1MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
2
6 mc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
7
9 mc [-abcCdfhPstuUVx] [-l log] [dir1 [dir2]] [-e [file] ...] [-v file]
10
12 GNU Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager for
13 Unix-like operating systems.
14
16 -a, --stickchars
17 Disable usage of graphic characters for line drawing.
18 -b, --nocolor
20 Force black and white display.
21 -c, --color
23 Force color mode, please check the section Colors for more
24 information.
25 -C arg, --colors=arg
27 Specify a different color set in the command line. The format
28 of arg is documented in the Colors section.
29 --configure-options
31 Display configure options.
32 -d, --nomouse
34 Disable mouse support.
35 -D N, --debuglevel=N
37 Save the debug level for SMB VFS. N is in 0-10 range.
38 -e [file], --edit[=file]
40 Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on
41 startup. See also mcedit (1).
42 -f, --datadir
44 Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander
45 files.
46 -F, --datadir-info
48 Display extended info about compiled-in paths for Midnight Com‐
49 mander.
50 -g, --oldmouse
52 Force a "normal tracking" mouse mode. Used when running on
53 xterm-capable terminals (tmux/screen).
54 -k, --resetsoft
56 Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo data‐
57 base. Only useful on HP terminals when the function keys don't
58 work.
59 -K file, --keymap=file
61 Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.
62 -l file, --ftplog=file
64 Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
65 --nokeymap
67 Don't load key bindings from any file, use default hardcoded
68 keys.
69 -P file, --printwd=file
71 Print the last working directory to the specified file. This
72 option is not meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used
73 from a special shell script that automatically changes the cur‐
74 rent directory of the shell to the last directory Midnight Com‐
75 mander was in. Source the file /usr/libexec/mc/mc.sh (bash and
76 zsh users) or /usr/libexec/mc.csh (tcsh users) respectively to
77 define mc as an alias to the appropriate shell script.
78 -s, --slow
80 Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks. If the section
81 [Lines] is not filled, the symbol for the pseudographics frame
82 is a space, otherwise the frame characters are taken from fol‐
83 lowing parameters.
84 You can redefine the following variables:
86 lefttop
88 left-top corner
89 righttop
91 right-top corner
92 centertop
94 center-top cross
95 centerbottom
97 center-bottom cross
98 leftbottom
100 left-bottom corner
101 rightbottom
103 right-bottom corner
104 leftmiddle
106 left-middle cross
107 rightmiddle
109 right-middle cross
110 centermiddle
112 center cross
113 horiz default horizontal line
115 vert default vertical line
117 thinhoriz
119 thin horizontal line
120 thinvert
122 thin vertical line
123 -S arg, --skin=arg
125 Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins
126 is documented in the Skins section.
127 -t, --termcap
129 Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it
130 makes Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP variable
131 for the terminal information instead of the information on the
132 system wide terminal database
133 -u, --nosubshell
135 Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if Mid‐
136 night Commander has been built with concurrent shell support).
137 -U, --subshell
139 Enable use of the concurrent shell support (only makes sense if
140 the Midnight Commander was built with the subshell support set
141 as an optional feature).
142 -v file, --view=file
144 Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also
145 mcview (1).
146 -V, --version
148 Display the version of the program.
149 -x, --xterm
151 Force xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals
152 (two screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
153 -X, --no-x11
155 Do not use X11 to get the state of modifiers Alt, Ctrl, Shift
156 If both paths are specified, the first path name is the directory to
158 show in the active panel; the second path name is the directory to be
159 shown in the other panel.
160 If one path is specified, the path name is the directory to show in the
162 active panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to
163 be shown in the passive panel.
164 If no paths are specified, current directory is shown in the active
166 panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to be
167 shown in the passive panel.
168
170 The screen of Midnight Commander is divided into four parts. Almost
171 all of the screen space is taken up by two directory panels. By
172 default, the second line from the bottom of the screen is the shell
173 command line, and the bottom line shows the function key labels. The
174 topmost line is the menu bar line. The menu bar line may not be visi‐
175 ble, but appears if you click the topmost line with the mouse or press
176 the F9 key.
177 Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same time.
179 One of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in the cur‐
180 rent panel). Almost all operations take place on the current panel.
181 Some file operations like Rename and Copy by default use the directory
182 of the unselected panel as a destination (don't worry, they always ask
183 you for confirmation first). For more information, see the sections on
184 the Directory Panels, the Left and Right Menus and the File Menu.
185 You can execute system commands from Midnight Commander by simply typ‐
187 ing them. Everything you type will appear on the shell command line,
188 and when you press Enter, Midnight Commander will execute the command
189 line you typed; read the Shell Command Line and Input Line Keys sec‐
190 tions to learn more about the command line.
191
193 Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is activated whenever
194 you are running on an xterm(1) terminal (it even works if you take a
195 telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm) or
196 if you are running on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server
197 running.
198 When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is
200 selected; if you click with the right button, the file is marked (or
201 unmarked, depending on the previous state).
202 Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is an
204 executable program; and if the extension file has a program specified
205 for the file's extension, the specified program is executed.
206 Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function
208 key labels by clicking on them.
209 The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400 milliseconds.
211 This may be changed to other values by editing the ~/.config/mc/ini
212 file and changing the mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
213 If you are running Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you can
215 get the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding
216 down the Shift key.
217
220 Some commands in Midnight Commander involve the use of the Control
221 (sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the Meta (sometimes labeled ALT or
222 even Compose) keys. In this manual we will use the following abbrevia‐
223 tions:
224 C-<chr>
226 means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>.
227 Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.
228 Alt-<chr>
230 means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If
231 there is no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release it, then type the
232 character <chr>.
233 S-<chr>
235 means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.
236 All input lines in Midnight Commander use an approximation to the GNU
238 Emacs editor's key bindings (default).
239 You may redefine key bindings. See redefine hotkey bindings
241 for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) are
243 relative to default behavior.
244 There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are
247 the most important.
248 The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands
250 appearing in the File menu. This section includes the function keys.
251 Most of these commands perform some action, usually on the selected
252 file or the tagged files.
253 The Directory Panels section documents the keys which select a file or
255 tag files as a target for a later action (the action is usually one
256 from the file menu).
257 The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are used for enter‐
259 ing and editing command lines. Most of these copy file names and such
260 from the directory panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typ‐
261 ing) or access the command line history.
262 Input Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This means both the
264 command line and the input lines in the query dialogs.
265 Redefine hotkey bindings
268 Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file). Ini‐
269 tially, Midnight Commander creates key bindings using keymap defined in
270 the source code. Then, two files /usr/share/mc/mc.keymap and
271 /etc/mc/mc.keymap are loaded always, sequentially reassigned key bind‐
272 ings defined earlier. User-defined keymap-file is searched on the fol‐
273 lowing algorithm (to the first one found):
274 1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap>
276 2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
277 3) Parameter keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] of config
278 file.
279 4) File ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap
280 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
282 may contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension
283 .keymap or without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the
284 first one found):
285 1) ~/.config/mc
287 2) /etc/mc/
288 3) /usr/share/mc/
289 Miscellaneous Keys
292 Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other categories:
293 Enter if there is some text in the command line (the one at the bottom
295 of the panels), then that command is executed. If there is no
296 text in the command line then if the selection bar is over a
297 directory the Midnight Commander does a chdir(2) to the selected
298 directory and reloads the information on the panel; if the
299 selection is an executable file then it is executed. Finally, if
300 the extension of the selected file name matches one of the
301 extensions in the extensions file then the corresponding command
302 is executed.
303 C-l repaint all the information in Midnight Commander.
305 C-x c run the Chmod command on a file or on the tagged files.
307 C-x o run the Chown command on the current file or on the tagged
309 files.
310 C-x l run the hard link command.
312 C-x s run the absolute symbolic link command.
314 C-x v run the relative symbolic link command. See the File Menu sec‐
316 tion for more information about symbolic links.
317 C-x i set the other panel display mode to information.
319 C-x q set the other panel display mode to quick view.
321 C-x ! execute the External panelize command.
323 C-x h run the add directory to hotlist command.
325 Alt-! executes the Filtered view command, described in the view com‐
327 mand.
328 Alt-? executes the Find file command.
330 Alt-c pops up the quick cd dialog.
332 C-o when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or
334 under an xterm, it will show you the output of the previous com‐
335 mand. When ran on the Linux console, Midnight Commander uses an
336 external program (cons.saver) to handle saving and restoring of
337 information on the screen.
338 When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time
340 and you will be taken back to Midnight Commander's main screen, to
341 return to your application just type C-o. If you have an application
342 suspended by using this trick, you won't be able to execute other pro‐
343 grams from Midnight Commander until you terminate the suspended appli‐
344 cation.
345 Directory Panels
347 This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If
348 you want to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a look
349 at the section on Left and Right Menus.
350 Tab, C-i
352 change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the new
353 current panel and the old current panel becomes the new other
354 panel. The selection bar moves from the old current panel to the
355 new current panel.
356 Insert, C-t
358 to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo
359 sequence). To untag files, just retag a tagged file.
360 M-e to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
362 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
363 recoding you may select "directory up" (..) in active panel. To
364 cancel the charsets in all directories, select "No translation "
365 in the dialog of encodings.
366 Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j
368 used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the
369 bottom one, respectively.
370 Alt-t toggle the current display listing to show the next display
372 listing mode. With this it is possible to quickly switch to
373 brief listing, long listing, user defined listing mode, and back
374 to the default.
375 C-\ (control-backslash)
377 show the directory hotlist and change to the selected directory.
378 + (plus)
380 this is used to select (tag) a group of files. Midnight Comman‐
381 der will prompt for a selection options. When Files only check‐
382 box is on, only files will be selected. If Files only is off,
383 as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Patterns
384 checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
385 globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters
386 and ? standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off,
387 then the tagging of files is done with normal regular expres‐
388 sions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on, the
389 selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensitive
390 is off, the case will be ignored.
391 \ (backslash)
393 use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the oppo‐
394 site of the Plus key.
395 up-key, C-p
397 move the selection bar to the previous entry in the panel.
398 down-key, C-n
400 move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.
401 home, a1, Alt-<
403 move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
404 end, c1, Alt->
406 move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
407 next-page, C-v
409 move the selection bar one page down.
410 prev-page, Alt-v
412 move the selection bar one page up.
413 Alt-o If the currently selected file is a directory, load that direc‐
415 tory on the other panel and moves the selection to the next
416 file. If the currently selected file is not a directory, load
417 the parent directory on the other panel and moves the selection
418 to the next file.
419 Alt-i make the current directory of the current panel also the current
421 directory of the other panel. Put the other panel to the list‐
422 ing mode if needed. If the current panel is panelized, the
423 other panel doesn't become panelized.
424 C-PageUp, C-PageDown
426 only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the
427 currently selected directory respectively.
428 Alt-y moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to
430 clicking the < with the mouse.
431 Alt-u moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to click‐
433 ing the > with the mouse.
434 Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H
436 displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v'
437 with the mouse.
438 Quick search
440 The Quick search mode allows you to perform fast file search in file
441 panel. Press C-s or Alt-s to start a filename search in the directory
442 listing.
443 When the search is active, the user input will be added to the search
445 string instead of the command line. If the Show mini-status option is
446 enabled the search string is shown on the mini-status line. When typ‐
447 ing, the selection bar will move to the next file starting with the
448 typed letters. The Backspace or DEL keys can be used to correct typing
449 mistakes. If C-s is pressed again, the next match is searched for.
