Midnight Commander is probably the most well-known console file manager and probably the most easy to use due to being the closest to Norton Commander and having the most common operations displayed at the bottom. We covered Midnight Commander as well as 2 other console file managers in our 3 Linux Console File Managers You Should Try post.
There are 2 Midnight Commander (mc) branches: stable - 4.7.0.x and development - 4.7.x. Ubuntu of course comes with the stable version of Midnight Commander but if you want to install the development version, you can now find Ubuntu packages in the unreleased / git builds PPA we've set up (which also holds the Sezen Applet).
There are lots of changes in the MC development branch compared to the stable version - here are just the a few of the new features in the dev branch:
- Mult-screen feature: support of many opened editors and viewers
- Reorganization of menu and configuration dialogs. More options are available in UI
- Mark of text in input fields is available now, DEL removes selected/unchanged text
- Now copy/move dialog shows the full path with file name in the field "to:"
- Added new capability to create relative symlinks: menu item and "C-x v" default shortcut
- Now we can use external utility to copy/paste text to X clipboard
- A built-in tool to visual compare and merge two files
- Added new skins: nice and dark
- Autodetect codepages of edited/viewed files with enca program
- Added ability to show progressbars (when copy files) from right to left
- Added indication of total BPS and ETA for file operations
- Viewer is now very fast
- And a lot more!
Install Midnight Commander 4.7.3 (which was released today) in Ubuntu Jaunty, Karmic, Lucid or Maverick:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/unstable && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mc
