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 -S arg Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins
31 is documented in the Skins. section.
32 -d, --nomouse
34 Disable mouse support.
35 -e [file], --edit[=file]
37 Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on
38 startup. See also mcedit (1).
39 -f, --datadir
41 Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander
42 files.
43 -k, --resetsoft
45 Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo data‐
46 base. Only useful on HP terminals when the function keys don't
47 work.
48 -K file
50 Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.
51 -l file, --ftplog=file
53 Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
54 -P file, --printwd=file
56 Print the last working directory to the specified file. This
57 option is not meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used
58 from a special shell script that automatically changes the cur‐
59 rent directory of the shell to the last directory the Midnight
60 Commander was in. Source the file /usr/share/mc/bin/mc.sh (bash
61 and zsh users) or /usr/share/mc/bin/mc.csh (tcsh users) respec‐
62 tively to define mc as an alias to the appropriate shell script.
63 -s Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks. If the section
65 [Lines] is not filled, the symbol for the pseudographics frame
66 is a space, otherwise the frame characters are taken from follow
67 params.
68 You can redefine the following variables:
70 lefttop
72 left-top corner
73 righttop
75 right-top corner
76 centertop
78 center-top cross
79 centerbottom
81 center-bottom cross
82 leftbottom
84 left-bottom corner
85 rightbottom
87 right-bottom corner
88 leftmiddle
90 left-middle cross
91 rightmiddle
93 right-middle cross
94 centermiddle
96 center cross
97 horiz default horizontal line
99 vert default vertical line
101 thinhoriz
103 thin horizontal line
104 thinvert
106 thin vertical line
107 -t, --termcap
109 Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it
110 makes the Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP vari‐
111 able for the terminal information instead of the information on
112 the system wide terminal database
113 -u, --nosubshell
115 Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if the
116 Midnight Commander has been built with concurrent shell sup‐
117 port).
118 -U, --subshell
120 Enable use of the concurrent shell support (only makes sense if
121 the Midnight Commander was built with the subshell support set
122 as an optional feature).
123 -v file, --view=file
125 Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also
126 mcview (1).
127 -V, --version
129 Display the version of the program.
130 -x, --xterm
132 Force xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals
133 (two screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
134 -g, --oldmouse
136 Force a "normal tracking" mouse mode. Used when running on
137 xterm-capable terminals (tmux/screen).
138 If specified, the first path name is the directory to show in the
140 selected panel; the second path name is the directory to be shown in
141 the other panel.
142
144 The screen of the Midnight Commander is divided into four parts.
145 Almost all of the screen space is taken up by two directory panels. By
146 default, the second line from the bottom of the screen is the shell
147 command line, and the bottom line shows the function key labels. The
148 topmost line is the menu bar line. The menu bar line may not be visi‐
149 ble, but appears if you click the topmost line with the mouse or press
150 the F9 key.
151 The Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same
153 time. One of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in the
154 current panel). Almost all operations take place on the current panel.
155 Some file operations like Rename and Copy by default use the directory
156 of the unselected panel as a destination (don't worry, they always ask
157 you for confirmation first). For more information, see the sections on
158 the Directory Panels, the Left and Right Menus and the File Menu.
159 You can execute system commands from the Midnight Commander by simply
161 typing them. Everything you type will appear on the shell command line,
162 and when you press Enter the Midnight Commander will execute the com‐
163 mand line you typed; read the Shell Command Line and Input Line Keys
164 sections to learn more about the command line.
165
167 The Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is activated when‐
168 ever you are running on an xterm(1) terminal (it even works if you take
169 a telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm)
170 or if you are running on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server
171 running.
172 When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is
174 selected; if you click with the right button, the file is marked (or
175 unmarked, depending on the previous state).
176 Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is an
178 executable program; and if the extension file has a program specified
179 for the file's extension, the specified program is executed.
180 Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function
182 key labels by clicking on them.
183 The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400 milliseconds.
185 This may be changed to other values by editing the ~/.mc/ini file and
186 changing the mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
187 If you are running the Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you
189 can get the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by hold‐
190 ing down the Shift key.
191
194 Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of the Control
195 (sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the Meta (sometimes labeled ALT or
196 even Compose) keys. In this manual we will use the following abbrevia‐
197 tions:
198 C-<chr>
200 means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>.
201 Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.
202 Alt-<chr>
204 means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If
205 there is no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release it, then type the
206 character <chr>.
207 S-<chr>
209 means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.
210 All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approximation to the
212 GNU Emacs editor's key bindings (default).
213 You may redefine key bindings. See redefine hotkey bindings
215 for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) rela‐
217 tive to default behavior.
218 There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are
221 the most important.
222 The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands
224 appearing in the File menu. This section includes the function keys.
225 Most of these commands perform some action, usually on the selected
226 file or the tagged files.
227 The Directory Panels section documents the keys which select a file or
229 tag files as a target for a later action (the action is usually one
230 from the file menu).
231 The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are used for enter‐
233 ing and editing command lines. Most of these copy file names and such
234 from the directory panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typ‐
235 ing) or access the command line history.
236 Input Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This means both the
238 command line and the input lines in the query dialogs.
239 Redefine hotkey bindings
242 Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file). A
243 keymap-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
244 found):
245 1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap> 2)
247 Environment variable MC_KEYMAP 3) In config file parameter
248 keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] 4) File ~/.mc/mc.keymap
249 5) File /etc/mc/mc.keymap
250 6) File /usr/share/mc/mc.keymap
251 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
253 may contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension
254 .keymap or without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the
255 first one found):
256 1) ~/.mc/ 2) /etc/mc/ 3) /usr/share/mc/
258 Miscellaneous Keys
260 Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other categories:
261 Enter if there is some text in the command line (the one at the bottom
263 of the panels), then that command is executed. If there is no
264 text in the command line then if the selection bar is over a
265 directory the Midnight Commander does a chdir(2) to the selected
266 directory and reloads the information on the panel; if the
267 selection is an executable file then it is executed. Finally, if
268 the extension of the selected file name matches one of the
269 extensions in the extensions file then the corresponding command
270 is executed.
271 C-l repaint all the information in the Midnight Commander.
273 C-x c run the Chmod command on a file or on the tagged files.
275 C-x o run the Chown command on the current file or on the tagged
277 files.
278 C-x l run the hard link command.
280 C-x s run the absolute symbolic link command.
282 C-x v run the relative symbolic link command. See the File Menu sec‐
284 tion for more information about symbolic links.
285 C-x i set the other panel display mode to information.
287 C-x q set the other panel display mode to quick view.
289 C-x ! execute the External panelize command.
291 C-x h run the add directory to hotlist command.
293 Alt-! executes the Filtered view command, described in the view com‐
295 mand.
296 Alt-? executes the Find file command.
298 Alt-c pops up the quick cd dialog.
300 C-o when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or
302 under an xterm, it will show you the output of the previous com‐
303 mand. When ran on the Linux console, the Midnight Commander
304 uses an external program (cons.saver) to handle saving and
305 restoring of information on the screen.
306 When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time
308 and you will be taken back to the Midnight Commander main screen, to
309 return to your application just type C-o. If you have an application
310 suspended by using this trick, you won't be able to execute other pro‐
311 grams from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the suspended
312 application.
313 Directory Panels
315 This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If
316 you want to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a look
317 at the section on Left and Right Menus.
318 Tab, C-i
320 change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the new
321 current panel and the old current panel becomes the new other
322 panel. The selection bar moves from the old current panel to the
323 new current panel.
324 Insert, C-t
326 to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo
327 sequence). To untag files, just retag a tagged file.
328 M-e to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
330 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
331 recoding you may select "directory up" (..) in active panel. To
332 cancel the charsets in all directories, select "No translation "
333 in the dialog of encodings.
334 Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j
336 used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the
337 bottom one, respectively.
338 Alt-t toggle the current display listing to show the next display
340 listing mode. With this it is possible to quickly switch to
341 brief listing, long listing, user defined listing mode, and back
342 to the default.
343 C-\ (control-backslash)
345 show the directory hotlist and change to the selected directory.
346 + (plus)
348 this is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight
349 Commander will prompt for a selection options. When Files only
350 checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files only is
351 off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat‐
352 terns checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the
353 filename globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more
354 characters and ? standing for one character). If Shell Patterns
355 is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
356 expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on,
357 the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensi‐
358 tive is off, the case will be ignored.
359 \ (backslash)
361 use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the oppo‐
362 site of the Plus key.
363 up-key, C-p
365 move the selection bar to the previous entry in the panel.
366 down-key, C-n
368 move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.
369 home, a1, Alt-<
371 move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
372 end, c1, Alt->
374 move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
375 next-page, C-v
377 move the selection bar one page down.
378 prev-page, Alt-v
380 move the selection bar one page up.
381 Alt-o If the currently selected file is a directory, load that direc‐
383 tory on the other panel and moves the selection to the next
384 file. If the currently selected file is not a directory, load
385 the parent directory on the other panel and moves the selection
386 to the next file.
387 Alt-i make the current directory of the current panel also the current
389 directory of the other panel. Put the other panel to the list‐
390 ing mode if needed. If the current panel is panelized, the
391 other panel doesn't become panelized.
392 C-PageUp, C-PageDown
394 only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the
395 currently selected directory respectively.
396 Alt-y moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to
398 clicking the < with the mouse.
399 Alt-u moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to click‐
401 ing the > with the mouse.
402 Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H
404 displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v'
405 with the mouse.
406 Quick search
408 The Quick search mode allows to perform fast file search in file panel.
409 Press C-s or Alt-s to start a filename search in the directory listing.
410 When the search is active, the user input will be added to the search
412 string instead of the command line. If the Show mini-status option is
413 enabled the search string is shown on the mini-status line. When typ‐
414 ing, the selection bar will move to the next file starting with the
415 typed letters. The Backspace or DEL keys can be used to correct typing
416 mistakes. If C-s is pressed again, the next match is searched for.
417 If quick search is started with double pressing of C-s, the previous
419 quick search pattern will be used for current search.
420 Besides the filename characters, you can also use wildcard characters
422 '*' and '?'.
423 Shell Command Line
425 This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
426 entering shell commands.
427 Alt-Enter
429 copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
430 C-Enter
432 same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some ter‐
433 minals.
434 C-Shift-Enter
436 copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the
437 command line. May not work on remote systems and some termi‐
438 nals.
439 Alt-Tab
441 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
442 pletion for you.
443 C-x t, C-x C-t
445 copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged files, the
446 selected file) of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other
447 panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.