450 If quick search is started with double pressing of C-s, the previous
452 quick search pattern will be used for current search.
453 Besides the filename characters, you can also use wildcard characters
455 '*' and '?'.
456 Shell Command Line
458 This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
459 entering shell commands.
460 Alt-Enter
462 copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
463 C-Enter
465 same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some ter‐
466 minals.
467 C-Shift-Enter
469 copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the
470 command line. May not work on remote systems and some termi‐
471 nals.
472 Alt-Tab
474 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
475 pletion for you.
476 C-x t, C-x C-t
478 copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged files, the
479 selected file) of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other
480 panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.
481 C-x p, C-x C-p
483 the first key sequence copies the current path name to the com‐
484 mand line, and the second one copies the unselected panel's path
485 name to the command line.
486 C-q the quote command can be used to insert characters that are oth‐
488 erwise interpreted by Midnight Commander (like the '+' symbol)
489 Alt-p, Alt-n
491 use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
492 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
493 Alt-h displays the history for the current input line.
495 General Movement Keys
497 The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common code
498 to handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same keys. Each of
499 them also accepts some keys of its own.
500 Other parts of Midnight Commander use some of the same movement keys,
502 so this section may be of use for those parts too.
503 Up, C-p
505 moves one line backward.
506 Down, C-n
508 moves one line forward.
509 Prev Page, Page Up, Alt-v
511 moves one page up.
512 Next Page, Page Down, C-v
514 moves one page down.
515 Home, A1
517 moves to the beginning.
518 End, C1
520 move to the end.
521 The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addi‐
523 tion the to ones mentioned above:
524 b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete
526 moves one page up.
527 Space bar
529 moves one page down.
530 u, d moves one half of a page up or down.
532 g, G moves to the beginning or to the end.
534 Input Line Keys
536 The input lines (they are used for the command line and for the query
537 dialogs in the program) accept these keys:
538 C-a puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
540 C-e puts the cursor at the end of the line.
542 C-b, move-left
544 move the cursor one position left.
545 C-f, move-right
547 move the cursor one position right.
548 Alt-f moves one word forward.
550 Alt-b moves one word backward.
552 C-h, Backspace
554 delete the previous character.
555 C-d, Delete
557 delete the character in the point (over the cursor).
558 C-@ sets the mark for cutting.
560 C-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer
562 and removes the text from the input line.
563 Alt-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buf‐
565 fer.
566 C-y yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
568 C-k kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
570 Alt-p, Alt-n
572 Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
573 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
574 Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace
576 delete one word backward.
577 Alt-Tab
579 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
580 pletion for you.
581
584 The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse on the top
585 row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus: "Left", "File", "Com‐
586 mand", "Options" and "Right".
587 The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appearance of the left
589 and right directory panels.
590 The File Menu lists the actions you can perform on the currently
592 selected file or the tagged files.
593 The Command Menu lists the actions which are more general and bear no
595 relation to the currently selected file or the tagged files.
596 The Options Menu lists the actions which allow you to customize Mid‐
598 night Commander.
599 Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus
601 The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the Left and
602 Right menus (they are named Above and Below when the horizontal panel
603 split is chosen from the Layout options dialog).
604 Listing Mode...
606 The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are
607 four different listing modes available: Full, Brief, Long and User.
608 The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file and
609 the modification time.
610 The brief view shows only the file name and it has from 1 up to 9 col‐
612 umns (therefore showing more files unlike other views). The long view
613 is similar to the output of ls -l command. The long view takes the
614 whole screen width.
615 If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to specify the
617 display format.
618 The user display format must start with a panel size specifier. This
620 may be "half" or "full", and they specify a half screen panel and a
621 full screen panel respectively.
622 After the panel size, you may specify how many listings to fit in the
624 panel, side-by-side (in other words: how many times to repeat the
625 fields horizontally). This defaults to 1. You may change this by adding
626 a number from 1 to 9 to the format string.
627 After this you add the name of the fields with an optional size speci‐
629 fier. This are the available fields you may display:
630 name displays the file name.
632 size displays the file size.
634 bsize is an alternative form of the size format. It displays the size
636 of the files and for directories it just shows SUB-DIR or
637 UP--DIR.
638 type displays a one character wide type field. This character is
640 similar to what is displayed by ls with the -F flag - * for exe‐
641 cutable files, / for directories, @ for links, = for sockets, -
642 for character devices, + for block devices, | for pipes, ~ for
643 symbolic links to directories and ! for stale symlinks (links
644 that point nowhere).
645 mark an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
647 mtime file's last modification time.
649 atime file's last access time.
651 ctime file's status change time.
653 perm a string representing the current permission bits of the file.
655 mode an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.
657 nlink the number of links to the file.
659 ngid the GID (numeric).
661 nuid the UID (numeric).
663 owner the owner of the file.
665 group the group of the file.
667 inode the inode of the file.
669 Also you can use following keywords to define the panel layout:
671 space a space in the display format.
673 | add a vertical line to the display format.
675 To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add :
677 followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If
678 the number is followed by the symbol +, then the size specifies the
679 minimal field size - if the program finds out that there is more space
680 on the screen, it will then expand that field.
681 For example, the Full display corresponds to this format:
683 half type name | size | mtime
685 And the Long display corresponds to this format:
687 full perm space nlink space owner space group space size space mtime
689 space name
690 This is a nice user display format:
692 half name | size:7 | type mode:3
694 Panels may also be set to the following modes:
696 Info The info view display information related to the currently
698 selected file and if possible information about the current file
699 system.
700 Tree The tree view is quite similar to the directory tree feature.
702 See the section about it for more information.
703 Quick View
705 In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced viewer that
706 displays the contents of the currently selected file, if you
707 select the panel (with the tab key or the mouse), you will have
708 access to the usual viewer commands.
709 Sort Order...
711 The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modification time,
712 by access time, and by inode information modification time, by size, by
713 inode and unsorted. In the Sort order dialog box you can choose the
714 sort order and you may also specify if you want to sort in reverse
715 order by checking the reverse box.
716 By default directories are sorted before files but this can be changed
718 from the Panel options menu (option Mix all files).
719 Filter...
721 The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern (for example
722 *.tar.gz) which the files must match to be shown. Regardless of the
723 filter pattern, the directories and the links to directories are always
724 shown in the directory panel.
725 Reread
727 The reread command reload the list of files in the directory. It is
728 useful if other processes have created or removed files.
729 File Menu
731 Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard shortcuts for
732 commands appearing in the file menu. The escape sequences for the
733 function keys are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals
734 without function key support, you can achieve the same functionality by
735 pressing the ESC key and then a number in the range 1 through 9 and 0
736 (corresponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).
737 The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in paren‐
739 theses):
740 Help (F1)
742 Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the help viewer, you
744 can use the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to follow
745 that link. The keys Space and Backspace are used to move forward and
746 backward in a help page. Press F1 again to get the full list of
747 accepted keys.
748 Menu (F2)
750 Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way to provide
752 users with a menu and add extra features to Midnight Commander.
753 View (F3, F13)
755 View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the Internal
757 File Viewer but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an
758 external file viewer specified by the VIEWER environment variable. If
759 VIEWER is undefined, the PAGER environment variable is tried. If PAGER
760 is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use F13
761 instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or
762 preprocessing to the file.
763 See parameters for external viewer for explain how you may specify an
765 extended command line options for external viewers.
766 Filtered View (Alt-!)
768 This command prompts for a command and its arguments (the argument
770 defaults to the currently selected file name), the output from such
771 command is shown in the internal file viewer.
772 Edit (F4, F14)
774 Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually F14) to
776 start the editor with a new, empty file. Currently they invoke the vi
777 editor, or the editor specified in the EDITOR environment variable, or
778 the Internal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
779 See parameters for external editor for explain how you may specify an
781 extended command line options for external editors.
782 Copy (F5, F15)
784 Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
786 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
787 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
788 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. Space for destina‐
789 tion file may be preallocated relative to preallocate_space configure
790 option. During this process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort the
791 operation. For details about source mask (which will be usually either
792 * or ^\(.*\)$ depending on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible
793 wildcards in the destination see Mask copy/rename.
794 F15 (usually F15) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
796 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
797 any tagged files.
798 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
800 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
801 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
802 Link (C-x l)
804 Create a hard link to the current file.
806 Absolute symlink (C-x s)
808 Create a absolute symbolic link to the current file.
810 Relative symLink (C-x v)
812 Create a relative symbolic link to the current file.
814 To those of you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a
816 file is a bit like copying the file, but both the source filename and
817 the destination filename represent the same file image. For example, if
818 you edit one of these files, all changes you make will appear in both
819 files. Some people call links aliases or shortcuts.
820 A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there is no way of
822 telling which one is the original and which is the link. If you delete
823 either one of them the other one is still intact. It is very difficult
824 to notice that the files represent the same image. Use hard links when
825 you don't even want to know.
826 A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original file. If the
828 original file is deleted the symbolic link is useless. It is quite easy
829 to notice that the files represent the same image. Midnight Commander
830 shows an "@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic link to
831 somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a tilde (~)). The orig‐
832 inal file which the link points to is shown on mini-status line if the
833 Show mini-status option is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to
834 avoid the confusion that can be caused by hard links.
835 When you press "C-x s" Midnight Commander will automatically fill in
837 the complete path+filename of the original file and suggest a name for
838 the link. You can change either one.
839 Sometimes you may want to change the absolute path of the original into
841 a relative path. An absolute path starts from the root directory:
842 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> /home/frodo/new/mc
844 A relative link describes the original file's location starting from
846 the location of the link itself:
847 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> ../new/mc
849 You can force Midnight Commander to suggest a relative path by pressing
851 "C-x v" instead of "C-x s".
852 Rename/Move (F6, F16)
854 Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
856 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
857 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
858 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. For more details
859 look at Copy (F5) operation above, most of the things are quite simi‐
860 lar.
861 F16 (usually F16) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
863 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
864 any tagged files.
865 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
867 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
868 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
869 Mkdir (F7)
871 Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory specified.
873 Delete (F8)
875 Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in the currently
877 selected panel. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort
878 the operation.
879 Quick cd (Alt-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full command line
881 and want to cd somewhere.
882 Select group (+)
884 This is used to select (tag) a group of files. Midnight Commander will
886 prompt for a selection options. When Files only checkbox is on, only
887 files will be selected. If Files only is off, as files as directories
888 will be selected. When Shell Patterns checkbox is on, the regular
889 expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (* standing
890 for zero or more characters and ? standing for one character). If
891 Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal
892 regular expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on,
893 the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensitive is
894 off, the case will be ignored.
895 Unselect group (\)
897 Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of the Select
899 group command.
900 Quit (F10, Shift-F10)
902 Terminate Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when you want to quit
904 and you are using the shell wrapper. Shift-F10 will not take you to
905 the last directory you visited with Midnight Commander, instead it will
906 stay at the directory where you started Midnight Commander.
907 Quick cd
909 This command is useful if you have a full command line and want to cd
910 somewhere without having to yank and paste the command line. This com‐
911 mand pops up a small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter
912 after cd on the command line and then you press enter. This features
913 all the things that are already in the internal cd command.
914 Command Menu
916 The Directory tree command shows a tree figure of the directories.
917 The "Find file" command allows you to search for a specific file.
919 The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the two directory pan‐
921 els.
922 The "Switch panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell
924 command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD console.
