GNU Midnight Commander

A text-based, two-pane file manager.

GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a Norton Commander-style file manager that runs in a terminal. The two-pane interface, with tab to switch between sides and a function-key menu at the bottom, gives a fast keyboard-driven workflow for copying, moving, and editing files. The built-in editor (mcedit) and viewer (mcview) cover most quick-edit cases without leaving the file manager.

mc has a long Unix history. Miguel de Icaza wrote the first versions in 1994 (before going on to start GNOME), and the project has had several phases of maintenance since. Today it is in active development with regular releases, and the codebase has been substantially modernised compared with the mid-2000s state.

mc is heavily used by experienced sysadmins for system rescue, remote-shell file management, and any situation where a graphical file manager would be impractical. Its FTP/SFTP filesystem support means a single mc invocation can present local and remote directories side by side, which is useful for quick file transfers during maintenance.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: File manager

Website: https://midnight-commander.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install mc
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install mc
Arch:          sudo pacman -S mc
macOS:         brew install mc

Authors

GNU Midnight Commander team

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