448 C-x p, C-x C-p
450 the first key sequence copies the current path name to the com‐
451 mand line, and the second one copies the unselected panel's path
452 name to the command line.
453 C-q the quote command can be used to insert characters that are oth‐
455 erwise interpreted by the Midnight Commander (like the '+' sym‐
456 bol)
457 Alt-p, Alt-n
459 use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
460 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
461 Alt-h displays the history for the current input line.
463 General Movement Keys
465 The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common code
466 to handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same keys. Each of
467 them also accepts some keys of its own.
468 Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same movement
470 keys, so this section may be of use for those parts too.
471 Up, C-p
473 moves one line backward.
474 Down, C-n
476 moves one line forward.
477 Prev Page, Page Up, Alt-v
479 moves one page up.
480 Next Page, Page Down, C-v
482 moves one page down.
483 Home, A1
485 moves to the beginning.
486 End, C1
488 move to the end.
489 The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addi‐
491 tion the to ones mentioned above:
492 b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete
494 moves one page up.
495 Space bar
497 moves one page down.
498 u, d moves one half of a page up or down.
500 g, G moves to the beginning or to the end.
502 Input Line Keys
504 The input lines (they are used for the command line and for the query
505 dialogs in the program) accept these keys:
506 C-a puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
508 C-e puts the cursor at the end of the line.
510 C-b, move-left
512 move the cursor one position left.
513 C-f, move-right
515 move the cursor one position right.
516 Alt-f moves one word forward.
518 Alt-b moves one word backward.
520 C-h, Backspace
522 delete the previous character.
523 C-d, Delete
525 delete the character in the point (over the cursor).
526 C-@ sets the mark for cutting.
528 C-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer
530 and removes the text from the input line.
531 Alt-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buf‐
533 fer.
534 C-y yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
536 C-k kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
538 Alt-p, Alt-n
540 Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
541 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
542 Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace
544 delete one word backward.
545 Alt-Tab
547 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
548 pletion for you.
549
552 The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse on the top
553 row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus: "Left", "File", "Com‐
554 mand", "Options" and "Right".
555 The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appearance of the left
557 and right directory panels.
558 The File Menu lists the actions you can perform on the currently
560 selected file or the tagged files.
561 The Command Menu lists the actions which are more general and bear no
563 relation to the currently selected file or the tagged files.
564 The Options Menu lists the actions which allow you to customize the
566 Midnight Commander.
567 Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus
569 The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the Left and
570 Right menus (they are named Above and Below when the horizontal panel
571 split is chosen from the Layout options dialog).
572 Listing Mode...
574 The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are
575 four different listing modes available: Full, Brief, Long and User.
576 The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file and
577 the modification time.
578 The brief view shows only the file name and it has two columns (there‐
580 fore showing twice as many files as other views). The long view is sim‐
581 ilar to the output of ls -l command. The long view takes the whole
582 screen width.
583 If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to specify the
585 display format.
586 The user display format must start with a panel size specifier. This
588 may be "half" or "full", and they specify a half screen panel and a
589 full screen panel respectively.
590 After the panel size, you may specify the two columns mode on the
592 panel, this is done by adding the number "2" to the user format string.
593 After this you add the name of the fields with an optional size speci‐
595 fier. This are the available fields you may display:
596 name displays the file name.
598 size displays the file size.
600 bsize is an alternative form of the size format. It displays the size
602 of the files and for directories it just shows SUB-DIR or
603 UP--DIR.
604 type displays a one character wide type field. This character is
606 similar to what is displayed by ls with the -F flag - * for exe‐
607 cutable files, / for directories, @ for links, = for sockets, -
608 for character devices, + for block devices, | for pipes, ~ for
609 symbolic links to directories and ! for stale symlinks (links
610 that point nowhere).
611 mark an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
613 mtime file's last modification time.
615 atime file's last access time.
617 ctime file's status change time.
619 perm a string representing the current permission bits of the file.
621 mode an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.
623 nlink the number of links to the file.
625 ngid the GID (numeric).
627 nuid the UID (numeric).
629 owner the owner of the file.
631 group the group of the file.
633 inode the inode of the file.
635 Also you can use following keywords to define the panel layout:
637 space a space in the display format.
639 | add a vertical line to the display format.
641 To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add :
643 followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If
644 the number is followed by the symbol +, then the size specifies the
645 minimal field size - if the program finds out that there is more space
646 on the screen, it will then expand that field.
647 For example, the Full display corresponds to this format:
649 half type name | size | mtime
651 And the Long display corresponds to this format:
653 full perm space nlink space owner space group space size space mtime
655 space name
656 This is a nice user display format:
658 half name | size:7 | type mode:3
660 Panels may also be set to the following modes:
662 Info The info view display information related to the currently
664 selected file and if possible information about the current file
665 system.
666 Tree The tree view is quite similar to the directory tree feature.
668 See the section about it for more information.
669 Quick View
671 In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced viewer that
672 displays the contents of the currently selected file, if you
673 select the panel (with the tab key or the mouse), you will have
674 access to the usual viewer commands.
675 Sort Order...
677 The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modification time,
678 by access time, and by inode information modification time, by size, by
679 inode and unsorted. In the Sort order dialog box you can choose the
680 sort order and you may also specify if you want to sort in reverse
681 order by checking the reverse box.
682 By default directories are sorted before files but this can be changed
684 from the Panel options menu (option Mix all files).
685 Filter...
687 The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern (for example
688 *.tar.gz) which the files must match to be shown. Regardless of the
689 filter pattern, the directories and the links to directories are always
690 shown in the directory panel.
691 Reread
693 The reread command reload the list of files in the directory. It is
694 useful if other processes have created or removed files. If you have
695 panelized file names in a panel this will reload the directory contents
696 and remove the panelized information (See the section External panelize
697 for more information).
698 File Menu
700 The Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard shortcuts for
701 commands appearing in the file menu. The escape sequences for the
702 function keys are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals
703 without function key support, you can achieve the same functionality by
704 pressing the ESC key and then a number in the range 1 through 9 and 0
705 (corresponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).
706 The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in paren‐
708 theses):
709 Help (F1)
711 Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the help viewer, you
713 can use the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to follow
714 that link. The keys Space and Backspace are used to move forward and
715 backward in a help page. Press F1 again to get the full list of
716 accepted keys.
717 Menu (F2)
719 Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way to provide
721 users with a menu and add extra features to the Midnight Commander.
722 View (F3, F13)
724 View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the Internal
726 File Viewer but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an
727 external file viewer specified by the VIEWER environment variable. If
728 VIEWER is undefined, the PAGER environment variable is tried. If PAGER
729 is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use F13
730 instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or
731 preprocessing to the file.
732 Filtered View (Alt-!)
734 This command prompts for a command and its arguments (the argument
736 defaults to the currently selected file name), the output from such
737 command is shown in the internal file viewer.
738 Edit (F4, F14)
740 Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually F14) to
742 start the editor with a new, empty file. Currently they invoke the vi
743 editor, or the editor specified in the EDITOR environment variable, or
744 the Internal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
745 Copy (F5, F15)
747 Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
749 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
750 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
751 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. During this
752 process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort the operation. For details
753 about source mask (which will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$ depending
754 on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible wildcards in the desti‐
755 nation see Mask copy/rename.
756 F15 (usually F15) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
758 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
759 any tagged files.
760 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
762 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
763 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
764 Link (C-x l)
766 Create a hard link to the current file.
768 Absolute symlink (C-x s)
770 Create a absolute symbolic link to the current file.
772 Relative symLink (C-x v)
774 Create a relative symbolic link to the current file.
776 To those of you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a
778 file is a bit like copying the file, but both the source filename and
779 the destination filename represent the same file image. For example, if
780 you edit one of these files, all changes you make will appear in both
781 files. Some people call links aliases or shortcuts.
782 A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there is no way of
784 telling which one is the original and which is the link. If you delete
785 either one of them the other one is still intact. It is very difficult
786 to notice that the files represent the same image. Use hard links when
787 you don't even want to know.
788 A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original file. If the
790 original file is deleted the symbolic link is useless. It is quite easy
791 to notice that the files represent the same image. The Midnight Comman‐
792 der shows an "@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic
793 link to somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a tilde (~)).
794 The original file which the link points to is shown on mini-status line
795 if the Show mini-status option is enabled. Use symbolic links when you
796 want to avoid the confusion that can be caused by hard links.
797 When you press "C-x s" Midnight Commander will automatically fill in
799 the complete path+filename of the original file and suggest a name for
800 the link. You can change either one.
801 Sometimes you may want to change the absolute path of the original into
803 a relative path. An absolute path starts from the root directory:
804 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> /home/frodo/new/mc
806 A relative link describes the original file's location starting from
808 the location of the link itself:
809 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> ../new/mc
811 You can force Midnight Commander to suggest a relative path by pressing
813 "C-x v" instead of "C-x s".
814 Rename/Move (F6, F16)
816 Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
818 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
819 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
820 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. For more details
821 look at Copy (F5) operation above, most of the things are quite simi‐
822 lar.
823 F16 (usually F16) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
825 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
826 any tagged files.
827 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
829 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
830 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
831 Mkdir (F7)
833 Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory specified.
835 Delete (F8)
837 Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in the currently
839 selected panel. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort
840 the operation.
841 Quick cd (Alt-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full command line
843 and want to cd somewhere.
844 Select group (+)
846 This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander
848 will prompt for a selection options. When Files only checkbox is on,
849 only files will be selected. If Files only is off, as files as direc‐
850 tories will be selected. When Shell Patterns checkbox is on, the regu‐
851 lar expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (*
852 standing for zero or more characters and ? standing for one charac‐
853 ter). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with
854 normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox
855 is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensi‐
856 tive is off, the case will be ignored.
857 Unselect group (\)
859 Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of the Select
861 group command.
862 Quit (F10, Shift-F10)
864 Terminate the Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when you want to
866 quit and you are using the shell wrapper. Shift-F10 will not take you
867 to the last directory you visited with the Midnight Commander, instead
868 it will stay at the directory where you started the Midnight Commander.
869 Quick cd
871 This command is useful if you have a full command line and want to cd
872 somewhere without having to yank and paste the command line. This com‐
873 mand pops up a small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter
874 after cd on the command line and then you press enter. This features
875 all the things that are already in the internal cd command.
876 Command Menu
878 The Directory tree command shows a tree figure of the directories.
879 The "Find file" command allows you to search for a specific file.
881 The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the two directory pan‐
883 els.
884 The "Switch panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell
886 command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD console.