925 The "Compare directories" command compares the directory panels with
927 each other. You can then use the Copy (F5) command to make the panels
928 identical. There are three compare methods. The quick method compares
929 only file size and file date. The thorough method makes a full
930 byte-by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available if the
931 machine does not support the mmap(2) system call. The size-only com‐
932 pare method just compares the file sizes and does not check the con‐
933 tents or the date times, it just checks the file size.
934 The "External panelize" allows you to execute an external program, and
936 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
937 The "Command history" command shows a list of typed commands. The
939 selected command is copied to the command line. The command history can
940 also be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-n.
941 The "Directory hotlist" command makes changing of the current directory
943 to often used directories faster.
944 The "Screen list" command shows a dialog window with the list of cur‐
946 rently running internal editors, viewers and other MC modules that sup‐
947 port this mode.
948 The "Edit extension file" command allows you to specify programs to
950 executed when you try to execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other
951 thing on files with certain extensions (filename endings).
952 The "Edit Menu File" command may be used for editing the user menu
954 (which appears by pressing F2).
955 Directory Tree
957 The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the directories. You
958 can select a directory from the figure and Midnight Commander will
959 change to that directory.
960 There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory tree command
962 is available from Commands menu. The other way is to select tree view
963 from the Left or Right menu.
964 To get rid of long delays, Midnight Commander creates the tree figure
966 by scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the direc‐
967 tory which you want to see is missing, move to its parent directory and
968 press C-r (or F2).
969 You can use the following keys:
971 General movement keys are accepted.
973 Enter. In the directory tree, exits the directory tree and changes to
975 this directory in the current panel. In the tree view, changes to this
976 directory in the other panel and stays in tree view mode in the current
977 panel.
978 C-r, F2 (Rescan). Rescan this directory. Use this when the tree figure
980 is out of date: it is missing subdirectories or shows some subdirecto‐
981 ries which don't exist any more.
982 F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure. Use this to
984 remove clutter from the figure. If you want the directory back to the
985 tree figure press F2 in its parent directory.
986 F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic navigation mode
988 (default) and the static navigation mode.
989 In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
991 select a directory. All known directories are shown.
992 In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
994 select a sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent direc‐
995 tory, and the Right key to move to a child directory. Only the parent,
996 sibling and children directories are shown, others are left out. The
997 tree figure changes dynamically as you traverse.
998 F5 (Copy). Copy the directory.
1000 F6 (RenMov). Move the directory.
1002 F7 (Mkdir). Make a new directory below this directory.
1004 F8 (Delete). Delete this directory from the file system.
1006 C-s, Alt-s. Search the next directory matching the search string. If
1008 there is no such directory these keys will move one line down.
1009 C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search string.
1011 Any other character. Add the character to the search string and move
1013 to the next directory which starts with these characters. In the tree
1014 view you must first activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The
1015 search string is shown in the mini status line.
1016 The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They
1018 aren't supported in the tree view.
1019 F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
1021 Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.
1023 The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See also the
1025 section on mouse support.
1026 Find File
1028 The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the search
1029 and the filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree button you
1030 can select the start directory from the directory tree figure.
1031 The "File name" input field contains a filename pattern to be searched
1033 for. It is interpreted as a shell pattern or as a regular expression
1034 depending on the state of the "Using shell patterns" checkbox. An empty
1035 value is valid and matches any file name.
1036 The "Content" input field contains a string to search for within the
1038 files. Leave this field empty to disable searching file contents.
1039 Option "Whole words" allows select only those files containing matches
1041 that form whole words. Like grep -w.
1042 You can start the search by pressing the OK button. During the search
1044 you can stop from the Stop button and continue from the Start button.
1045 You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow keys. The Chdir
1047 button will change to the directory of the currently selected file. The
1048 Again button will ask for the parameters for a new search. The Quit
1049 button quits the search operation. The Panelize button will place the
1050 found files to the current directory panel so that you can do addi‐
1051 tional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete and so on). To
1052 return to the normal file listing, change directory to "..".
1053 The 'Enable ignore directories' checkbox and input field below it allow
1055 to set up the list of directories that should be skip during the search
1056 files (for example, you may want to avoid searches on a CD-ROM or on a
1057 NFS directory that is mounted across a slow link). List components must
1058 be separated with a colon, here is an example:
1059 /cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
1061 Relative paths are supported also. The following example shows how to
1063 skip special directories of version control systems:
1064 /cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs:.svn:.git:CVS
1065 Attention: input field can contain a dot (.), this means the current
1067 absolute path.
1068 You may consider using the External panelize command for some opera‐
1070 tions. Find file command is for simple queries only, while using Exter‐
1071 nal panelize you can do as mysterious searches as you would like.
1072 External panelize
1074 The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and
1075 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
1076 For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the panels all the
1078 symbolic links in the current directory, you can use external paneliza‐
1079 tion to run the following command:
1080 find . -type l -print
1082 Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no
1084 longer be the directory listing of the current directory, but all the
1085 files that are symbolic links.
1086 If you want to panelize all of the files that have been downloaded from
1088 your FTP server, you can use this awk command to extract the file name
1089 from the transfer log files:
1090 awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/xferlog
1092 You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive
1094 name, so that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the
1095 command on the input line and pressing Add new button. Then you enter a
1096 name under which you want the command to be saved. Next time, you just
1097 choose that command from the list and do not have to type it again.
1098 Hotlist
1100 The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the directories in
1101 the directory hotlist. Midnight Commander will change to the directory
1102 corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dialog, you can
1103 remove already created label/directory pairs and add new ones. To add
1104 new directories quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist command (C-x
1105 h), which adds the current directory into the directory hotlist, asking
1106 just for the label for the directory.
1107 This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using
1109 the CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
1110 Edit Extension File
1112 This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.config/mc/mc.ext. The for‐
1113 mat of this file following:
1114 All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
1116 Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
1118 keyword/expr, i.e. everything after the slash until new line is expr.
1120 keyword can be:
1122 shell - expr is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name
1124 ends with expr. Example: shell/.tar matches *.tar.
1125 regex - expr is a regular expression. File matches if its name
1127 matches the regular expression.
1128 directory
1130 - expr is a regular expression. File matches if it is a direc‐
1131 tory and its name matches the regular expression.
1132 type - expr is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
1134 file %f without the initial "filename:" part matches regular
1135 expression expr.
1136 default
1138 - matches any file. expr is ignored.
1139 include
1141 - denotes a common section. expr is the name of the section.
1142 Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the for‐
1144 mat: keyword=command (with no spaces around =), where keyword should
1145 be: Open (invoked on Enter or double click), View (F3), Edit (F4) or
1146 Include (to add rules from the common section). command is any
1147 one-line shell command, with the simple macro substitution.
1148 Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If
1150 the appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule
1151 didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and
1152 View action is missing in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View
1153 action from the second entry will be used). default should match all
1154 the actions.
1155 Background Jobs
1157 This lets you control the state of any background Midnight Commander
1158 process (only copy and move files operations can be done in the back‐
1159 ground). You can stop, restart and kill a background job from here.
1160 Edit Menu File
1162 The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized by the
1163 user. When you access the user menu, the file .mc.menu from the current
1164 directory is used if it exists, but only if it is owned by user or root
1165 and is not world-writable. If no such file found, ~/.config/mc/menu is
1166 tried in the same way, and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide
1167 menu /usr/share/mc/mc.menu.
1168 The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with any‐
1170 thing but space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in order to
1171 be able to use it like a hot key, the first character should be a let‐
1172 ter). All the lines that start with a space or a tab are the commands
1173 that will be executed when the entry is selected.
1174 When an option is selected all the command lines of the option are
1176 copied to a temporary file in the temporary directory (usually
1177 /usr/tmp) and then that file is executed. This allows the user to put
1178 normal shell constructs in the menus. Also simple macro substitution
1179 takes place before executing the menu code. For more information, see
1180 macro substitution.
1181 Here is a sample mc.menu file:
1183 A Dump the currently selected file
1185 od -c %f
1186 B Edit a bug report and send it to root
1188 I=`mktemp ${MC_TMPDIR:-/tmp}/mail.XXXXXX` || exit 1
1189 vi $I
1190 mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < $I
1191 rm -f $I
1192 M Read mail
1194 emacs -f rmail
1195 N Read Usenet news
1197 emacs -f gnus
1198 H Call the info hypertext browser
1200 info
1201 J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
1203 tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
1204 K Make a release of the current subdirectory
1206 echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
1207 read tar
1208 ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
1209 cd ..
1210 tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
1211 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1213 X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
1214 tar xzvf %f
1215 Default Conditions
1217 Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condition must
1219 start from the first column with a '=' character. If the condition is
1220 true, the menu entry will be the default entry.
1221 Condition syntax: = <sub-cond>
1223 or: = <sub-cond> | <sub-cond> ...
1224 or: = <sub-cond> & <sub-cond> ...
1225 Sub-condition is one of following:
1227 y <pattern> syntax of current file matching pattern?
1229 (for edit menu only)
1230 f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
1231 F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
1232 d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
1233 D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
1234 t <type> current file of type?
1235 T <type> other file of type?
1236 x <filename> is it executable filename?
1237 ! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
1238 Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according to
1240 the shell patterns option. You can override the global value of the
1241 shell patterns option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first line
1242 of the menu file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).
1243 Type is one or more of the following characters:
1245 n not a directory
1247 r regular file
1248 d directory
1249 l link
1250 c character device
1251 b block device
1252 f FIFO (pipe)
1253 s socket
1254 x executable file
1255 t tagged
1256 For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't' type
1258 is a little special because it acts on the panel instead of the file.
1259 The condition '=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the current
1260 panel and false if not.
1261 If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be
1263 shown whenever the value of the condition is calculated.
1264 The conditions are calculated from left to right. This means
1266 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1267 is calculated as
1268 ( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
1269 Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
1271 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1273 L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
1274 gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
1275 Addition Conditions
1277 If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it
1279 is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will
1280 be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will
1281 not be included in the menu.
1282 You can combine default and addition conditions by starting condition
1284 with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you
1285 want to use two different conditions, one for adding and another for
1286 defaulting, you can precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one
1287 starting with '+' and another starting with '='.
1288 Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start
1290 with '#', space or tab.
1291 Options Menu
1293 Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and off in
1294 several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options are
1295 enabled if they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.
1296 The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change
1298 most of settings of Midnight Commander.
1299 The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of
1301 options how mc looks like on the screen.
1302 The Panel options command pops up a dialog from which you specify
1304 options of file manager panels.
1305 The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which
1307 actions you want to confirm.
1308 The Appearance command pops up a dialog from which you specify the
1310 skin.
1311 The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select
1313 which characters is your terminal able to display.
1314 The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys
1316 which are not working on some terminals and you may fix them.
1317 The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS
1319 related options.
1320 The Save setup command saves the current settings of the Left, Right
1322 and Options menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.
1323 Configuration
1325 The options in this dialog are divided into several groups: "File oper‐
1326 ation options", "Esc key mode", "Pause after run" and "Other options".
1327 File operation options
1329 Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and
1331 Delete operations are verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each
1332 operation). If you have a slow terminal, you may wish to disable the
1333 verbose operation. It is automatically turned off if the speed of your
1334 terminal is less than 9600 bps.
1335 Compute totals. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander computes
1337 total byte sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy, Rename
1338 and Delete operations. This will provide you with a more accurate
1339 progress bar at the expense of some speed. This option has no effect,
1340 if Verbose operation is disabled.
