file type. If present, all other options are ignored.
- regexp
- regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option is ignored.
- extensions
- list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.
- extensions_case
- (make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions' rule case
sentitive (true) or not (false).
`type' key may have values:
- FILE (all files)
- FILE_EXE
- DIR (all directories)
- LINK_DIR
- LINK (all links except stale link)
- HARDLINK
- SYMLINK
- STALE_LINK
- DEVICE (all device files)
- DEVICE_BLOCK
- DEVICE_CHAR
- SPECIAL (all special files)
- SPECIAL_SOCKET
- SPECIAL_FIFO
- SPECIAL_DOOR
Special Settings¶
Most of the Midnight Commander settings can be changed from the menus. However,
there are a small number of settings which can only be changed by editing the
setup file.
These variables may be set in your ~/.config/mc/ini file:
- clear_before_exec
- By default the Midnight Commander clears the screen before executing a
command. If you would prefer to see the output of the command at the
bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.config/mc/ini file and change the value
of the field clear_before_exec to 0.
- confirm_view_dir
- If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that directory. If this
flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirmation before changing the
directory if you have files tagged.
- ftpfs_retry_seconds
- This value is the number of seconds the Midnight Commander will wait
before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has denied the login.
If the value is zero, the login will no be retried.
- max_dirt_limit
- Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the internal
file viewer. Normally this value is not significant, because the code
automatically adjusts the number of updates to skip according to the rate
of incoming keystrokes. However, on very slow machines or terminals with a
fast keyboard auto repeat, a big value can make screen updates too
jumpy.
- It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best behavior, and
that is the default value.
- mouse_move_pages_viewer
- Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by line on
the internal file viewer.
- only_leading_plus_minus
- Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line (select,
unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line is empty. You don't
need to quote those characters in the middle of the command line. On the
other hand, you cannot use them to change selection when the command line
is not empty.
- show_output_starts_shell
- This variable only works if you are not using the subshell support. When
you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user screen, if this one is
set, you will get a fresh shell. Otherwise, pressing any key will bring
you back to the Midnight Commander.
- timeformat_recent
- Change the time format used to display dates less than 6 months from now.
See strftime or date man page for the format specification. If this option
is absent, default timeformat is used.
- timeformat_old
- Change the time format used to display dates older than 6 months from now
or for dates in the future. See strftime or date man page for the format
specification. If this option is absent, default timeformat is used.
- torben_fj_mode
- If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work slightly
different on the panels, instead of moving the selection to the first and
last files in the panels, they will act as follows:
- The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else go to the
top line unless it is already on the top line, in this case it will go to
the first file in the panel.
- The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line, if over
it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at the bottom line,
in such case it will move the selection to the last file name in the
panel.
- use_file_to_guess_type
- If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file command to
match the file types listed on the mc.ext file.
- xtree_mode
- If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file system on
a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other panel with the
contents of the selected directory.
- fish_directory_timeout
- This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in seconds.
The default value is 900 seconds.
- clipboard_store
- This variable contains path (with options) to the external clipboard
utility like 'xclip' to read text into X selection from file. For
example:
clipboard_store=xclip -i
- clipboard_paste
- This variable contains path (with options) to the external clipboard
utility like 'xclip' to print the selection to standard out. For
example:
clipboard_paste=xclip -o
- autodetect_codeset
- This option allows use the `enca' command to autodetect codeset of text
files in internal viewer and editor. List of valid values can be obtain by
the `enca --list languages | cut -d : -f1' command. Option must be located
in the [Misc] section.
For example:
autodetect_codeset=russian
Parameters for external editor or viewer¶
The Midnight Commander provides a way for specify an options for external
editors and viewers. The Midnight Commander tries to search the
"[External editor or viewer parameters]" section in the system
initialization file (the mc.lib file located in the Midnight Commander library
directory) and then in the ~/.config/mc/ini file. The option name should be
equal to the name (full pathname) of external editor or viewer. The option
value can contain following variables:
- %filename
- The filename to edit/view.
- %lineno
- The start line in the opening file.
For example:
[External editor or viewer parameters]
vi=%filename +%lineno
joe=%filename +%lineno
more=%filename +%lineno
Start line is passed to the external editor/viewer only if it is called from the
Find file results window.
If external editor/viewer is launched via F4/F3 keys, MC hopes that program (at
least "joe", but probably others too) has an own feature that by
default opens the file where it was last open. MC doesn't prevent external
editor/viewer to save and restore position in opened files.
Terminal databases¶
The Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal database
without requiring root privileges. The Midnight Commander searches in the
system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in the Midnight Commander
library directory) and in the ~/.config/mc/ini file for the section
"terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section
"terminal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol
that you want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for the
key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape character and the
^x to represent the control-x character.
The possible key symbols are:
f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
bs backspace
home home key
end end key
up up arrow key
down down arrow key
left left arrow key
right right arrow key
pgdn page down key
pgup page up key
insert the insert character
delete the delete character
complete to do completion
For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you set this
in the ini file:
insert=\e[Op
Also now you can use
extended learn keys. For example:
ctrl-alt-right=\e[[1;6C
ctrl-alt-left=\e[[1;6D
This means that ctrl+alt+left sends a \e[[1;6D escape sequence and therefore
Midnight Commander interprets "\e[[1;6D" as Ctrl-Alt-Left.
The
complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
the completion process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can define other
keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of nice and unused keys
everywhere).
FILES¶
Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also affected by the
MC_DATADIR environment variable. If it's set, its value is used instead
of /usr/share/mc in the paths below.
/usr/share/mc/mc.hlp
- The help file for the program.
/usr/share/mc/mc.ext
- The default system-wide extensions file.
~/.config/mc/mc.ext
- User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration file. They
override the contents of the system wide files if present.
/usr/share/mc/mc.ini
- The default system-wide setup for the Midnight Commander, used only if the
user doesn't have his own ~/.config/mc/ini file.
/usr/share/mc/mc.lib
- Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this file affect
all users, whether they have ~/.config/mc/ini or not. Currently, only
terminal settings are loaded from mc.lib.
~/.config/mc/ini
- User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is loaded from
here instead of the system-wide startup file.
/usr/share/mc/mc.hint
- This file contains the hints displayed by the program.
/usr/share/mc/mc.menu
- This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
~/.config/mc/menu
- User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used instead of
the system-wide applications menu.
~/.cache/mc/Tree
- The directory list for the directory tree and tree view features.
~/.local/share/mc.menu
- Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used instead of
the home or system-wide applications menu.
To change default root directory of MC, you can use
MC_HOME environment
variable. The value of MC_HOME must be an absolute path. If MC_HOME is unset
or empty, HOME variable is used. If HOME is unset or empty, MC directories are
get from GLib library.
LICENSE¶
This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in help for details
on the License and the lack of warranty.
AVAILABILITY¶
The latest version of this program can be found at
http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/.
SEE ALSO¶
ed(1),
gpm(1), terminfo(1),
view(1),
sh(1),
bash(1),
tcsh(1),
zsh(1).
The Midnight Commander page on the World Wide Web:
http://www.midnight-commander.org/
AUTHORS¶
Authors and contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file in the source
distribution.
BUGS¶
See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains to be
done.
If you want to report a problem with the program, please create bugreport at
http://www.midnight-commander.org/.
Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program you are
running (
mc -V displays this information), the operating system you are
running the program on. If the program crashes, we would appreciate a stack
trace.