887 The "Compare directories" command compares the directory panels with
889 each other. You can then use the Copy (F5) command to make the panels
890 identical. There are three compare methods. The quick method compares
891 only file size and file date. The thorough method makes a full
892 byte-by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available if the
893 machine does not support the mmap(2) system call. The size-only com‐
894 pare method just compares the file sizes and does not check the con‐
895 tents or the date times, it just checks the file size.
896 The "External panelize" allows you to execute an external program, and
898 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
899 The "Command history" command shows a list of typed commands. The
901 selected command is copied to the command line. The command history can
902 also be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-n.
903 The "Directory hotlist" command makes changing of the current directory
905 to often used directories faster.
906 The "Screen list" command shows a dialog window with the list of cur‐
908 rently running internal editors, viewers and other MC modules that sup‐
909 port this mode.
910 The "Edit extension file" command allows you to specify programs to
912 executed when you try to execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other
913 thing on files with certain extensions (filename endings).
914 The "Edit menu file" command may be used for editing the user menu
916 (which appears by pressing F2).
917 Directory Tree
919 The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the directories. You
920 can select a directory from the figure and the Midnight Commander will
921 change to that directory.
922 There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory tree command
924 is available from Commands menu. The other way is to select tree view
925 from the Left or Right menu.
926 To get rid of long delays the Midnight Commander creates the tree fig‐
928 ure by scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the
929 directory which you want to see is missing, move to its parent direc‐
930 tory and press C-r (or F2).
931 You can use the following keys:
933 General movement keys are accepted.
935 Enter. In the directory tree, exits the directory tree and changes to
937 this directory in the current panel. In the tree view, changes to this
938 directory in the other panel and stays in tree view mode in the current
939 panel.
940 C-r, F2 (Rescan). Rescan this directory. Use this when the tree figure
942 is out of date: it is missing subdirectories or shows some subdirecto‐
943 ries which don't exist any more.
944 F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure. Use this to
946 remove clutter from the figure. If you want the directory back to the
947 tree figure press F2 in its parent directory.
948 F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic navigation mode
950 (default) and the static navigation mode.
951 In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
953 select a directory. All known directories are shown.
954 In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
956 select a sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent direc‐
957 tory, and the Right key to move to a child directory. Only the parent,
958 sibling and children directories are shown, others are left out. The
959 tree figure changes dynamically as you traverse.
960 F5 (Copy). Copy the directory.
962 F6 (RenMov). Move the directory.
964 F7 (Mkdir). Make a new directory below this directory.
966 F8 (Delete). Delete this directory from the file system.
968 C-s, Alt-s. Search the next directory matching the search string. If
970 there is no such directory these keys will move one line down.
971 C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search string.
973 Any other character. Add the character to the search string and move
975 to the next directory which starts with these characters. In the tree
976 view you must first activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The
977 search string is shown in the mini status line.
978 The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They
980 aren't supported in the tree view.
981 F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
983 Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.
985 The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See also the
987 section on mouse support.
988 Find File
990 The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the search
991 and the filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree button you
992 can select the start directory from the directory tree figure.
993 Option form whole words. Like grep -w.
995 You can start the search by pressing the OK button. During the search
997 you can stop from the Stop button and continue from the Start button.
998 You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow keys. The Chdir
1000 button will change to the directory of the currently selected file. The
1001 Again button will ask for the parameters for a new search. The Quit
1002 button quits the search operation. The Panelize button will place the
1003 found files to the current directory panel so that you can do addi‐
1004 tional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete and so on). After
1005 panelizing you can press C-r to return to the normal file listing.
1006 It is possible to have a list of directories that the Find File command
1008 should skip during the search (for example, you may want to avoid
1009 searches on a CD-ROM or on a NFS directory that is mounted across a
1010 slow link).
1011 Directories to be skipped should be set on the variable ignore_dirs in
1013 the FindFile section of your ~/.mc/ini file.
1014 Directory components should be separated with a colon, here is an exam‐
1016 ple:
1017 [FindFile]
1019 ignore_dirs=/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
1020 You may consider using the External panelize command for some opera‐
1022 tions. Find file command is for simple queries only, while using Exter‐
1023 nal panelize you can do as mysterious searches as you would like.
1024 External panelize
1026 The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and
1027 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
1028 For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the panels all the
1030 symbolic links in the current directory, you can use external paneliza‐
1031 tion to run the following command:
1032 find . -type l -print
1034 Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no
1036 longer be the directory listing of the current directory, but all the
1037 files that are symbolic links.
1038 If you want to panelize all of the files that have been downloaded from
1040 your FTP server, you can use this awk command to extract the file name
1041 from the transfer log files:
1042 awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/xferlog
1044 You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive
1046 name, so that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the
1047 command on the input line and pressing Add new button. Then you enter a
1048 name under which you want the command to be saved. Next time, you just
1049 choose that command from the list and do not have to type it again.
1050 Hotlist
1052 The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the directories in
1053 the directory hotlist. The Midnight Commander will change to the
1054 directory corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dia‐
1055 log, you can remove already created label/directory pairs and add new
1056 ones. To add new directories quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist
1057 command (C-x h), which adds the current directory into the directory
1058 hotlist, asking just for the label for the directory.
1059 This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using
1061 the CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
1062 Extension File Edit
1064 This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.mc/bindings. The format of
1065 this file following:
1066 All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
1068 Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
1070 keyword/expr, i.e. everything after the slash until new line is expr.
1072 keyword can be:
1074 shell - expr is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name
1076 ends with expr. Example: shell/.tar matches *.tar.
1077 regex - expr is a regular expression. File matches if its name
1079 matches the regular expression.
1080 directory
1082 - expr is a regular expression. File matches if it is a direc‐
1083 tory and its name matches the regular expression.
1084 type - expr is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
1086 file %f without the initial "filename:" part matches regular
1087 expression expr.
1088 default
1090 - matches any file. expr is ignored.
1091 include
1093 - denotes a common section. expr is the name of the section.
1094 Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the for‐
1096 mat: keyword=command (with no spaces around =), where keyword should
1097 be: Open (invoked on Enter or double click), View (F3), Edit (F4) or
1098 Include (to add rules from the common section). command is any
1099 one-line shell command, with the simple macro substitution.
1100 Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If
1102 the appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule
1103 didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and
1104 View action is missing in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View
1105 action from the second entry will be used). default should match all
1106 the actions.
1107 Background Jobs
1109 This lets you control the state of any background Midnight Commander
1110 process (only copy and move files operations can be done in the back‐
1111 ground). You can stop, restart and kill a background job from here.
1112 Menu File Edit
1114 The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized by the
1115 user. When you access the user menu, the file .mc.menu from the current
1116 directory is used if it exists, but only if it is owned by user or root
1117 and is not world-writable. If no such file found, ~/.mc/menu is tried
1118 in the same way, and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide menu
1119 /usr/share/mc/mc.menu.
1120 The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with any‐
1122 thing but space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in order to
1123 be able to use it like a hot key, the first character should be a let‐
1124 ter). All the lines that start with a space or a tab are the commands
1125 that will be executed when the entry is selected.
1126 When an option is selected all the command lines of the option are
1128 copied to a temporary file in the temporary directory (usually
1129 /usr/tmp) and then that file is executed. This allows the user to put
1130 normal shell constructs in the menus. Also simple macro substitution
1131 takes place before executing the menu code. For more information, see
1132 macro substitution.
1133 Here is a sample mc.menu file:
1135 A Dump the currently selected file
1137 od -c %f
1138 B Edit a bug report and send it to root
1140 I=`mktemp ${MC_TMPDIR:-/tmp}/mail.XXXXXX` || exit 1
1141 vi $I
1142 mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < $I
1143 rm -f $I
1144 M Read mail
1146 emacs -f rmail
1147 N Read Usenet news
1149 emacs -f gnus
1150 H Call the info hypertext browser
1152 info
1153 J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
1155 tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
1156 K Make a release of the current subdirectory
1158 echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
1159 read tar
1160 ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
1161 cd ..
1162 tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
1163 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1165 X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
1166 tar xzvf %f
1167 Default Conditions
1169 Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condition must
1171 start from the first column with a '=' character. If the condition is
1172 true, the menu entry will be the default entry.
1173 Condition syntax: = <sub-cond>
1175 or: = <sub-cond> | <sub-cond> ...
1176 or: = <sub-cond> & <sub-cond> ...
1177 Sub-condition is one of following:
1179 y <pattern> syntax of current file matching pattern?
1181 (for edit menu only)
1182 f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
1183 F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
1184 d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
1185 D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
1186 t <type> current file of type?
1187 T <type> other file of type?
1188 x <filename> is it executable filename?
1189 ! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
1190 Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according to
1192 the shell patterns option. You can override the global value of the
1193 shell patterns option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first line
1194 of the menu file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).
1195 Type is one or more of the following characters:
1197 n not a directory
1199 r regular file
1200 d directory
1201 l link
1202 c character device
1203 b block device
1204 f FIFO (pipe)
1205 s socket
1206 x executable file
1207 t tagged
1208 For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't' type
1210 is a little special because it acts on the panel instead of the file.
1211 The condition '=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the current
1212 panel and false if not.
1213 If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be
1215 shown whenever the value of the condition is calculated.
1216 The conditions are calculated from left to right. This means
1218 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1219 is calculated as
1220 ( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
1221 Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
1223 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1225 L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
1226 gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
1227 Addition Conditions
1229 If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it
1231 is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will
1232 be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will
1233 not be included in the menu.
1234 You can combine default and addition conditions by starting condition
1236 with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you
1237 want to use two different conditions, one for adding and another for
1238 defaulting, you can precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one
1239 starting with '+' and another starting with '='.
1240 Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start
1242 with '#', space or tab.
1243 Options Menu
1245 The Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and off
1246 in several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options are
1247 enabled if they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.
1248 The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change
1250 most of settings of the Midnight Commander.
1251 The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of
1253 options how mc looks like on the screen.
1254 The Panel options command pops up a dialog from which you specify
1256 options of file manager panels.
1257 The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which
1259 actions you want to confirm.
1260 The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select
1262 which characters is your terminal able to display.
1263 The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys
1265 which are not working on some terminals and you may fix them.
1266 The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS
1268 related options.
1269 The Save setup command saves the current settings of the Left, Right
1271 and Options menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.
1272 Configuration
1274 The options in this dialog are divided into several groups: "File oper‐
1275 ation options", "Esc key mode", "Pause after run" and "Other options".