1341 Classic progressbar. If this option is enabled, the progressbar of
1343 Copy/Move/Delete operations is always grown form left to right. If dis‐
1344 abled, the growing direction of progressbar follows to direction of
1345 Copy/Move/Delete operation: from left panel to right one and vice
1346 versa. Enabled by default.
1347 Mkdir autoname. When you press F7 to create a new directory, the input
1349 line in popup dialog will be filled by name of current file or direc‐
1350 tory in active panel. Disabled by default.
1351 Preallocate space. Preallocate space for whole target file, if possi‐
1353 ble, before copy operation. Disabled by default.
1354 Esc key mode.
1356 By default, Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key prefix.
1358 Therefore, you should press Esc code twice to exit a dialog. But there
1359 is a possibility to use a single press of ESC key for that action.
1360 Single press. By default this option is disabled. If you'll enable it,
1362 the ESC key will act as a prefix key for set up time interval (see
1363 Timeout option below), and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC
1364 key is interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).
1365 Timeout. This options is used to setup the time interval (in microsec‐
1367 onds) for single press of ESC key. By default, this interval is one
1368 second (1000000 microseconds). Also the timeout can be set via KEY‐
1369 BOARD_KEY_TIMEOUT_US environment variable (also in microseconds), which
1370 has higher priority than Timeout option value.
1371 Pause after run
1373 After executing your commands, Midnight Commander can pause, so that
1375 you can examine the output of the command. There are three possible
1376 settings for this variable:
1377 Never. Means that you do not want to see the output of your command.
1379 If you are using the Linux or FreeBSD console or an xterm, you will be
1380 able to see the output of the command by typing C-o.
1381 On dumb terminals. You will get the pause message on terminals that
1383 are not capable of showing the output of the last command executed (any
1384 terminal that is not an xterm or the Linux console).
1385 Always. The program will pause after executing all of your commands.
1387 Other options
1389 Use internal editor. If this option is enabled, the built-in file edi‐
1391 tor is used to edit files. If the option is disabled, the editor speci‐
1392 fied in the EDITOR environment variable is used. If no editor is spec‐
1393 ified, vi is used. See the section on the internal file editor.
1394 Use internal viewer. If this option is enabled, the built-in file
1396 viewer is used to view files. If the option is disabled, the pager
1397 specified in the PAGER environment variable is used. If no pager is
1398 specified, the view command is used. See the section on the internal
1399 file viewer.
1400 Ask new file name. If this option is enabled, file name is asked
1402 before open new file in editor.
1403 Auto menus. If this option is enabled, the user menu will be invoked
1405 at startup. Useful for building menus for non-unixers.
1406 Drop down menus. When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will
1408 be activated as soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only
1409 get the menu title, and you will have to activate the menu either with
1410 the arrow keys or with the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using
1411 hotkeys.
1412 Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Filter commands
1414 will use shell-like regular expressions. The following conversions are
1415 performed to achieve this: the '*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more
1416 characters); the '?' is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and
1417 '.' by the literal dot. If the option is disabled, then the regular
1418 expressions are the ones described in ed(1).
1419 Complete: show all. By default, Midnight Commander pops up all possi‐
1421 ble completions if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
1422 Alt-Tab for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as
1423 much as possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this
1424 option if you want to see all possible completions even after pressing
1425 Alt-Tab the first time.
1426 Rotating dash. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander shows
1428 a rotating dash in the upper right corner as a work in progress indica‐
1429 tor.
1430 Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes Midnight Commander to
1432 follow the logical chain of directories when changing current directory
1433 either in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default
1434 behavior of bash. When unset, Midnight Commander follows the real
1435 directory structure, so cd .. if you've entered that directory through
1436 a link will move you to the current directory's real parent and not to
1437 the directory where the link was present.
1438 Safe delete. If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory
1440 hotlist entries unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default
1441 selection in the confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from "Yes"
1442 to "No". This option is disabled by default.
1443 Auto save setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit Midnight
1445 Commander, the configurable options of Midnight Commander are saved in
1446 the ~/.config/mc/ini file.
1447 Layout
1449 The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout
1450 of screen. The options in this dialog are divided into several groups:
1451 "Panel split", "Console output" and "Other options".
1452 Panel split
1454 The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory panels. You
1456 can specify whether the area is split to the panels in Vertical or Hor‐
1457 izontal direction. Panel layout can be changed using Alt-, (Alt-comma)
1458 shortcut.
1459 Equal split. By default, panels have equal sizes. Using this option
1461 you can specify an unequal split.
1462 Console output
1464 On the Linux or FreeBSD console you can specify how many lines are
1466 shown in the output window. This option is available if Midnight Com‐
1467 mander runs on native console only.
1468 Other options
1470 Menu bar visible. If enabled, main menu of Midnight Commander is
1472 always visible on the top row of screen above panels. Enabled by
1473 default.
1474 Command prompt. If enabled, command line is avalable. Enabled by
1476 default.
1477 Keybar visible. If enabled, 10 lables associated with F1-F10 keys are
1479 located at the bottom row of screen. Enabled by default.
1480 Hintbar visible. If enabled, the one-line hints are visible below pan‐
1482 els. Enabled by default.
1483 XTerm window title. When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight
1485 Commander sets the terminal window title to the current working direc‐
1486 tory and updates it when necessary. If your terminal emulator is bro‐
1487 ken and you see some incorrect output on startup and directory change,
1488 turn off this option. Enabled by default.
1489 Show free space. If enabled, free space and total space of current
1491 file system is shown at the bottom frame of panel. Enabled by default.
1492 Panel options
1494 Main panel options
1495 Show mini-status. If enabled, one line of status information about the
1497 currently selected item is shown at the bottom of the panels. Enabled
1498 by default.
1499 Use SI size units. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander will
1501 use SI prefixes (base 10) when displaying any byte sizes. If disabled
1502 (default), Midnight Commander will use IEC prefixes (base 2).
1503 Mix all files. If this option is enabled, all files and directories
1505 are shown mixed together. If the option is disabled (default), direc‐
1506 tories (and links to directories) are shown at the beginning of the
1507 listing, and other files below.
1508 Show backup files. If enabled, Midnight Commander will show files end‐
1510 ing with a tilde. Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls option
1511 -B). Enabled by default.
1512 Show hidden files. If enabled, Midnight Commander will show all files
1514 that start with a dot (like ls -a). Disabled by default.
1515 Fast directory reload. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander
1517 will use a trick to determine if the directory contents have changed.
1518 The trick is to reload the directory only if the i-node of the direc‐
1519 tory has changed; this means that reloads only happen when files are
1520 created or deleted. If what changes is the i-node for a file in the
1521 directory (file size changes, mode or owner changes, etc) the display
1522 is not updated. In these cases, if you have the option on, you have to
1523 rescan the directory manually (with C-r). Disabled by default.
1524 Mark moves down. If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you
1526 mark a file (with Insert key). Enabled by default.
1527 Reverse files only. Allow revert selection of files only. Enabled by
1529 default. If enabled, the reverse selection is applied to files only,
1530 not to directories. The selection of directories is untouched. If off,
1531 the reverse selection is applied to files as well to directories: all
1532 unselected items become selected, and vice versa.
1533 Simple swap. If both panels contain file listing, simple swap means
1535 that panels exchange its screen positions: left panel become right one,
1536 and vice versa. If this option is unchecked, file listing panels
1537 exchange its content keeping listing format and sort options. Unchecked
1538 by default.
1539 Auto save panels setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit Mid‐
1541 night Commander, the current settings of panels are saved in the
1542 ~/.config/mc/panels.ini file. Disabled by default.
1543 Navigation
1545 Lynx-like motion. If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows
1547 keys to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory
1548 and the shell command line is empty. By default, this setting is off.
1549 Page scrolling. If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the
1551 display when the cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel,
1552 otherwise it will just scroll a file at a time.
1553 Center scrolling. If set, panel will scroll when the cursor reaches
1555 the middle of the panel column, only hitting the top or bottom of the
1556 panel when actually on the first or last file. This behavior applies
1557 when scrolling one file at a time, and does not apply to the page
1558 up/down keys.
1559 Mouse page scrolling. Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse wheel
1561 is done by pages or line by line on the panels.
1562 File highlight
1564 You can specify whether permissions and file types should be high‐
1566 lighted with distinctive Colors. If the permission highlighting is
1567 enabled, the parts of the perm and mode display fields which apply to
1568 the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with the color
1569 defined by the selected keyword. If the file type highlighting is
1570 enabled, file names are colored according to rules described in
1571 /etc/mc/filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for more info.
1572 Quick search
1574 You can specify how the Quick search mode should work: case insensi‐
1576 tively, case sensitively or be matched to the panel sort order: case
1577 sensitive or not.
1578 Confirmation
1580 In this dialog you configure the confirmation options for file dele‐
1581 tion, overwriting files, execution by pressing enter, quitting the pro‐
1582 gram, directory hotlist entries deletion and history cleanup.
1583 Appearance
1585 In this dialog you can select the skin to be used.
1586 See the Skins section for technical details about the skin definition
1588 files.
1589 Display bits
1591 This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the
1592 screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/curses supports
1593 only seven output bits, ISO-8859-1 displays all the characters in the
1594 ISO-8859-1 map and full 8 bits is for those terminals that can display
1595 full 8 bit characters.
1596 Learn keys
1598 This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor
1599 arrows and some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal.
1600 They often don't, since many terminal databases are incomplete or bro‐
1601 ken.
1602 You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h'
1604 left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor move‐
1605 ment key and it is recognized, you can use that key as well.
1606 You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a key
1608 and it is recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name of
1609 that key. Once a key is marked OK it starts working as usually, e.g.
1610 F1 pressed the first time will just check that the F1 key works, but
1611 after that it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys. The
1612 Tab key should be working always.
1613 If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after
1615 pressing one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by
1616 pressing the button with the name of that key (either by the mouse or
1617 by Enter or Space after selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then
1618 a message box will appear asking you to press that key. Do it and wait
1619 until the message box disappears. If you want to abort, just press
1620 Escape once and wait.
1621 When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions
1623 for the keys you have redefined will be written into the [termi‐
1624 nal:TERM] section of your ~/.config/mc/ini file (where TERM is the name
1625 of your current terminal). The definitions of the keys that were
1626 already working properly are not saved.
1627 Virtual FS
1629 This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File
1630 System.
1631 Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some of
1633 the virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the
1634 file system (for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).
1635 Also, in order to access the contents of compressed files (for example,
1637 compressed tar files), Midnight Commander needs to create temporary
1638 uncompressed files on your disk.
1639 Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk
1641 take up resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
1642 information to decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of
1643 access to frequently used file systems.
1644 Because of the format of the tar archives, the Tar filesystem needs to
1646 read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most tar
1647 files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in
1648 extinction), the tar file system has to uncompress the file on the disk
1649 in a temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a reg‐
1650 ular tar file.
1651 Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
1653 it's common that you will leave a tar file and then re-enter it later.
1654 Since decompression is slow, Midnight Commander will cache the informa‐
1655 tion in memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires, all the
1656 resources associated with the file system are released. The default
1657 timeout is set to one minute.
1658 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote
1660 FTP servers. It has several options.
1661 ftp anonymous password is the password used when you login as "anony‐
1663 mous". Some sites require a valid e-mail address. On the other hand,
1664 you probably don't want to give your real e-mail address to untrusted
1665 sites, especially if you are not using spam filtering.
1666 ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a
1668 cache. The cache expire time is configurable with the ftpfs directory
1669 cache timeout option. A low value for this option may slow down every
1670 operation on the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a
1671 request to the FTP server.
1672 You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern
1674 firewalls are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below),
1675 so FTP proxies are considered obsolete.
1676 If Always use ftp proxy is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to
1678 enable proxy for certain hosts. See FTP File System for examples.
1679 If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
1681 /usr/lib/mc/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names that are
1682 local (if the host name starts with a dot, it is assumed to be a
1683 domain) and to assume that any hostnames without dots in their names
1684 are directly accessible. All other hosts will be accessed through the
1685 specified FTP proxy.
1686 You can enable using ~/.netrc file, which keeps login names and pass‐
1688 words for ftp servers. See netrc (5) for the description of the .netrc
1689 format.
1690 Use passive mode enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection
1692 for data transfer is initiated by the client, not by the server. This
1693 option is recommended and enabled by default. If this option is turned
1694 off, the data connection is initiated by the server. This may not work
1695 with some firewalls.
1696 Save Setup
1698 At startup, Midnight Commander will try to load initialization informa‐
1699 tion from the ~/.config/mc/ini file. If this file doesn't exist, it
1700 will load the information from the system-wide configuration file,
1701 located in /usr/share/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration file
1702 doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.
1703 The Save Setup command creates the ~/.config/mc/ini file by saving the
1705 current settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
1706 If you activate the auto save setup option, MC will always save the
1708 current settings when exiting.
1709 There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To
1711 change these settings you have to edit the setup file with your
1712 favorite editor. See the section on Special Settings for more informa‐
1713 tion.
1714
1717 You may execute commands by typing them directly in Midnight Comman‐
1718 der's input line, or by selecting the program you want to execute with
1719 the selection bar in one of the panels and hitting Enter.
1720 If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, Midnight Comman‐
1722 der checks the extension of the selected file against the extensions in
1723 the Extensions File. If a match is found then the code associated with
1724 that extension is executed. A very simple macro expansion takes place
1725 before executing the command.
1726 The cd internal command
1728 The cd command is interpreted by Midnight Commander, it is not passed
1729 to the command shell for execution. Thus it may not handle all of the
1730 nice macro expansion and substitution that your shell does, although it
1731 does some of them:
1732 Tilde substitution. The (~) will be substituted with your home direc‐
1734 tory, if you append a username after the tilde, then it will be substi‐
1735 tuted with the login directory of the specified user.
1736 For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while
1738 ~/guest is the directory guest in your home directory.
1739 Previous directory. You can jump to the directory you were previously
1741 by using the special directory name '-' like this: cd -
1742 CDPATH directories. If the directory specified to the cd command is
1744 not in the current directory, then Midnight Commander uses the value in
1745 the environment variable CDPATH to search for the directory in any of
1746 the named directories.
1747 For example you could set your CDPATH variable to ~/src:/usr/src,
1749 allowing you to change your directory to any of the directories inside
1750 the ~/src and /usr/src directories, from any place in the file system
1751 by using its relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
1752 /usr/src/linux).
1753 Macro Substitution
1755 When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension dependent com‐
1756 mand, or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
1757 substitution takes place.
1758 The macros are:
1760 %i The indent of blank space, equal the cursor column position.
1762 For edit menu only.
1763 %y The syntax type of current file. For edit menu only.
1765 %k The block file name.
1767 %e The error file name.
1769 %m The current menu name.
1771 %f and %p
1773 The current file name.
1774 %x The extension of current file name.
1776 %b The current file name without extension.
1778 %d The current directory name.
1780 %F The current file in the unselected panel.
1782 %D The directory name of the unselected panel.
1784 %t The currently tagged files.
1786 %T The tagged files in the unselected panel.
1788 %u and %U
1790 Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are
1791 untagged. You can use this macro only once per menu file entry
1792 or extension file entry, because next time there will be no
1793 tagged files.
1794 %s and %S
1796 The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise
1797 the current file.
1798 %cd This is a special macro that is used to change the current
1800 directory to the directory specified in front of it. This is
1801 used primarily as an interface to the Virtual File System.
1802 %view This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer. This macro
1804 can be used alone, or with arguments. If you pass any arguments
1805 to this macro, they should be enclosed in brackets.
1806 The arguments are: ascii to force the viewer into ascii mode;
1808 hex to force the viewer into hex mode; nroff to tell the viewer
1809 that it should interpret the bold and underline sequences of
1810 nroff; unformatted to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff
1811 commands for making the text bold or underlined.
1812 %% The % character
1814 %{some text}
1816 Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text
1817 inside the braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted
1818 by the text typed by the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to
1819 cancel. This macro doesn't work on the command line yet.
1820 %var{ENV:default}
1822 If environment variable ENV is unset, the default is substi‐
1823 tuted. Otherwise, the value of ENV is substituted.
1824 The subshell support
1826 The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the
1827 shells: bash, ash (BusyBox and Debian), tcsh, zsh and fish.
1828 When the subshell support is active, Midnight Commander will spawn a
1830 concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the SHELL variable
1831 and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run
1832 it in a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time you
1833 execute a command, the command will be passed to the subshell as if you
1834 had typed it. This also allows you to change the environment vari‐
1835 ables, use shell functions and define aliases that are valid until you
1836 quit Midnight Commander.
1837 bash users may specify startup commands in ~/.local/share/mc/bashrc
1839 (fallback ~/.bashrc) and special keyboard maps in
1840 ~/.local/share/mc/inputrc (fallback ~/.inputrc).
1841 ash/dash users (BusyBox or Debian) may specify startup commands in
1843 ~/.local/share/mc/ashrc (fallback ~/.profile).
1844 tcsh, zsh, fish users cannot specify mc-specific startup commands at
1846 present. They have to rely on shell-specific startup files.
1847 The following paragraphs are relevant only when the subshell support is
1849 active:
1850 You can suspend applications at any time with the sequence C-o and jump
1852 back to Midnight Commander, if you interrupt an application, you will
1853 not be able to run other external commands until you quit the applica‐
1854 tion you interrupted.
1855 The basic prompt displayed by Midnight Commander is of the form
1857 "user@host:current_path$ ". When using a capable shell, like Bash, the
1858 prompt displayed by Midnight Commander will be the same prompt that you
1859 are currently using in your shell.
1860 (There's a known problem when using fish: the prompt is displayed only
1862 in full screen mode (Ctrl-o), not when the panels are visible.)
1863 The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can control sub‐
1865 shell usage (-U/-u). Furthermore, to set a specific subshell different
1866 from your current SHELL variable or login shell defined in /etc/passwd,
1867 you may call MC like this: SHELL=/bin/myshell mc
1868
1870 The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of
1871 files and directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key combina‐
1872 tion.
1873 The Chmod window has two parts - Permissions and File.
1875 In the File section are displayed the name of the file or directory and
1877 its permissions in octal form, as well as its owner and group.
1878 In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons which corre‐
1880 spond to the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute bits,
1881 you can see the octal value change in the File section.
1882 To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons) use the arrow
1884 keys or the Tab key. To change the state of the check buttons or to
1885 select a button use Space. You can also use the hotkeys on the buttons
1886 to quickly activate them. Hotkeys are shown as highlighted letters on
1887 the buttons.
1888 To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
1890 When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on
1892 the bits you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits you
1893 want to change, you select one of the action buttons (Set marked or
1894 Clear marked).
1895 Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use
1897 the [Set all] button, which will act on all the tagged files.
1898 [Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected files
1900 [Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1902 [Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1904 [Set] set the attributes of one file
1906 [Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
1908
1910 The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot
1911 key for this command is C-x o.
1912
1914 The Advanced Chown command is the Chmod and Chown command combined into
1915 one window. You can change the permissions and owner/group of files at
1916 once.
1917
1919 When you copy, move or delete files, Midnight Commander shows the file
1920 operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed and
1921 uses up to three progress bars. The file bar indicates the percentage
1922 of the current file that has been processed so far. The count bar
1923 shows how many of the tagged files have been handled. The bytes bar
1924 indicates the percentage of the total size of the tagged files that has
1925 been handled. If the verbose option is off, the file and bytes bars
1926 are not shown.
1927 There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip
1929 button will skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort but‐
1930 ton will abort the whole operation, the rest of the files are skipped.
1931 There are three other dialogs which you can run into during the file
1933 operations.
1934 The error dialog informs about error conditions and has three choices.
1936 Normally you select either the Skip button to skip the file or the
1937 Abort button to abort the operation altogether. You can also select
1938 the Retry button if you fixed the problem from another terminal.
1939 The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or move a file on
1941 the top of an existing file. The dialog shows the dates and sizes of
1942 the both files. Press the Yes button to overwrite the file, the No
1943 button to skip the file, the All button to overwrite all the files, the
1944 None button to never overwrite and the Update button to overwrite if
1945 the source file is newer than the target file. You can abort the whole
1946 operation by pressing the Abort button.
1947 The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to delete a directory
1949 which is not empty. Press the Yes button to delete the directory
1950 recursively, the No button to skip the directory, the All button to
1951 delete all the directories and the None button to skip all the
1952 non-empty directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing
1953 the Abort button. If you selected the Yes or All button you will be
1954 asked for a confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are really sure you
1955 want to do the recursive delete.
1956 If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the
1958 files on which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped
1959 files are left tagged.
1960
1962 The copy/move operations let you translate the names of files in an
1963 easy way. To do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and
1964 usually in the trailing part of the destination specify some wildcards.
1965 All the files matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
1966 the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the tagged files
1967 matching the source mask are renamed.
1968 There are other options which you can set:
1970 Follow links
1972 determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source direc‐
1974 tory (recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target directory
1975 or whether would you like to copy their content.
1976 Dive into subdirs
1978 determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be
1980 copied, but the target directory already exists. The default action is
1981 to copy the contents of the source directory into the target directory.
1982 Enabling this option causes copying the source directory itself into
1983 the target directory.
1984 For example, you want to copy directory /foo containing file bar to
1986 /bla/foo, which is an already existing directory. Normally (when Dive
1987 into subdirs is not set), mc would copy file /foo/bar into the file
1988 /bla/foo/bar. By enabling this option the /bla/foo/foo directory will
1989 be created, and /foo/bar will be copied into /bla/foo/foo/bar.
1990 Preserve attributes
1992 determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you
1994 are root) the ownership of the original files. If this option is not
1995 set, the current value of the umask will be respected.
1996 Use shell patterns
1998 When this option is on you can use the '*' and '?' wildcards in the
2000 source mask. They work like they do in the shell. In the target mask
2001 only the '*' and '\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wild‐
2002 card in the target mask corresponds to the first wildcard group in the
2003 source mask, the second '*' corresponds to the second group and so on.
2004 The '\1' wildcard corresponds to the first wildcard group in the source
2005 mask, the '\2' wildcard corresponds to the second group and so on all
2006 the way up to '\9'. The '\0' wildcard is the whole filename of the
2007 source file.
2008 Two examples:
2010 If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is "/bla/*.tgz" and
2012 the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will be "foo.tgz" in
2013 "/bla".
2014 Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
2016 become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is "*.*" and the
2017 destination is "\2.\1".