1276 File operation options
1278 Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and
1280 Delete operations are verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each
1281 operation). If you have a slow terminal, you may wish to disable the
1282 verbose operation. It is automatically turned off if the speed of your
1283 terminal is less than 9600 bps.
1284 Compute totals. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander com‐
1286 putes total byte sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy,
1287 Rename and Delete operations. This will provide you with a more accu‐
1288 rate progress bar at the expense of some speed. This option has no
1289 effect, if Verbose operation is disabled.
1290 Classic progressbar. If this option is enabled, the progressbar of
1292 Copy/Move/Delete operations is always grown form left to right. If dis‐
1293 abled, the growing direction of progressbar follows to direction of
1294 Copy/Move/Delete operation: from left panel to right one and vice
1295 versa. Enabled by default.
1296 Mkdir autoname When you press F7 to create a new directory, the input
1298 line in popup dialog will be filled by name of current file or direc‐
1299 tory in active panel. Disabled by default.
1300 Esc key mode.
1302 By default the Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key prefix.
1304 Therefore, you should press Esc code twice to exit a dialog. But there
1305 is a possibility to use a single press of ESC key for that action.
1306 Single press. By default this option is disabled. If you'll enable it,
1308 the ESC key will act as a prefix key for set up time interval (see
1309 Timeout option below), and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC
1310 key is interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).
1311 Timeout. This options is used to setup the time interval (in microsec‐
1313 onds) for single press of ESC key. By default, this inrerval is one
1314 second (1000000 microseconds). Also the timeout can be set via KEY‐
1315 BOARD_KEY_TIMEOUT_US environment variable (also in microseconds), which
1316 has higher priority than Timeout option value.
1317 Pause after run
1319 After executing your commands, the Midnight Commander can pause, so
1321 that you can examine the output of the command. There are three possi‐
1322 ble settings for this variable:
1323 Never. Means that you do not want to see the output of your command.
1325 If you are using the Linux or FreeBSD console or an xterm, you will be
1326 able to see the output of the command by typing C-o.
1327 Ondumbterminals. You will get the pause message on terminals that are
1329 not capable of showing the output of the last command executed (any
1330 terminal that is not an xterm or the Linux console).
1331 Always. The program will pause after executing all of your commands.
1333 Other options
1335 Use internal editor. If this option is enabled, the built-in file edi‐
1337 tor is used to edit files. If the option is disabled, the editor speci‐
1338 fied in the EDITOR environment variable is used. If no editor is spec‐
1339 ified, vi is used. See the section on the internal file editor.
1340 Use internal viewer. If this option is enabled, the built-in file
1342 viewer is used to view files. If the option is disabled, the pager
1343 specified in the PAGER environment variable is used. If no pager is
1344 specified, the view command is used. See the section on the internal
1345 file viewer.
1346 Auto menus. If this option is enabled, the user menu will be invoked
1348 at startup. Useful for building menus for non-unixers.
1349 Drop down menus. When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will
1351 be activated as soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only
1352 get the menu title, and you will have to activate the menu either with
1353 the arrow keys or with the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using
1354 hotkeys.
1355 Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Filter commands
1357 will use shell-like regular expressions. The following conversions are
1358 performed to achieve this: the '*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more
1359 characters); the '?' is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and
1360 '.' by the literal dot. If the option is disabled, then the regular
1361 expressions are the ones described in ed(1).
1362 Complete: show all. By default the Midnight Commander pops up all pos‐
1364 sible completions if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
1365 Alt-Tab for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as
1366 much as possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this
1367 option if you want to see all possible completions even after pressing
1368 Alt-Tab the first time.
1369 Rotating dash. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander shows
1371 a rotating dash in the upper right corner as a work in progress indica‐
1372 tor.
1373 Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes the Midnight Commander
1375 to follow the logical chain of directories when changing current direc‐
1376 tory either in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default
1377 behavior of bash. When unset, the Midnight Commander follows the real
1378 directory structure, so cd .. if you've entered that directory through
1379 a link will move you to the current directory's real parent and not to
1380 the directory where the link was present.
1381 Safe delete. If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory
1383 hotlist entries unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default
1384 selection in the confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from "Yes"
1385 to "No". This option is disabled by default.
1386 Auto save setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit the Midnight
1388 Commander the configurable options of the Midnight Commander are saved
1389 in the ~/.mc/ini file.
1390 Layout
1392 The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout
1393 of screen. The options in this dialog are divided into several groups:
1394 "Panel split", "Console output" and "Other options".
1395 Panel split
1397 The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory panels. You
1399 can specify whether the area is split to the panels in Vertical
1400 or Horizontal direction. Panel layout can be changed using Alt-,
1401 (Alt-comma) shortcut.
1402 Equal split. By default, panels have equal sizes. Using this option
1404 you can specify an unequal split.
1405 Console output
1407 On the Linux or FreeBSD console you can specify how many lines are
1409 shown in the output window. This option is available if Midnight Com‐
1410 mander runs on native console only.
1411 Other options
1413 Menu bar visible. If enabled, main menu of Midnight Commander is
1415 always visible on the top row of screen above panels. Enabled by
1416 default.
1417 Show mini-status. If enabled, one line of status information about the
1419 currently selected item is shown at the bottom of the panels. Enabled
1420 by default.
1421 Command prompt. If enabled, command line is avalable. Enabled by
1423 default.
1424 Keybar visible. If enabled, 10 lables associated with F1-F10 keys are
1426 located at the bottom row of screen. Enabled by default.
1427 Hintbar visible. If enabled, the one-line hints are visible below pan‐
1429 els. Enabled by default.
1430 XTerm window title. When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight
1432 Commander sets the terminal window title to the current working direc‐
1433 tory and updates it when necessary. If your terminal emulator is bro‐
1434 ken and you see some incorrect output on startup and directory change,
1435 turn off this option. Enabled by default.
1436 Show free space. If enabled, free space and total space of current
1438 file system is shown at the bottom frame of panel. Enabled by default.
1439 Panel options
1441 Main panel options
1442 Use SI size units. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander will
1444 use SI units (powers of 1000) when displaying any byte sizes. The suf‐
1445 fixes (k, m ...) are shown in lowercase. If disabled (default), Mid‐
1446 night Commander will use binary units (powers of 1024) and the suffixes
1447 are shown in upper case (K, M ...)
1448 Mix all files. If this option is enabled, all files and directories
1450 are shown mixed together. If the option is desabled (default), direc‐
1451 tories (and links to directories) are shown at the beginning of the
1452 listing, and other files below.
1453 Show backup files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show files
1455 ending with a tilde. Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls
1456 option -B). Enabled by default.
1457 Show hidden files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show all
1459 files that start with a dot (like ls -a). Disabled by default.
1460 Fast directory reload. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Comman‐
1462 der will use a trick to determine if the directory contents have
1463 changed. The trick is to reload the directory only if the i-node of
1464 the directory has changed; this means that reloads only happen when
1465 files are created or deleted. If what changes is the i-node for a file
1466 in the directory (file size changes, mode or owner changes, etc) the
1467 display is not updated. In these cases, if you have the option on, you
1468 have to rescan the directory manually (with C-r). Disabled by default.
1469 Mark moves down. If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you
1471 mark a file (with Insert key). Enabled by default.
1472 Reverse files only. Allow revert selection of files only. Enabled by
1474 default. If enabled, the reverse selection is applied to files only,
1475 not to directories. The selection of directories is untouched. If off,
1476 the reverse selection is applied to files as well to directories: all
1477 unselected items become selected, and vice versa.
1478 Simple swap. If both panels contain file listing, simple swap means
1480 that panels exchange its screen positions: left panel become right one,
1481 and vice versa. If this option is unchecked, file listing panels
1482 exchange its content keeping listing format and sort options. Unchecked
1483 by default.
1484 Auto save panels setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit the
1486 Midnight Commander the current settings of panels are saved in the
1487 ~/.mc/panels.ini file. Disabled by default.
1488 Navigation
1490 Lynx-like motion. If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows
1492 keys to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory
1493 and the shell command line is empty. By default, this setting is off.
1494 Page scrolling. If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the
1496 display when the cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel,
1497 otherwise it will just scroll a file at a time.
1498 Mouse page scrolling. Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse wheel
1500 is done by pages or line by line on the panels.
1501 File highlight
1503 You can specify whether permissions and file types should be high‐
1505 lighted with distinctive Colors. If the permission highlighting is
1506 enabled, the parts of the perm and mode display fields which apply to
1507 the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with the color
1508 defined by the selected keyword. If the file type highlighting is
1509 enabled, file names are colored according to rules described in
1510 /etc/mc/filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for more info.
1511 Quick search
1513 You can specify how the Quick search mode should works: case insensi‐
1515 tively, case sensitively or be matched to the the panel sort order:
1516 case sensitive or not.
1517 Confirmation
1519 In this dialog you configure the confirmation options for file dele‐
1520 tion, overwriting files, execution by pressing enter, quitting the pro‐
1521 gram, directory hotlist entries deletion and history cleanup.
1522 and.
1523 Display bits
1525 This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the
1526 screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/curses supports
1527 only seven output bits, ISO-8859-1 displays all the characters in the
1528 ISO-8859-1 map and full 8 bits is for those terminals that can display
1529 full 8 bit characters.
1530 Learn keys
1532 This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor
1533 arrows and some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal.
1534 They often don't, since many terminal databases are incomplete or bro‐
1535 ken.
1536 You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h'
1538 left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor move‐
1539 ment key and it is recognized, you can use that key as well.
1540 You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a key
1542 and it is recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name of
1543 that key. Once a key is marked OK it starts working as usually, e.g.
1544 F1 pressed the first time will just check that the F1 key works, but
1545 after that it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys. The
1546 Tab key should be working always.
1547 If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after
1549 pressing one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by
1550 pressing the button with the name of that key (either by the mouse or
1551 by Enter or Space after selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then
1552 a message box will appear asking you to press that key. Do it and wait
1553 until the message box disappears. If you want to abort, just press
1554 Escape once and wait.
1555 When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions
1557 for the keys you have redefined will be written into the [termi‐
1558 nal:TERM] section of your ~/.mc/ini file (where TERM is the name of
1559 your current terminal). The definitions of the keys that were already
1560 working properly are not saved.
1561 Virtual FS
1563 This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File
1564 System.
1565 The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some
1567 of the virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the
1568 file system (for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).
1569 Also, in order to access the contents of compressed files (for example,
1571 compressed tar files) the Midnight Commander needs to create temporary
1572 uncompressed files on your disk.
1573 Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk
1575 take up resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
1576 information to decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of
1577 access to frequently used file systems.