2018 Use shell patterns off
2020 When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic
2022 grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source mask
2023 to specify meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is more
2024 flexible but also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are sim‐
2025 ilar to the situation when the shell patterns option is on.
2026 Two examples:
2028 If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
2030 "/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will
2031 be "/bla/foo.tgz".
2032 Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
2034 will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
2035 "^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".
2036 Case Conversions
2038 You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u' or '\l'
2040 in the target mask, the next character will be converted to uppercase
2041 or lowercase correspondingly.
2042 If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will be
2044 converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next '\E'
2045 or next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.
2046 The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
2048 For example, if the source mask is '*' ( Use shell patterns on) or
2050 '^\(.*\)$' ( Use shell patterns off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the
2051 file names will be converted to have initial upper case and otherwise
2052 lower case.
2053 You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is a back‐
2055 slash and '\*' is an asterisk.
2056 Stable symlinks
2058 commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the tar‐
2060 get, so that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With
2061 absolute symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative
2062 one, it will recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other direc‐
2063 tory parts and making the value as short as possible (most modern
2064 filesystems keep short symlinks inside inodes and thus don't waste much
2065 disk space).
2066
2069 The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection.
2070 The input line allow enter the regular expression of filenames that
2071 will be selected/unselected.
2072 When Files only checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files
2074 only is off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat‐
2075 terns checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
2076 globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ?
2077 standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging
2078 of files is done with normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When
2079 Case sensitive checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive
2080 characters. If Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
2081
2083 The mcdiff is a visual diff tool. You can compare two files and edit
2084 them in-place (diffs are updated dynamically). You can browse and view
2085 a working copy from popular version control systems (GIT, Subversion,
2086 etc).
2087 Following shortcuts are available in internal diff viewer of Midnight
2089 Commander.
2090 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2092 F2 Save modified files.
2094 F4 Edit file of the left panel in the internal editor.
2096 F14 Edit file of the right panel in the internal editor.
2098 F5 Merge the current hunk. Only the current hunk will be merged.
2100 F7 Start search.
2102 F17 Continue search.
2104 F10, Esc, q Exit from diff viewer.
2106 Alt-s, s Toggle show of hunk status.
2108 Alt-n, l Toggle show of line numbers.
2110 f Maximize left panel.
2112 = Make panels equal in width.
2114 > Reduce the size of the right panel.
2116 < Reduce the size of the left panel.
2118 c Toggle show of trailing carriage return (CR) symbol as ^M.
2120 2, 3, 4, 8 Set tabulation size
2122 C-u Swap contents of diff panels.
2124 C-r Refresh the screen.
2126 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2128 Enter, Space, n Find next diff hunk.
2130 Backspace, p Find previous diff hunk.
2132 g Go to line.
2134 Down Scroll one line forward.
2136 Up Scroll one line backward.
2138 PageUp Move one page up.
2140 PageDown Mves one page down.
2142 Home, A1 Moves to the line beginning.
2144 End Moves to the line end.
2146 C-Home Move to the file beginning.
2148 C-End, C1 Move to the file end.
2150
2152 The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To
2153 toggle between modes, use the F4 key.
2154 The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
2156 the file type to display the information. Some character sequences,
2157 which appear most often in preformatted manual pages, are displayed
2158 bold and underlined, thus making a pretty display of your files.
2159 When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and con‐
2161 stant numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing the
2162 quotes. Each number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text with
2163 constants like this:
2164 "String" 34 0xBB 012 "more text"
2166 Numbers are always interpreted in hex. In the example above, "34" is
2168 interpreted as 0x34. The prefix "0x" isn't really needed: we could type
2169 "BB" instead of "0xBB". And "012" is interpreted as 0x12, not as an
2170 octal number.
2171 Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Mid‐
2173 night Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
2174 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2176 F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
2178 F4 Toggle the hex mode.
2180 F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and will display
2182 that line.
2183 F6, /. Regular expression search.
2185 ?, Reverse regular expression search.
2187 F7 Normal search / hex mode search.
2189 C-s, F17, n. Start normal search if there was no previous search
2191 expression else find next match.
2192 C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search expression
2194 else find next match.
2195 F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or
2197 if a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the
2198 output from the filter. Current mode is always the other than written
2199 on the button label, since on the button is the mode which you enter by
2200 that key.
2201 F9 Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on the viewer
2203 will interpret some string sequences to show bold and underline with
2204 different colors. Also, on button label is the other mode than current.
2205 F10, Esc. Exit the internal file viewer.
2207 next-page, space, C-v. Scroll one page forward.
2209 prev-page, Alt-v, C-b, Backspace. Scroll one page backward.
2211 down-key Scroll one line forward.
2213 up-key Scroll one line backward.
2215 C-l Refresh the screen.
2217 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2219 [n] m Set the mark n.
2221 [n] r Jump to the mark n.
2223 C-f Jump to the next file.
2225 C-b Jump to the previous file.
2227 Alt-r Toggle the ruler.
2229 Alt-e to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recod‐
2231 ing is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
2232 recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2233 It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look
2235 at the Edit Extension File section
2236
2239 The internal file editor is a full-featured full screen editor. It can
2240 edit files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files.
2241 The internal file editor is invoked using F4 if the use_internal_edit
2242 option is set in the initialization file.
2243 The features it presently supports are: block copy, move, delete, cut,
2245 paste; key for key undo; pull-down menus; file insertion; macro com‐
2246 mands; regular expression search and replace; shift-arrow text high‐
2247 lighting (if supported by the terminal); insert-overwrite toggle; word
2248 wrap; autoindent; tunable tab size; syntax highlighting for various
2249 file types; and an option to pipe text blocks through shell commands
2250 like indent and ispell.
2251 Sections:
2253 Options of editor in ini-file
2255 The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring. To see what
2257 keys do what, just consult the appropriate pull-down menu. Other keys
2258 are: Shift movement keys do text highlighting. Ctrl-Ins copies to the
2259 file mcedit.clip and Shift-Ins pastes from mcedit.clip. Shift-Del cuts
2260 to mcedit.clip, and Ctrl-Del deletes highlighted text. Mouse highlight‐
2261 ing also works, and you can override the mouse as usual by holding down
2262 the shift key while dragging the mouse to let normal terminal mouse
2263 highlighting work.
2264 To define a macro, press Ctrl-R and then type out the key strokes you
2266 want to be executed. Press Ctrl-R again when finished. You can then
2267 assign the macro to any key you like by pressing that key. The macro is
2268 executed when you press Ctrl-A and then the assigned key. The macro is
2269 also executed if you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the assigned key,
2270 provided that the key is not used for any other function. Once defined,
2271 the macro commands go into the file
2272 ~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/mcedit.macros You can delete a macro by delet‐
2273 ing the appropriate line in this file.
2274 To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
2276 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recod‐
2277 ing you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2278 F19 will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or C or C++
2280 code or another). This is controlled by the file
2281 /usr/share/mc/edit.indent.rc which is copied to
2282 ~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/edit.indent.rc in your home directory the
2283 first time you use it.
2284 The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When editing binary
2286 files, you should set display bits to 7 bits in the options menu to
2287 keep the spacing clean.
2288
2291 Some editor options of ini-file are described in this section. Options
2292 are placed in [Midnight-Commander] section
2293 editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file
2295 Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from
2296 begin of file to cursor position (0)
2297
2300 Midnight Commander supports running many internal modules (such as edi‐
2301 tor, viewer and diff viewer) simultaneously and switching between them
2302 without closing open files. Using several file managers at a time, how‐
2303 ever, is not currently supported.
2304 Let's call each of these modules a screen. There are three ways to
2306 switch between screens, using one of these global shortcuts:
2307 Alt-} switch to the next screen;
2309 Alt-{ switch to the previous screen;
2311 Alt-` open a dialog window with the list of currently open screens (or
2313 use the "Screen list" menu item).
2314
2316 Let Midnight Commander type for you.
2317 Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC
2319 attempts completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins
2320 with $), username (if the text begins with ~), hostname (if the text
2321 begins with @) or command (if you are on the command line in the posi‐
2322 tion where you might type a command, possible completions then include
2323 shell reserved words and shell built-in commands as well) in turn. If
2324 none of these matches, filename completion is attempted.
2325 Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input
2327 lines, command completion is command line specific. If the completion
2328 is ambiguous (there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the
2329 following action depends on the setting of the Complete: show all
2330 option in the Configuration dialog. If it is enabled, a list of all
2331 possibilities pops up next to the current position and you can select
2332 with the arrow keys and Enter the correct entry. You can also type the
2333 first letters in which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of
2334 all possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you press
2335 Alt-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise
2336 the first item which matches all the previous characters will be high‐
2337 lighted. As soon as there is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you
2338 can hide it by canceling keys Esc, F10 and left and right arrow keys.
2339 If Complete: show all is disabled, the dialog pops up only if you press
2340 Alt-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.
2341 Apply escaping of ?, * and & symbols (as \?, \*, \& ) in filenames to
2343 disallow use them as metasymbols in regular expressions when substitu‐
2344 tion is performed in the input line.
2345
2348 Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file
2349 system; this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch.
2350 The virtual file system switch allows Midnight Commander to manipulate
2351 files not located on the Unix file system.
2352 Currently, Midnight Commander is packaged with some Virtual File Sys‐
2354 tems (VFS): the local file system, used for accessing the regular Unix
2355 file system; the ftpfs, used to manipulate files on remote systems with
2356 the FTP protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed tar
2357 files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on ext2 file systems
2358 (the default file system for Linux systems), fish (for manipulating
2359 files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh). If the code was
2360 compiled with sftpfs (for manipulating files over SFTP connections).
2361 If the code was compiled with smbfs support, you can manipulate files
2362 on remote systems with the SMB (CIFS) protocol.
2363 A generic extfs (EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to
2365 easily expand VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.
2366 The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will
2368 forward them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one
2369 of the file systems is described later in their own section.
2370 FTP File System
2372 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote
2373 machines. To actually use it, you can use the FTP link item in the
2374 menu or directly change your current directory using the cd command to
2375 a path name that looks like this:
2376 ftp://[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
2378 The user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2380 the user element, Midnight Commander will login to the remote machine
2381 as that user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the login name
2382 from the ~/.netrc file. The optional pass element is the password used
2383 for the connection. Using the password in the VFS directory name is
2384 not recommended, because it can appear on the screen in clear text and
2385 can be saved to the directory history.
2386 To enable using FTP proxy, prepend ! (an exclamation sign) to the
2388 hostname.
2389 Examples:
2391 ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
2393 ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
2394 ftp://!behind.firewall.edu/pub
2395 ftp://guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
2396 ftp://miguel:xxx@server/pub
2397 Please check the Virtual File System dialog box for ftpfs options.
2399 Tar File System
2401 The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar
2402 files and compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change
2403 your directory to a tar file, you change your current directory to the
2404 tar file by using the following syntax:
2405 /filename.tar/utar://[dir-inside-tar]
2407 The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means
2409 that usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter
2410 into the tar file, see the Edit Extension File section for details on
2411 how this is done.
2412 Examples:
2414 mc-3.0.tar.gz/utar://mc-3.0/vfs
2416 /ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar/utar://
2417 The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
2419 FIle transfer over SHell filesystem
2421 The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
2422 manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use
2423 this, the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have
2424 bash-compatible shell.
2425 To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
2427 directory which name is in the following format:
2428 sh://[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]
2430 The user, options and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2432 the user element, Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
2433 machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
2434 The available options are:
2436 'C' - use compression;
2437 'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
2438 port - specify the port used by remote server.
2439 If the remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the
2440 remote machine will be set to this one.
2441 Examples:
2443 sh://onlyrsh.mx:r/linux/local
2445 sh://joe@want.compression.edu:C/private
2446 sh://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
2447 sh://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
2448 SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) filesystem
2450 The SFTP file system is a network based file system that allows you to
2451 manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local.
2452 To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
2454 directory which name is in the following format:
2455 sftp://[user@]machine:[port]/[remote-dir]
2457 The user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2459 the user element, Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
2460 machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name. port -
2461 specify the port used by remote server (22 by default). If the
2462 remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the remote
2463 machine will be set to this one.
2464 Examples:
2466 sftp://onlyrsh.mx/linux/local
2468 sftp://joe:password@want.compression.edu/private
2469 sftp://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
2470 sftp://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
2471 Undelete File System
2473 On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs undelete
2474 facilities, you will have the undelete file system available. Recovery
2475 of deleted files is only available on ext2 file systems. The undelete
2476 file system is just an interface to the ext2fs library to retrieve all
2477 of the deleted files names on an ext2fs and provides and to extract the
2478 selected files into a regular partition.
2479 To use this file system, you have to chdir into the special file name
2481 formed by the "undel://" prefix and the file name where the actual file
2482 system resides.
2483 For example, to recover deleted files on the second partition of the
2485 first SCSI disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:
2486 undel://sda2
2488 It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
2490 before you start browsing files there.
2491 SMB File System
2493 The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB
2494 (or CIFS) protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups, Windows
2495 9x/ME/XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Samba. To actually use it, you
2496 may try to use the panel command "SMB link..." (accessible from the
2497 menubar) or you may directly change your current directory to it using
2498 the cd command to a path name that looks like this:
2499 smb://[user@]machine[/service][/remote-dir]
2501 The user, service and remote-dir elements are optional. The user,
2503 domain and password can be specified in an input dialog.
2504 Examples:
2506 smb://machine/Share
2508 smb://other_machine
2509 smb://guest@machine/Public/Irlex
2510 EXTernal File System
2512 extfs allows you to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU
2513 Midnight Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.
2514 Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:
2516 1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing
2518 file. They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree.
2519 You can invoke them by typing 'cd fsname://' where fsname is an extfs
2520 short name (see below). Examples of such filesystems include audio
2521 (list audio tracks on the CD) or apt (list of all Debian packages in
2522 the system).
2523 For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type
2525 cd audio://
2527 2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent
2529 contents of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files
2530 compressed in an archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages in
2531 a mailbox (mailfs) or parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such
2532 filesystems 'fsname://' should be appended to the archive name. Note
2533 that the archive itself can be on another vfs.
2534 For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type
2536 cd documents.zip/uzip://
2538 In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For
2540 instance, you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory
2541 history. An important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell com‐
2542 mands inside extfs, just like any other non-local VFS.
2543 Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:
2545 a access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette (cd a://).
2547 apt front end to Debian's APT package management system (cd apt://).
2549 audio audio CD ripping and playing (cd audio:// or cd
2551 device/audio://).
2552 bpp package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution (cd
2554 file.bpp/bpp://).
2555 deb package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.deb/deb://).
2557 dpkg Debian GNU/Linux installed packages (cd deb://).
2559 hp48 view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator (cd hp48://).
2561 lslR browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs (cd file‐
2563 name/lslR://).
2564 mailfs mbox-style mailbox files support (cd mailbox/mailfs://).
2566 patchfs
2568 extfs to handle unified and context diffs (cd file‐
2569 name/patchfs://).
2570 rpm RPM package (cd filename/rpm://).
2572 rpms RPM database management (cd rpms://).
2574 ulha, urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha
2576 archivers (cd archive/xxxx:// where xxxx is one of: ulha, urar,
2577 uzip, uzoo, uar, uha).
2578 You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in
2580 the Edit Extension File section. Here is an example entry for Debian
2581 packages:
2582 regex/.deb$
2584 Open=%cd %p/deb://
2585
2587 Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports color
2588 using the terminal database and your terminal name. Sometimes it gets
2589 confused, so you may force color mode or disable color mode using the
2590 -c and -b flag respectively.
2591 If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager instead of
2593 ncurses, it will also check the variable COLORTERM, if it is set, it
2594 has the same effect as the -c flag.
2595 You may specify terminals that always force color mode by adding the
2597 color_terminals variable to the Colors section of the initialization
2598 file. This will prevent Midnight Commander from trying to detect if
2599 your terminal supports color. Example:
2600 [Colors]
2602 color_terminals=linux,xterm
2603 color_terminals=terminal-name1,terminal-name2...
2604 The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang, ncurses does
2606 not provide a way to force color mode: ncurses uses just the informa‐
2607 tion in the terminal database.
2608 Midnight Commander provides a way to change the default colors. Cur‐
2610 rently the colors are configured using the environment variable
2611 MC_COLOR_TABLE or the Colors section in the initialization file.
2612 In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
2614 base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a ter‐
2615 minal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:
2616 [Colors]
2618 base_color=
2619 xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
2620 The format for the color definition is:
2622 <keyword>=<fgcolor>,<bgcolor>,<attributes>:<keyword>=...
2624 The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal, selected, dis‐
2626 abled, marked, markselect, errors, input, inputmark, inputunchanged,
2627 commandlinemark, reverse, gauge, header, inputhistory, commandhistory.
2628 Button bar colors are: bbarhotkey, bbarbutton. Status bar color: sta‐
2629 tusbar. Menu colors are: menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, men‐
2630 uinactive. Dialog colors are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus,
2631 dtitle. Error dialog colors are: errdfocus, errdhotnormal, errdhotfo‐
2632 cus, errdtitle. Help colors are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold,
2633 helplink, helpslink, helptitle. Viewer colors are: viewnormal, view‐
2634 bold, viewunderline, viewselected. Editor colors are: editnormal, edit‐
2635 bold, editmarked, editwhitespace, editlinestate. Popup menu colors are:
2636 pmenunormal, pmenusel, pmenutitle.
2637 header determines the color of panel header, the line that contains
2639 column titles and sort mode indicator.
2640 input determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.
2642 gauge determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar
2644 (gauge), which is used to show the user the progress of file opera‐
2645 tions, such as copying.
2646 disabled determines the color of the widget that cannot be selected.
2648 The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal is used for the nor‐
2650 mal text, dfocus is the color used for the currently selected compo‐
2651 nent, dhotnormal is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in
2652 normal components, whereas the dhotfocus color is used for the high‐
2653 lighted color in the currently selected component.
2654 Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot,
2656 menuhotsel and menuinactive tags instead.
2657 Help uses the following colors: helpnormal is used for normal text,
2659 helpitalic is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual
2660 page, helpbold is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the man‐
2661 ual page, helplink is used for not selected hyperlinks and helpslink is
2662 used for selected hyperlink.
2663 Popup menu uses following colors: pmenunormal is used for non-selected
2665 menu items and as a main color of popup menu window, pmenusel is used
2666 for selected menu item, pmenutitle is used for popup menu title.
2667 The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, bright‐
2669 green, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan,
2670 brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword for
2671 transparent background. It is 'default'. The 'default' can only be used
2672 for background color. Another special keyword "base" means mc's main
2673 colors. When 256 colors are available, they can be specified either as
2674 color16 to color255, or as rgb000 to rgb555 and gray0 to gray23. Exam‐
2675 ple:
2676 [Colors]
2678 base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default
2679 Attributes can be any of bold, italic, underline, reverse and blink,
2681 appended by a plus sign if more than one are desired. The special word
2682 "none" means no attributes, without attempting to fall back to
2683 base_color. Example:
2684 menuhotsel=yellow;black;bold+underline
2686
2689 You can change the appearance of Midnight Commander. To do this, you
2690 must specify a file that contain descriptions of colors and lines to
2691 draw boxes. Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible with the
2692 assignment of colors, as described in Section Colors.
2693 If your skin contains any true-color definitions, you should define the
2695 'truecolors' key set to TRUE value in [skin] section. If true-color is
2696 not used but 256-color is, you should define '256colors' instead.
2697 A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
2699 found):
2700 1) command line option -S <skin> or --skin=<skin>
2702 2) Environment variable MC_SKIN
2703 3) Parameter skin in section [Midnight-Commander] in config
2704 file.
2705 4) File /etc/mc/skins/default.ini
2706 5) File /usr/share/mc/skins/default.ini
2707 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
2710 may contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini
2711 or without it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one
2712 found):
2713 1) ~/.local/share/mc/skins/
2715 2) /etc/mc/skins/
2716 3) /usr/share/mc/skins/
2717 For getting extended info, refer to:
2720 Description of section and parameters
2722 Color pair definitions
2723 Color and attribute aliases
2724 Draw lines
2725 Compatibility
2726 Description of section and parameters
2729 Section [skin] contain metainfo for skin-file. Parameter description
2730 contain short text about skin.
2731 Section [filehighlight] contain descriptions of color pairs for file‐
2734 names highlighting. Name of parameters must be equal to names of sec‐
2735 tions into filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for getting
2736 more info.
2737 Section [core] describes the elements that are used everywhere.
2740 _default_
2742 Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not con‐
2743 tain color definitions
2744 selected
2746 cursor
2747 marked selected data
2749 markselect
2751 cursor on selected data
2752 gauge color of the filled part of the progress bar
2754 input color of input lines used in query dialogs
2756 inputmark
2758 color of input selected text
2759 inputunchanged
2761 color of input text before first modification or cursor movement
2762 commandlinemark
2764 color of selected text in command line
2765 reverse
2767 reverse color
2768 Section [dialog] describes the elements that are placed on dialog win‐
2770 dows (except error dialogs).
2771 _default_
2773 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2774 specified
2775 dfocus Color of active element (in focus)
2777 dhotnormal
2779 Color of hotkeys
2780 dhotfocus
2782 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2783 Section [error] describes the elements that are placed on error dialog
2786 windows
2787 _default_
2789 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2790 specified
2791 errdhotnormal
2793 Color of hotkeys
2794 errdhotfocus
2796 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2797 Section [menu] describes the elements that are placed in menu. This
2800 section describes system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus
2801 (called by F2 in panels and by F11 in editor).
2802 _default_
2804 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2805 specified
2806 entry Color of menu items
2808 menuhot
2810 Color of menu hotkeys
2811 menusel
2813 Color of active menu item (in focus)
2814 menuhotsel
2816 Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item
2817 menuinactive
2819 Color of inactive menu
2820 Section [help] describes the elements that are placed on help window.
2823 _default_
2825 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2826 specified
2827 helpitalic
2829 Color pair for element with italic attribute
2830 helpbold
2832 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2833 helplink
2835 Color of links
2836 helpslink
2838 Color of active link (on focus)
2839 Section [editor] describes the colors of elements placed in editor.
2842 _default_
2844 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2845 specified
2846 editbold
2848 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2849 editmarked
2851 Color of selected text
2852 editwhitespace
2854 Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting
2855 editlinestate
2857 Color for line state area
2858 Section [viewer] describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.
2861 viewunderline
2863 Color pair for element with underline attribute
2864 Color pair definitions
2867 Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.
2868 Color pairs described as two colors and the optional attributes sepa‐
2870 rated by ';'. First field sets the foreground color, second field sets
2871 background color, third field sets the attributes. Any of the fields
2872 may be omitted, in this case value will be taken from default color
2873 pair (global color pair or from default color pair of this section).