1578 Because of the format of the tar archives, the Tar filesystem needs to
1580 read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most tar
1581 files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in
1582 extinction), the tar file system has to uncompress the file on the disk
1583 in a temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a reg‐
1584 ular tar file.
1585 Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
1587 it's common that you will leave a tar file and then re-enter it later.
1588 Since decompression is slow, the Midnight Commander will cache the
1589 information in memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires,
1590 all the resources associated with the file system are released. The
1591 default timeout is set to one minute.
1592 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote
1594 FTP servers. It has several options.
1595 ftp anonymous password is the password used when you login as "anony‐
1597 mous". Some sites require a valid e-mail address. On the other hand,
1598 you probably don't want to give your real e-mail address to untrusted
1599 sites, especially if you are not using spam filtering.
1600 ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a
1602 cache. The cache expire time is configurable with the ftpfs directory
1603 cache timeout option. A low value for this option may slow down every
1604 operation on the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a
1605 request to the FTP server.
1606 You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern
1608 firewalls are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below),
1609 so FTP proxies are considered obsolete.
1610 If Always use ftp proxy is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to
1612 enable proxy for certain hosts. See FTP File System for examples.
1613 If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
1615 /usr/lib/mc/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names that are
1616 local (if the host name starts with a dot, it is assumed to be a
1617 domain) and to assume that any hostnames without dots in their names
1618 are directly accessible. All other hosts will be accessed through the
1619 specified FTP proxy.
1620 You can enable using ~/.netrc file, which keeps login names and pass‐
1622 words for ftp servers. See netrc (5) for the description of the .netrc
1623 format.
1624 Use passive mode enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection
1626 for data transfer is initiated by the client, not by the server. This
1627 option is recommended and enabled by default. If this option is turned
1628 off, the data connection is initiated by the server. This may not work
1629 with some firewalls.
1630 Save Setup
1632 At startup the Midnight Commander will try to load initialization
1633 information from the ~/.mc/ini file. If this file doesn't exist, it
1634 will load the information from the system-wide configuration file,
1635 located in /usr/share/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration file
1636 doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.
1637 The Save Setup command creates the ~/.mc/ini file by saving the current
1639 settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
1640 If you activate the auto save setup option, MC will always save the
1642 current settings when exiting.
1643 There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To
1645 change these settings you have to edit the setup file with your
1646 favorite editor. See the section on Special Settings for more informa‐
1647 tion.
1648
1651 You may execute commands by typing them directly in the Midnight Com‐
1652 mander's input line, or by selecting the program you want to execute
1653 with the selection bar in one of the panels and hitting Enter.
1654 If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, the Midnight
1656 Commander checks the extension of the selected file against the exten‐
1657 sions in the Extensions File. If a match is found then the code asso‐
1658 ciated with that extension is executed. A very simple macro expansion
1659 takes place before executing the command.
1660 The cd internal command
1662 The cd command is interpreted by the Midnight Commander, it is not
1663 passed to the command shell for execution. Thus it may not handle all
1664 of the nice macro expansion and substitution that your shell does,
1665 although it does some of them:
1666 Tilde substitution. The (~) will be substituted with your home direc‐
1668 tory, if you append a username after the tilde, then it will be substi‐
1669 tuted with the login directory of the specified user.
1670 For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while
1672 ~/guest is the directory guest in your home directory.
1673 Previous directory. You can jump to the directory you were previously
1675 by using the special directory name '-' like this: cd -
1676 CDPATH directories. If the directory specified to the cd command is
1678 not in the current directory, then The Midnight Commander uses the
1679 value in the environment variable CDPATH to search for the directory in
1680 any of the named directories.
1681 For example you could set your CDPATH variable to ~/src:/usr/src,
1683 allowing you to change your directory to any of the directories inside
1684 the ~/src and /usr/src directories, from any place in the file system
1685 by using its relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
1686 /usr/src/linux).
1687 Macro Substitution
1689 When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension dependent com‐
1690 mand, or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
1691 substitution takes place.
1692 The macros are:
1694 %i The indent of blank space, equal the cursor column position.
1696 For edit menu only.
1697 %y The syntax type of current file. For edit menu only.
1699 %k The block file name.
1701 %e The error file name.
1703 %m The current menu name.
1705 %f and %p
1707 The current file name.
1708 %x The extension of current file name.
1710 %b The current file name without extension.
1712 %d The current directory name.
1714 %F The current file in the unselected panel.
1716 %D The directory name of the unselected panel.
1718 %t The currently tagged files.
1720 %T The tagged files in the unselected panel.
1722 %u and %U
1724 Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are
1725 untagged. You can use this macro only once per menu file entry
1726 or extension file entry, because next time there will be no
1727 tagged files.
1728 %s and %S
1730 The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise
1731 the current file.
1732 %cd This is a special macro that is used to change the current
1734 directory to the directory specified in front of it. This is
1735 used primarily as an interface to the Virtual File System.
1736 %view This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer. This macro
1738 can be used alone, or with arguments. If you pass any arguments
1739 to this macro, they should be enclosed in brackets.
1740 The arguments are: ascii to force the viewer into ascii mode;
1742 hex to force the viewer into hex mode; nroff to tell the viewer
1743 that it should interpret the bold and underline sequences of
1744 nroff; unformatted to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff
1745 commands for making the text bold or underlined.
1746 %% The % character
1748 %{some text}
1750 Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text
1751 inside the braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted
1752 by the text typed by the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to
1753 cancel. This macro doesn't work on the command line yet.
1754 %var{ENV:default}
1756 If environment variable ENV is unset, the default is substi‐
1757 tuted. Otherwise, the value of ENV is substituted.
1758 The subshell support
1760 The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the
1761 shells: bash, tcsh and zsh.
1762 When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander will spawn a
1764 concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the SHELL variable
1765 and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run
1766 it in a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time you
1767 execute a command, the command will be passed to the subshell as if you
1768 had typed it. This also allows you to change the environment vari‐
1769 ables, use shell functions and define aliases that are valid until you
1770 quit the Midnight Commander.
1771 If you are using bash you can specify startup commands for the subshell
1773 in your ~/.mc/bashrc file and special keyboard maps in the ~/.mc/inpu‐
1774 trc file. tcsh users may specify startup commands in the ~/.mc/tcshrc
1775 file.
1776 When the subshell code is used, you can suspend applications at any
1778 time with the sequence C-o and jump back to the Midnight Commander, if
1779 you interrupt an application, you will not be able to run other exter‐
1780 nal commands until you quit the application you interrupted.
1781 An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the prompt dis‐
1783 played by the Midnight Commander is the same prompt that you are cur‐
1784 rently using in your shell.
1785 The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can control the
1787 subshell code.
1788
1790 The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of
1791 files and directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key combina‐
1792 tion.
1793 The Chmod window has two parts - Permissions and File.
1795 In the File section are displayed the name of the file or directory and
1797 its permissions in octal form, as well as its owner and group.
1798 In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons which corre‐
1800 spond to the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute bits,
1801 you can see the octal value change in the File section.
1802 To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons) use the arrow
1804 keys or the Tab key. To change the state of the check buttons or to
1805 select a button use Space. You can also use the hotkeys on the buttons
1806 to quickly activate them. Hotkeys are shown as highlighted letters on
1807 the buttons.
1808 To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
1810 When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on
1812 the bits you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits you
1813 want to change, you select one of the action buttons (Set marked or
1814 Clear marked).
1815 Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use
1817 the [Set all] button, which will act on all the tagged files.
1818 [Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected files
1820 [Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1822 [Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1824 [Set] set the attributes of one file
1826 [Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
1828
1830 The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot
1831 key for this command is C-x o.
1832
1834 The Advanced Chown command is the Chmod and Chown command combined into
1835 one window. You can change the permissions and owner/group of files at
1836 once.
1837
1839 When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander shows the
1840 file operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed
1841 and uses up to three progress bars. The file bar indicates the per‐
1842 centage of the current file that has been processed so far. The count
1843 bar shows how many of the tagged files have been handled. The bytes
1844 bar indicates the percentage of the total size of the tagged files that
1845 has been handled. If the verbose option is off, the file and bytes
1846 bars are not shown.
1847 There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip
1849 button will skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort but‐
1850 ton will abort the whole operation, the rest of the files are skipped.
1851 There are three other dialogs which you can run into during the file
1853 operations.
1854 The error dialog informs about error conditions and has three choices.
1856 Normally you select either the Skip button to skip the file or the
1857 Abort button to abort the operation altogether. You can also select
1858 the Retry button if you fixed the problem from another terminal.
1859 The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or move a file on
1861 the top of an existing file. The dialog shows the dates and sizes of
1862 the both files. Press the Yes button to overwrite the file, the No
1863 button to skip the file, the All button to overwrite all the files, the
1864 None button to never overwrite and the Update button to overwrite if
1865 the source file is newer than the target file. You can abort the whole
1866 operation by pressing the Abort button.
1867 The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to delete a directory
1869 which is not empty. Press the Yes button to delete the directory
1870 recursively, the No button to skip the directory, the All button to
1871 delete all the directories and the None button to skip all the
1872 non-empty directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing
1873 the Abort button. If you selected the Yes or All button you will be
1874 asked for a confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are really sure you
1875 want to do the recursive delete.
1876 If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the
1878 files on which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped
1879 files are left tagged.
1880
1882 The copy/move operations let you translate the names of files in an
1883 easy way. To do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and
1884 usually in the trailing part of the destination specify some wildcards.
1885 All the files matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
1886 the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the tagged files
1887 matching the source mask are renamed.
1888 There are other options which you can set:
1890 Follow links
1892 determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source direc‐
1894 tory (recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target directory
1895 or whether would you like to copy their content.
1896 Dive into subdirs
1898 determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be
1900 copied, but the target directory already exists. The default action is
1901 to copy the contents of the source directory into the target directory.
1902 Enabling this option causes copying the source directory itself into
1903 the target directory.
1904 For example, you want to copy directory /foo containing file bar to
1906 /bla/foo, which is an already existing directory. Normally (when Dive
1907 into subdirs is not set), mc would copy file /foo/bar into the file
1908 /bla/foo/bar. By enabling this option the /bla/foo/foo directory will
1909 be created, and /foo/bar will be copied into /bla/foo/foo/bar.
1910 Preserve attributes
1912 determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you
1914 are root) the ownership of the original files. If this option is not
1915 set, the current value of the umask will be respected.