2874 Example:
2876 [core]
2877 # green on black
2878 _default_=green;black
2879 # green (default) on blue
2880 selected=;blue
2881 # yellow on black (default)
2882 # underlined yellow on black (default)
2883 marked=yellow;;underline
2884 Possible colors (names) and attributes are described in Colors. sec‐
2887 tion.
2888 Color and attribute aliases
2891 This optional section might define aliases for single colors (not color
2892 pairs) as well as combination of attributes; in other words, for semi‐
2893 colon-separated fragments of parameters. Aliases can refer to other
2894 aliases as long as they don't form a loop.
2895 Example:
2897 [aliases]
2898 myfavfg=green
2899 myfavbg=black
2900 myfavattr=bold+italic
2901 [core]
2902 _default_=myfavfg;myfavbg;myfavattr
2903 Draw lines
2906 Lines sets in section [Lines] into skin-file. By default single lines
2907 are used, but you may redefine to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to
2908 lines, for example).
2909 WARNING!!! When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen
2911 library usage of drawing lines is limited! Possible only drawing a
2912 single lines. For all questions and comments please contact the devel‐
2913 opers of Ncurses.
2914 Descriptions of parameters [Lines]:
2917 lefttop
2919 left-top line fragment.
2920 righttop
2922 right-top line fragment.
2923 centertop
2925 down branch of horizontal line
2926 centerbottom
2928 up branch of horizontal line
2929 leftbottom
2931 left-bottom line fragment
2932 rightbottom
2934 right-bottom line fragment
2935 leftmiddle
2937 right branch of vertical line
2938 rightmiddle
2940 left branch of vertical line
2941 centermiddle
2943 cross of lines
2944 horiz horizontal line
2946 vert vertical line
2948 thinhoriz
2950 thin horizontal line
2951 thinvert
2953 thin vertical line
2954 Compatibility
2958 Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with the appoint‐
2959 ment of the colors described in Colors. section.
2960 In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin file
2962 and is complementary.
2963
2966 Section [filehighlight] in current skin-file contains key names as
2967 highlight groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented
2968 in Skins section.
2969 Rules of filenames highlight are placed in /usr/share/mc/filehigh‐
2971 light.ini file (~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini). Name of section in
2972 this file must be equal to parameters names in [filehighlight] section
2973 (in current skin-file).
2974 Keys in these groups are:
2976 type file type. If present, all other options are ignored.
2978 regexp regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option is ignored.
2980 extensions
2982 list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.
2983 extensions_case
2985 (make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions'
2986 rule case sensitive (true) or not (false).
2987 `type' key may have values:
2989 - FILE (all files)
2990 - FILE_EXE
2991 - DIR (all directories)
2992 - LINK_DIR
2993 - LINK (all links except stale link)
2994 - HARDLINK
2995 - SYMLINK
2996 - STALE_LINK
2997 - DEVICE (all device files)
2998 - DEVICE_BLOCK
2999 - DEVICE_CHAR
3000 - SPECIAL (all special files)
3001 - SPECIAL_SOCKET
3002 - SPECIAL_FIFO
3003 - SPECIAL_DOOR
3004
3006 Most of Midnight Commander settings can be changed from the menus. How‐
3007 ever, there are a small number of settings which can only be changed by
3008 editing the setup file.
3009 These variables may be set in your ~/.config/mc/ini file:
3011 clear_before_exec
3013 By default, Midnight Commander clears the screen before execut‐
3014 ing a command. If you would prefer to see the output of the
3015 command at the bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.config/mc/ini
3016 file and change the value of the field clear_before_exec to 0.
3017 confirm_view_dir
3019 If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that direc‐
3020 tory. If this flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirma‐
3021 tion before changing the directory if you have files tagged.
3022 ftpfs_retry_seconds
3024 This value is the number of seconds Midnight Commander will wait
3025 before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has denied
3026 the login. If the value is zero, the login will no be retried.
3027 max_dirt_limit
3029 Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the
3030 internal file viewer. Normally this value is not significant,
3031 because the code automatically adjusts the number of updates to
3032 skip according to the rate of incoming keystrokes. However, on
3033 very slow machines or terminals with a fast keyboard auto
3034 repeat, a big value can make screen updates too jumpy.
3035 It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best
3037 behavior, and that is the default value.
3038 mouse_move_pages_viewer
3040 Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by
3041 line on the internal file viewer.
3042 only_leading_plus_minus
3044 Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line
3045 (select, unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line
3046 is empty. You don't need to quote those characters in the mid‐
3047 dle of the command line. On the other hand, you cannot use them
3048 to change selection when the command line is not empty.
3049 show_output_starts_shell
3051 This variable only works if you are not using the subshell sup‐
3052 port. When you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user
3053 screen, if this one is set, you will get a fresh shell. Other‐
3054 wise, pressing any key will bring you back to Midnight Comman‐
3055 der.
3056 timeformat_recent
3058 Change the time format used to display dates less than 6 months
3059 from now. See strftime or date man page for the format specifi‐
3060 cation. If this option is absent, default timeformat is used.
3061 timeformat_old
3063 Change the time format used to display dates older than 6
3064 months from now or for dates in the future. See strftime or
3065 date man page for the format specification. If this option is
3066 absent, default timeformat is used.
3067 torben_fj_mode
3069 If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work
3070 slightly different on the panels, instead of moving the selec‐
3071 tion to the first and last files in the panels, they will act as
3072 follows:
3073 The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else
3075 go to the top line unless it is already on the top line, in this
3076 case it will go to the first file in the panel.
3077 The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line,
3079 if over it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at
3080 the bottom line, in such case it will move the selection to the
3081 last file name in the panel.
3082 use_file_to_guess_type
3084 If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file com‐
3085 mand to match the file types listed on the mc.ext file.
3086 xtree_mode
3088 If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file
3089 system on a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other
3090 panel with the contents of the selected directory.
3091 fish_directory_timeout
3093 This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in
3094 seconds. The default value is 900 seconds.
3095 clipboard_store
3097 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
3098 board utility like 'xclip' to read text into X selection from
3099 file. For example:
3100 clipboard_store=xclip -i
3102 clipboard_paste
3104 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
3105 board utility like 'xclip' to print the selection to standard
3106 out. For example:
3107 clipboard_paste=xclip -o
3109 autodetect_codeset
3111 This option allows use the `enca' command to autodetect codeset
3112 of text files in internal viewer and editor. List of valid val‐
3113 ues can be obtain by the `enca --list languages | cut -d : -f1'
3114 command. Option must be located in the [Misc] section.
3115 For example:
3117 autodetect_codeset=russian
3119
3121 Midnight Commander provides a way for specify an options for external
3122 editors and viewers. Midnight Commander tries to search the "[External
3123 editor or viewer parameters]" section in the system initialization file
3124 (the mc.lib file located in Midnight Commander's library directory) and
3125 then in the ~/.config/mc/ini file. The option name should be equal to
3126 the name (full pathname) of external editor or viewer. The option value
3127 can contain following variables:
3128 %filename
3130 The filename to edit/view.
3131 %lineno
3133 The start line in the opening file.
3134 For example:
3136 [External editor or viewer parameters]
3138 vi=%filename +%lineno
3139 joe=%filename +%lineno
3140 more=%filename +%lineno
3141 Start line is passed to the external editor/viewer only if it is called
3143 from the Find file results window.
3144 If external editor/viewer is launched via F4/F3 keys, MC hopes that
3146 program (at least "joe", but probably others too) has an own feature
3147 that by default opens the file where it was last open. MC doesn't pre‐
3148 vent external editor/viewer to save and restore position in opened
3149 files.
3150
3152 Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal database
3153 without requiring root privileges. Midnight Commander searches in the
3154 system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in Midnight Comman‐
3155 der's library directory) and in the ~/.config/mc/ini file for the sec‐
3156 tion "terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section "termi‐
3157 nal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol that you
3158 want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for the
3159 key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape character
3160 and the ^x to represent the control-x character.
3161 The possible key symbols are:
3163 f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
3165 bs backspace
3166 home home key
3167 end end key
3168 up up arrow key
3169 down down arrow key
3170 left left arrow key
3171 right right arrow key
3172 pgdn page down key
3173 pgup page up key
3174 insert the insert character
3175 delete the delete character
3176 complete to do completion
3177 For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you
3179 set this in the ini file:
3180 insert=\e[Op
3182 Also now you can use extended learn keys. For example:
3185 ctrl-alt-right=\e[[1;6C
3187 ctrl-alt-left=\e[[1;6D
3188 This means that ctrl+alt+left sends a \e[[1;6D escape sequence and
3191 therefore Midnight Commander interprets "\e[[1;6D" as Ctrl-Alt-Left.
3192 The complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
3195 the completion process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can
3196 define other keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of
3197 nice and unused keys everywhere).
3198
3201 Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also
3202 affected by the MC_DATADIR environment variable. If it's set, its value
3203 is used instead of /usr/share/mc in the paths below.
3204 /usr/share/mc/mc.hlp
3206 The help file for the program.
3208 /usr/share/mc/mc.ext
3210 The default system-wide extensions file.
3212 ~/.config/mc/mc.ext
3214 User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
3216 file. They override the contents of the system wide files if
3217 present.
3218 /usr/share/mc/mc.ini
3220 The default system-wide setup for Midnight Commander, used only
3222 if the user doesn't have his own ~/.config/mc/ini file.
3223 /usr/share/mc/mc.lib
3225 Global settings for Midnight Commander. Settings in this file
3227 affect all users, whether they have ~/.config/mc/ini or not.
3228 Currently, only terminal settings are loaded from mc.lib.
3229 ~/.config/mc/ini
3231 User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is
3233 loaded from here instead of the system-wide startup file.
3234 /usr/share/mc/mc.hint
3236 This file contains the hints displayed by the program.
3238 /usr/share/mc/mc.menu
3240 This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
3242 ~/.config/mc/menu
3244 User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used
3246 instead of the system-wide applications menu.
3247 ~/.cache/mc/Tree
3249 The directory list for the directory tree and tree view fea‐
3251 tures.
3252 ~/.local/share/mc.menu
3254 Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used
3256 instead of the home or system-wide applications menu.
3257 To change default root directory of MC, you can use MC_PROFILE_ROOT
3259 environment variable. The value of MC_PROFILE_ROOT must be an absolute
3260 path. If MC_PROFILE_ROOT is unset or empty, HOME variable is used. If
3261 HOME is unset or empty, MC directories are get from GLib library.
3262
3264 This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
3265 License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in
3266 help for details on the License and the lack of warranty.
3267
3269 The latest version of this program can be found at http://ftp.mid‐
3270 night-commander.org/.
3271
3273 ed(1), gpm(1), terminfo(1), view(1), sh(1), bash(1), tcsh(1), zsh(1).
3274 Midnight Commander's page on the World Wide Web:
3276 http://www.midnight-commander.org/
3277
3279 Authors and contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file in the source
3280 distribution.
3281
3283 See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains
3284 to be done.
3285 If you want to report a problem with the program, please create bugre‐
3287 port at http://www.midnight-commander.org/.
3288 Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program
3290 you are running (mc -V displays this information), the operating system
3291 you are running the program on. If the program crashes, we would
3292 appreciate a stack trace.
3293MC Version 4.8.19 March 2017 MC(1)