1916 Use shell patterns on
1918 When the shell patterns option is on you can use the '*' and '?' wild‐
1920 cards in the source mask. They work like they do in the shell. In the
1921 target mask only the '*' and '\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The
1922 first '*' wildcard in the target mask corresponds to the first wildcard
1923 group in the source mask, the second '*' corresponds to the second
1924 group and so on. The '\1' wildcard corresponds to the first wildcard
1925 group in the source mask, the '\2' wildcard corresponds to the second
1926 group and so on all the way up to '\9'. The '\0' wildcard is the whole
1927 filename of the source file.
1928 Two examples:
1930 If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is "/bla/*.tgz" and
1932 the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will be "foo.tgz" in
1933 "/bla".
1934 Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
1936 become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is "*.*" and the
1937 destination is "\2.\1".
1938 Use shell patterns off
1940 When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic
1942 grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source mask
1943 to specify meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is more
1944 flexible but also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are sim‐
1945 ilar to the situation when the shell patterns option is on.
1946 Two examples:
1948 If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
1950 "/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will
1951 be "/bla/foo.tgz".
1952 Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
1954 will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
1955 "^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".
1956 Case Conversions
1958 You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u' or '\l'
1960 in the target mask, the next character will be converted to uppercase
1961 or lowercase correspondingly.
1962 If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will be
1964 converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next '\E'
1965 or next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.
1966 The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
1968 For example, if the source mask is '*' (shell patterns on) or
1970 '^\(.*\)$' (shell patterns off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the file
1971 names will be converted to have initial upper case and otherwise lower
1972 case.
1973 You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is a back‐
1975 slash and '\*' is an asterisk.
1976 Stable symlinks
1978 commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the tar‐
1980 get, so that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With
1981 absolute symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative
1982 one, it will recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other direc‐
1983 tory parts and making the value as short as possible (most modern
1984 filesystems keep short symlinks inside inodes and thus don't waste much
1985 disk space).
1986
1989 The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection.
1990 The input line allow enter the regular expression of filenames that
1991 will be selected/unselected.
1992 When Files only checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files
1994 only is off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat‐
1995 terns checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
1996 globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ?
1997 standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging
1998 of files is done with normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When
1999 Case sensitive checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive
2000 characters. If Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
2001
2003 The mcdiff is a visual diff tool. You can compare two files and edit
2004 them in-place (diffs are updated dynamically). You can browse and view
2005 a working copy from popular version control systems (GIT, Subversion,
2006 etc).
2007 Following shortcuts are available in internal diff viewer of Midnight
2009 Commander.
2010 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2012 F2 Save modified files.
2014 F4 Edit file of the left panel in the internal editor.
2016 F14 Edit file of the right panel in the internal editor.
2018 F5 Merge the current hunk. Only the current hunk will be merged.
2020 F7 Start search.
2022 F17 Continue search.
2024 F10, Esc, q Exit from diff viewer.
2026 Alt-s, s Toggle show of hunk status.
2028 Alt-n, l Toggle show of line numbers.
2030 f Maximize left panel.
2032 = Make panels equal in width.
2034 > Reduce the size of the right panel.
2036 < Reduce the size of the left panel.
2038 c Toggle show of trailing carriage return (CR) symbol as ^M.
2040 2, 3, 4, 8 Set tabulation size
2042 C-u Swap contents of diff panels.
2044 C-r Refresh the screen.
2046 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2048 Enter, Space, n Find next diff hunk.
2050 Backspace, p Find previous diff hunk.
2052 g Go to line.
2054 Down Scroll one line forward.
2056 Up Scroll one line backward.
2058 PageUp Move one page up.
2060 PageDown Mves one page down.
2062 Home, A1 Moves to the line beginning.
2064 End Moves to the line end.
2066 C-Home Move to the file beginning.
2068 C-End, C1 Move to the file end.
2070
2072 The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To
2073 toggle between modes, use the F4 key.
2074 The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
2076 the file type to display the information. Some character sequences,
2077 which appear most often in preformatted manual pages, are displayed
2078 bold and underlined, thus making a pretty display of your files.
2079 When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and con‐
2081 stant numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing the
2082 quotes. Each number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text with
2083 constants like this:
2084 "String" -1 0xBB 012 "more text"
2086 Note that 012 is an octal number. -1 is converted to 0xFF.
2088 Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Mid‐
2090 night Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
2091 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2093 F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
2095 F4 Toggle the hex mode.
2097 F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and will display
2099 that line.
2100 F6, /. Regular expression search.
2102 ?, Reverse regular expression search.
2104 F7 Normal search / hex mode search.
2106 C-s, F17, n. Start normal search if there was no previous search
2108 expression else find next match.
2109 C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search expression
2111 else find next match.
2112 F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or
2114 if a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the
2115 output from the filter. Current mode is always the other than written
2116 on the button label, since on the button is the mode which you enter by
2117 that key.
2118 F9 Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on the viewer
2120 will interpret some string sequences to show bold and underline with
2121 different colors. Also, on button label is the other mode than current.
2122 F10, Esc. Exit the internal file viewer.
2124 next-page, space, C-v. Scroll one page forward.
2126 prev-page, Alt-v, C-b, Backspace. Scroll one page backward.
2128 down-key Scroll one line forward.
2130 up-key Scroll one line backward.
2132 C-l Refresh the screen.
2134 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2136 ! Like C-o, but run a new shell if the subshell is not running.
2138 [n] m Set the mark n.
2140 [n] r Jump to the mark n.
2142 C-f Jump to the next file.
2144 C-b Jump to the previous file.
2146 Alt-r Toggle the ruler.
2148 Alt-e to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recod‐
2150 ing is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
2151 recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2152 It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look
2154 at the Extension File Edit section
2155
2158 The internal file editor is a full-featured full screen editor. It can
2159 edit files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files.
2160 The internal file editor is invoked using F4 if the use_internal_edit
2161 option is set in the initialization file.
2162 The features it presently supports are: block copy, move, delete, cut,
2164 paste; key for key undo; pull-down menus; file insertion; macro com‐
2165 mands; regular expression search and replace; shift-arrow text high‐
2166 lighting (if supported by the terminal); insert-overwrite toggle; word
2167 wrap; autoindent; tunable tab size; syntax highlighting for various
2168 file types; and an option to pipe text blocks through shell commands
2169 like indent and ispell.
2170 Sections:
2172 Options of editor in ini-file
2174 The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring. To see what
2176 keys do what, just consult the appropriate pull-down menu. Other keys
2177 are: Shift movement keys do text highlighting. Ctrl-Ins copies to the
2178 file cooledit.clip and Shift-Ins pastes from cooledit.clip. Shift-Del
2179 cuts to cooledit.clip, and Ctrl-Del deletes highlighted text. Mouse
2180 highlighting also works, and you can override the mouse as usual by
2181 holding down the shift key while dragging the mouse to let normal ter‐
2182 minal mouse highlighting work.
2183 To define a macro, press Ctrl-R and then type out the key strokes you
2185 want to be executed. Press Ctrl-R again when finished. You can then
2186 assign the macro to any key you like by pressing that key. The macro is
2187 executed when you press Ctrl-A and then the assigned key. The macro is
2188 also executed if you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the assigned key,
2189 provided that the key is not used for any other function. Once defined,
2190 the macro commands go into the file .mc/cedit/cooledit.macros in your
2191 home directory. You can delete a macro by deleting the appropriate line
2192 in this file.
2193 To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
2195 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recod‐
2196 ing you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2197 F19 will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or C or C++
2199 code or another). This is controlled by the file
2200 /usr/share/mc/edit.indent.rc which is copied to
2201 .mc/cedit/edit.indent.rc in your home directory the first time you use
2202 it.
2203 The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When editing binary
2205 files, you should set display bits to 7 bits in the options menu to
2206 keep the spacing clean.
2207
2210 Some editor options of ini-file are described in this section. Options
2211 are placed in [Midnight-Commander] section
2212 editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file
2214 Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from
2215 begin of file to cursor position (0)
2216
2219 Midnight Commander supports running many internal modules (such as edi‐
2220 tor, viewer and diff viewer) simultaneously and switching between them
2221 without closing open files. Using several file managers at a time, how‐
2222 ever, is not currently supported.
2223 Let's call each of these modules a screen. There are three ways to
2225 switch between screens, using one of these global shortcuts:
2226 Alt-} switch to the next screen;
2228 Alt-{ switch to the previous screen;
2230 Alt-` open a dialog window with the list of currently open screens (or
2232 use the "Screen list" menu item).
2233
2235 Let the Midnight Commander type for you.
2236 Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC
2238 attempts completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins
2239 with $), username (if the text begins with ~), hostname (if the text
2240 begins with @) or command (if you are on the command line in the posi‐
2241 tion where you might type a command, possible completions then include
2242 shell reserved words and shell built-in commands as well) in turn. If
2243 none of these matches, filename completion is attempted.
2244 Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input
2246 lines, command completion is command line specific. If the completion
2247 is ambiguous (there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the
2248 following action depends on the setting of the Complete: show all
2249 option in the Configuration dialog. If it is enabled, a list of all
2250 possibilities pops up next to the current position and you can select
2251 with the arrow keys and Enter the correct entry. You can also type the
2252 first letters in which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of
2253 all possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you press
2254 Alt-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise
2255 the first item which matches all the previous characters will be high‐
2256 lighted. As soon as there is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you
2257 can hide it by canceling keys Esc, F10 and left and right arrow keys.
2258 If Complete: show all is disabled, the dialog pops up only if you press
2259 Alt-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.
2260
2262 The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file
2263 system; this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch.
2264 The virtual file system switch allows the Midnight Commander to manipu‐
2265 late files not located on the Unix file system.
2266 Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with some Virtual File
2268 Systems (VFS): the local file system, used for accessing the regular
2269 Unix file system; the ftpfs, used to manipulate files on remote systems
2270 with the FTP protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed
2271 tar files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on ext2 file sys‐
2272 tems (the default file system for Linux systems), fish (for manipulat‐
2273 ing files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh). If the code was
2274 compiled with smbfs support, you can manipulate files on remote systems
2275 with the SMB (CIFS) protocol.
2276 A generic extfs (EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to
2278 easily expand VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.
2279 The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will
2281 forward them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one
2282 of the file systems is described later in their own section.
2283 FTP File System
2285 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote
2286 machines. To actually use it, you can use the FTP link item in the
2287 menu or directly change your current directory using the cd command to
2288 a path name that looks like this:
2289 /#ftp:[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
2291 The user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2293 the user element, the Midnight Commander will login to the remote
2294 machine as that user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the
2295 login name from the ~/.netrc file. The optional pass element is the
2296 password used for the connection. Using the password in the VFS direc‐
2297 tory name is not recommended, because it can appear on the screen in
2298 clear text and can be saved to the directory history.
2299 To enable using FTP proxy, prepend ! (an exclamation sign) to the
2301 hostname.
2302 Examples:
2304 /#ftp:ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
2306 /#ftp:tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
2307 /#ftp:!behind.firewall.edu/pub
2308 /#ftp:guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
2309 /#ftp:miguel:xxx@server/pub
2310 Please check the Virtual File System dialog box for ftpfs options.
2312 Tar File System
2314 The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar
2315 files and compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change
2316 your directory to a tar file, you change your current directory to the
2317 tar file by using the following syntax:
2318 /filename.tar#utar/[dir-inside-tar]
2320 The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means
2322 that usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter
2323 into the tar file, see the Extension File Edit section for details on
2324 how this is done.
2325 Examples:
2327 mc-3.0.tar.gz#utar/mc-3.0/vfs
2329 /ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar#utar
2330 The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
2332 FIle transfer over SHell filesystem
2334 The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
2335 manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use
2336 this, the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have
2337 bash-compatible shell.
2338 To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
2340 directory which name is in the following format:
2341 /#sh:[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]
2343 The user, options and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2345 the user element, the Midnight Commander will try to login on the
2346 remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
2347 The available options are:
2349 'C' - use compression;
2350 'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
2351 port - specify the port used by remote server.
2352 If the remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the
2353 remote machine will be set to this one.
2354 Examples:
2356 /#sh:onlyrsh.mx:r/linux/local
2358 /#sh:joe@want.compression.edu:C/private
2359 /#sh:joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
2360 /#sh:joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
2361 Undelete File System
2363 On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs undelete
2364 facilities, you will have the undelete file system available. Recovery
2365 of deleted files is only available on ext2 file systems. The undelete
2366 file system is just an interface to the ext2fs library to retrieve all
2367 of the deleted files names on an ext2fs and provides and to extract the
2368 selected files into a regular partition.
2369 To use this file system, you have to chdir into the special file name
2371 formed by the "/#undel" prefix and the file name where the actual file
2372 system resides.
2373 For example, to recover deleted files on the second partition of the
2375 first SCSI disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:
2376 /#undel:sda2
2378 It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
2380 before you start browsing files there.
2381 SMB File System
2383 The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB
2384 (or CIFS) protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups, Windows
2385 9x/ME/XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Samba. To actually use it, you
2386 may try to use the panel command "SMB link..." (accessible from the
2387 menubar) or you may directly change your current directory to it using
2388 the cd command to a path name that looks like this:
2389 /#smb:[user@]machine[/service][/remote-dir]
2391 The user, service and remote-dir elements are optional. The user,
2393 domain and password can be specified in an input dialog.
2394 Examples:
2396 /#smb:machine/Share
2398 /#smb:other_machine
2399 /#smb:guest@machine/Public/Irlex
2400 EXTernal File System
2402 extfs allows to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU
2403 Midnight Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.
2404 Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:
2406 1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing
2408 file. They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree.
2409 You can invoke them by typing 'cd #fsname' where fsname is an extfs
2410 short name (see below). Examples of such filesystems include audio
2411 (list audio tracks on the CD) or apt (list of all Debian packages in
2412 the system).
2413 For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type
2415 cd #audio
2417 2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent
2419 contents of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files
2420 compressed in an archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages in
2421 a mailbox (mailfs) or parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such
2422 filesystems '#fsname' should be appended to the archive name. Note
2423 that the archive itself can be on another vfs.
2424 For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type
2426 cd documents.zip#uzip
2428 In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For
2430 instance, you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory
2431 history. An important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell com‐
2432 mands inside extfs, just like any other non-local VFS.
2433 Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:
2435 a access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette (cd #a).
2437 apt front end to Debian's APT package management system (cd #apt).
2439 audio audio CD ripping and playing (cd #audio or cd device#audio).
2441 bpp package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.bpp#bpp).
2443 deb package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.deb#deb).
2445 dpkg Debian GNU/Linux installed packages (cd #deb).
2447 hp48 view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator (cd #hp48).
2449 lslR browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs (cd file‐
2451 name#lslR).
2452 mailfs mbox-style mailbox files support (cd mailbox#mailfs).
2454 patchfs
2456 extfs to handle unified and context diffs (cd filename#patchfs).
2457 rpm RPM package (cd filename#rpm).
2459 rpms RPM database management (cd #rpms).
2461 ulha, urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha
2463 archivers (cd archive#xxxx where xxxx is one of: ulha, urar,
2464 uzip, uzoo, uar, uha).
2465 You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in
2467 the Extension File Edit section. Here is an example entry for Debian
2468 packages:
2469 regex/.deb$
2471 Open=%cd %p#deb
2472
2474 The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports
2475 color using the terminal database and your terminal name. Sometimes it
2476 gets confused, so you may force color mode or disable color mode using
2477 the -c and -b flag respectively.
2478 If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager instead of
2480 ncurses, it will also check the variable COLORTERM, if it is set, it
2481 has the same effect as the -c flag.
2482 You may specify terminals that always force color mode by adding the
2484 color_terminals variable to the Colors section of the initialization
2485 file. This will prevent the Midnight Commander from trying to detect
2486 if your terminal supports color. Example:
2487 [Colors]
2489 color_terminals=linux,xterm
2490 color_terminals=terminal-name1,terminal-name2...
2491 The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang, ncurses does
2493 not provide a way to force color mode: ncurses uses just the informa‐
2494 tion in the terminal database.
2495 The Midnight Commander provides a way to change the default colors.
2497 Currently the colors are configured using the environment variable
2498 MC_COLOR_TABLE or the Colors section in the initialization file.
2499 In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
2501 base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a ter‐
2502 minal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:
2503 [Colors]
2505 base_color=
2506 xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
2507 The format for the color definition is:
2509 <keyword>=<foregroundcolor>,<backgroundcolor>:<keyword>= ...
2511 The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal, selected, dis‐
2513 abled, marked, markselect, errors, input, inputmark, inputunchanged,
2514 commandlinemark, reverse, gauge, header, inputhistory, commandhistory.
2515 Button bar colors are: bbarhotkey, bbarbutton. Status bar color: sta‐
2516 tusbar. Menu colors are: menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, men‐
2517 uinactive. Dialog colors are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus,
2518 dtitle. Error dialog colors are: errdfocus, errdhotnormal, errdhotfo‐
2519 cus, errdtitle. Help colors are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold,
2520 helplink, helpslink, helptitle. Viewer color are: viewbold, viewunder‐
2521 line, viewselected. Editor colors are: editnormal, editbold, edit‐
2522 marked, editwhitespace, editlinestate. Popup menu colors are: pme‐
2523 nunormal, pmenusel, pmenutitle.
2524 header determines the color of panel header, the line that contains
2526 column titles and sort mode indicator.
2527 input determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.
2529 gauge determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar
2531 (gauge), which is used to show the user the progress of file opera‐
2532 tions, such as copying.
2533 disabled determines the color of the widget that cannot be selected.
2535 The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal is used for the nor‐
2537 mal text, dfocus is the color used for the currently selected compo‐
2538 nent, dhotnormal is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in
2539 normal components, whereas the dhotfocus color is used for the high‐
2540 lighted color in the currently selected component.
2541 Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot,
2543 menuhotsel and menuinactive tags instead.
2544 Help uses the following colors: helpnormal is used for normal text,
2546 helpitalic is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual
2547 page, helpbold is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the man‐
2548 ual page, helplink is used for not selected hyperlinks and helpslink is
2549 used for selected hyperlink.
2550 Popup menu uses following colors: pmenunormal is used for non-selected
2552 menu items and as a main color of popup menu window, pmenusel is used
2553 for selected menu item, pmenutitle is used for popup menu title.
2554 The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, bright‐
2556 green, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan,
2557 brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword for
2558 transparent background. It is 'default'. The 'default' can only be used
2559 for background color. Example:
2560 [Colors]
2562 base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default
2563
2566 You can change the appearance of Midnight Commander. To do this, you
2567 must specify a file that contain descriptions of colors and lines to
2568 draw boxes. Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible with the
2569 assignment of colors, as described in Section Colors.
2570 A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
2572 found):
2573 1) command line option -S <skin> or --skin=<skin>
2575 2) Environment variable MC_SKIN
2576 3) In config file parameter skin in section [Midnight-Commander]
2577 4) File /etc/mc/skins/default.ini
2578 5) File /usr/share/mc/skins/default.ini
2579 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
2582 may contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini
2583 or without it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one
2584 found):
2585 1) ~/.mc/skins/
2587 2) /etc/mc/skins/
2588 3) /usr/share/mc/skins/
2589 For getting extended info, refer to:
2592 Description of section and parameters
2594 Color pair definitions
2595 Draw lines
2596 Compatibility
2597 Description of section and parameters
2600 Section [skin] contain metainfo for skin-file. Parameter description
2601 contain short text about skin.
2602 Section [filehighlight] contain descriptions of color pairs for file‐
2605 names highlighting. Name of parameters must be equal to names of sec‐
2606 tions into filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for getting
2607 more info.
2608 Section [core] describes the elements that are used everywhere.
2611 _default_
2613 Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not con‐
2614 tain color definitions
2615 selected
2617 cursor
2618 marked selected data
2620 markselect
2622 cursor on selected data
2623 gauge color of the filled part of the progress bar
2625 input color of input lines used in query dialogs
2627 inputmark
2629 color of input selected text
2630 inputunhanged
2632 color of input text before first modification or cursor movement
2633 commandlinemark
2635 color of selected text in command line
2636 reverse
2638 reverse color
2639 Section [dialog] describes the elements that are placed on dialog win‐
2641 dows (except error dialogs).
2642 _default_
2644 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2645 specified
2646 dfocus Color of active element (in focus)
2648 dhotnormal
2650 Color of hotkeys
2651 dhotfocus
2653 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2654 Section [error] describes the elements that are placed on error dialog
2657 windows
2658 _default_
2660 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2661 specified
2662 errdhotnormal
2664 Color of hotkeys
2665 errdhotfocus
2667 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2668 Section [menu] describes the elements that are placed in menu. This
2671 section describes system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus
2672 (called by F2 in panels and by F11 in editor).
2673 _default_
2675 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2676 specified
2677 entry Color of menu items
2679 menuhot
2681 Color of menu hotkeys
2682 menusel
2684 Color of active menu item (in focus)
2685 menuhotsel
2687 Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item
2688 menuinactive
2690 Color of inactive menu
2691 Section [help] describes the elements that are placed on help window.
2694 _default_
2696 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2697 specified
2698 helpitalic
2700 Color pair for element with italic attribute
2701 helpbold
2703 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2704 helplink
2706 Color of links
2707 helpslink
2709 Color of active link (on focus)
2710 Section [editor] describes the colors of elements placed in editor.
2713 _default_
2715 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2716 specified
2717 editbold
2719 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2720 editmarked
2722 Color of selected text
2723 editwhitespace
2725 Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting
2726 editlinestate
2728 Color for line state area
2729 Section [viewer] describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.
2732 viewunderline
2734 Color pair for element with underline attribute
2735 Color pair definitions
2738 Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.
2739 Color pairs described as two colors separated by ';'. First color sets
2741 the foreground color, second color sets background color. One of the
2742 colors may be omitted, in this case color will be taken from default
2743 color pair (global color pair or from default color pair of this sec‐
2744 tion).
2745 Example:
2747 [core]
2748 # green on black
2749 _default_=green;black
2750 # green (default) on blue
2751 selected=;blue
2752 # yellow on black (default)
2753 marked=yellow;
2754 Possible colors (names) described in Colors. section.
2757 Draw lines
2760 Lines sets in section [Lines] into skin-file. By default single lines
2761 are used, but you may redefine to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to
2762 lines, for example).
2763 WARNING!!! When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen
2765 library usage of drawing lines is limited! Possible only drawing a
2766 single lines. For all questions and comments please contact the devel‐
2767 opers of Ncurses.
2768 Descriptions of parameters [Lines]:
2771 lefttop
2773 left-top line fragment.
2774 righttop
2776 right-top line fragment.
2777 centertop
2779 down branch of horizontal line
2780 centerbottom
2782 up branch of horizontal line
2783 leftbottom
2785 left-bottom line fragment
2786 rightbottom
2788 right-bottom line fragment
2789 leftmiddle
2791 right branch of vertical line
2792 rightmiddle
2794 left branch of vertical line
2795 centermiddle
2797 cross of lines
2798 horiz horizontal line
2800 vert vertical line
2802 thinhoriz
2804 thin horizontal line
2805 thinvert
2807 thin vertical line
2808 Compatibility
2812 Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with the appoint‐
2813 ment of the colors described in Colors. section.
2814 In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin file
2816 and is complementary.
2817
2820 Section [filehighlight] in current skin-file contains key names as
2821 highlight groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented
2822 in Skins section.
2823 Rules of filenames highlight are placed in /usr/share/mc/filehigh‐
2825 light.ini file (~/.mc/filehighlight.ini). Name of section in this file
2826 must be equal to parameters names in [filehighlight] section (in cur‐
2827 rent skin-file).
2828 Keys in these groups are:
2830 type file type. If present, all other options are ignored.
2832 regexp regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option is ignored.
2834 extensions
2836 list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.
2837 extensions_case
2839 (make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions'
2840 rule case sentitive (true) or not (false).
2841 `type' key may have values:
2843 - FILE (all files)
2844 - FILE_EXE
2845 - DIR (all directories)
2846 - LINK_DIR
2847 - LINK (all links except stale link)
2848 - HARDLINK
2849 - SYMLINK
2850 - STALE_LINK
2851 - DEVICE (all device files)
2852 - DEVICE_BLOCK
2853 - DEVICE_CHAR
2854 - SPECIAL (all special files)
2855 - SPECIAL_SOCKET
2856 - SPECIAL_FIFO
2857 - SPECIAL_DOOR
2858
2860 Most of the Midnight Commander settings can be changed from the menus.
2861 However, there are a small number of settings which can only be changed
2862 by editing the setup file.
2863 These variables may be set in your ~/.mc/ini file:
2865 clear_before_exec
2867 By default the Midnight Commander clears the screen before exe‐
2868 cuting a command. If you would prefer to see the output of the
2869 command at the bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.mc/ini file
2870 and change the value of the field clear_before_exec to 0.
2871 confirm_view_dir
2873 If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that direc‐
2874 tory. If this flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirma‐
2875 tion before changing the directory if you have files tagged.
2876 ftpfs_retry_seconds
2878 This value is the number of seconds the Midnight Commander will
2879 wait before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has
2880 denied the login. If the value is zero, the login will no be
2881 retried.
2882 max_dirt_limit
2884 Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the
2885 internal file viewer. Normally this value is not significant,
2886 because the code automatically adjusts the number of updates to
2887 skip according to the rate of incoming keystrokes. However, on
2888 very slow machines or terminals with a fast keyboard auto
2889 repeat, a big value can make screen updates too jumpy.
2890 It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best
2892 behavior, and that is the default value.
2893 mouse_move_pages_viewer
2895 Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by
2896 line on the internal file viewer.
2897 only_leading_plus_minus
2899 Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line
2900 (select, unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line
2901 is empty. You don't need to quote those characters in the mid‐
2902 dle of the command line. On the other hand, you cannot use them
2903 to change selection when the command line is not empty.
2904 show_output_starts_shell
2906 This variable only works if you are not using the subshell sup‐
2907 port. When you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user
2908 screen, if this one is set, you will get a fresh shell. Other‐
2909 wise, pressing any key will bring you back to the Midnight Com‐
2910 mander.
2911 timeformat_recent
2913 Change the time format used to display dates less than 6 months
2914 from now. See strftime or date man page for the format specifi‐
2915 cation. If this option is absent, default timeformat is used.
2916 timeformat_old
2918 Change the time format used to display dates older than 6
2919 months from now or for dates in the future. See strftime or
2920 date man page for the format specification. If this option is
2921 absent, default timeformat is used.
2922 torben_fj_mode
2924 If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work
2925 slightly different on the panels, instead of moving the selec‐
2926 tion to the first and last files in the panels, they will act as
2927 follows:
2928 The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else
2930 go to the top line unless it is already on the top line, in this
2931 case it will go to the first file in the panel.
2932 The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line,
2934 if over it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at
2935 the bottom line, in such case it will move the selection to the
2936 last file name in the panel.
2937 use_file_to_guess_type
2939 If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file com‐
2940 mand to match the file types listed on the mc.ext file.
2941 xtree_mode
2943 If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file
2944 system on a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other
2945 panel with the contents of the selected directory.
2946 fish_directory_timeout
2948 This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in
2949 seconds. The default value is 900 seconds.
2950 clipboard_store
2952 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
2953 board utility like 'xclip' to read text into X selection from
2954 file. For example:
2955 clipboard_store=xclip -i
2957 clipboard_paste
2959 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
2960 board utility like 'xclip' to print the selection to standard
2961 out. For example:
2962 clipboard_pastee=xclip -o
2964 autodetect_codeset
2966 This option allows use the `enca' command to autodetect codeset
2967 of text files in internal viewer and editor. List of valid val‐
2968 ues can be obtain by the `enca --list languages | cut -d : -f1'
2969 command. Option must be located in the [Misc] section.
2970 For example:
2972 autodetect_codeset=russian
2974
2976 The Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal data‐
2977 base without requiring root privileges. The Midnight Commander
2978 searches in the system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in
2979 the Midnight Commander library directory) and in the ~/.mc/ini file for
2980 the section "terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section
2981 "terminal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol that
2982 you want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for
2983 the key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape char‐
2984 acter and the ^x to represent the control-x character.
2985 The possible key symbols are:
2987 f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
2989 bs backspace
2990 home home key
2991 end end key
2992 up up arrow key
2993 down down arrow key
2994 left left arrow key
2995 right right arrow key
2996 pgdn page down key
2997 pgup page up key
2998 insert the insert character
2999 delete the delete character
3000 complete to do completion
3001 For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you
3003 set this in the ini file:
3004 insert=\e[Op
3006 Also now you can use extended learn keys. For example:
3009 ctrl-alt-right=\e[[1;6C
3011 ctrl-alt-left=\e[[1;6D
3012 This means that ctrl+alt+left sends a \e[[1;6D escape sequence and
3015 therefore Midnight Commander interprets "\e[[1;6D" as Ctrl-Alt-Left.
3016 The complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
3019 the completion process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can
3020 define other keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of
3021 nice and unused keys everywhere).
3022
3025 Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also
3026 affected by the MC_DATADIR environment variable. If it's set, its
3027 value is used instead of /usr/share/mc in the paths below.
3028 /usr/share/mc/mc.hlp
3030 The help file for the program.
3032 /usr/share/mc/mc.ext
3034 The default system-wide extensions file.
3036 ~/.mc/bindings
3038 User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
3040 file. They override the contents of the system wide files if
3041 present.
3042 /usr/share/mc/mc.ini
3044 The default system-wide setup for the Midnight Commander, used
3046 only if the user doesn't have his own ~/.mc/ini file.
3047 /usr/share/mc/mc.lib
3049 Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this
3051 file affect all users, whether they have ~/.mc/ini or not. Cur‐
3052 rently, only terminal settings are loaded from mc.lib.
3053 ~/.mc/ini
3055 User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is
3057 loaded from here instead of the system-wide startup file.
3058 /usr/share/mc/mc.hint
3060 This file contains the hints displayed by the program.
3062 /usr/share/mc/mc.menu
3064 This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
3066 ~/.mc/menu
3068 User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used
3070 instead of the system-wide applications menu.
3071 ~/.mc/Tree
3073 The directory list for the directory tree and tree view fea‐
3075 tures.
3076 ./.mc.menu
3078 Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used
3080 instead of the home or system-wide applications menu.
3081
3083 This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
3084 License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in
3085 help for details on the License and the lack of warranty.
3086
3088 The latest version of this program can be found at
3089 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mc/.
3090
3092 ed(1), gpm(1), terminfo(1), view(1), sh(1), bash(1), tcsh(1), zsh(1).
3093 The Midnight Commander page on the World Wide Web:
3095 http://www.midnight-commander.org/
3096
3098 Authors and contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file in the source
3099 distribution.
3100
3102 See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains
3103 to be done.
3104 If you want to report a problem with the program, please send mail to
3106 this address: mc-devel@gnome.org.
3107 Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program
3109 you are running (mc -V displays this information), the operating system
3110 you are running the program on. If the program crashes, we would
3111 appreciate a stack trace.
3112MC Version 4.7.5.5 @DATE_OF_MAN_PAGE@ MC(1)