1MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
2
6 mc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
7
9 mc [-abcCdfhPstuUVx] [-l log] [dir1 [dir2]] [-e [file] ...] [-v file]
10
12 GNU Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager for
13 Unix-like operating systems.
14
16 -a, --stickchars
17 Disable usage of graphic characters for line drawing.
18 -b, --nocolor
20 Force black and white display.
21 -c, --color
23 Force color mode, please check the section Colors for more
24 information.
25 -C arg, --colors=arg
27 Specify a different color set in the command line. The format
28 of arg is documented in the Colors section.
29 --configure-options
31 Display configure options.
32 -d, --nomouse
34 Disable mouse support.
35 -D N, --debuglevel=N
37 Save the debug level for SMB VFS. N is in 0-10 range.
38 -e [file], --edit[=file]
40 Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on
41 startup. See also mcedit (1).
42 -f, --datadir
44 Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander
45 files.
46 -F, --datadir-info
48 Display extended info about compiled-in paths for Midnight Com‐
49 mander.
50 -g, --oldmouse
52 Force a "normal tracking" mouse mode. Used when running on
53 xterm-capable terminals (tmux/screen).
54 -k, --resetsoft
56 Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo data‐
57 base. Only useful on HP terminals when the function keys don't
58 work.
59 -K file, --keymap=file
61 Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.
62 -l file, --ftplog=file
64 Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
65 --nokeymap
67 Don't load key bindings from any file, use default hardcoded
68 keys.
69 -P file, --printwd=file
71 Print the last working directory to the specified file. This
72 option is not meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used
73 from a special shell script that automatically changes the cur‐
74 rent directory of the shell to the last directory Midnight Com‐
75 mander was in. Source the file /usr/libexec/mc/mc.sh (bash and
76 zsh users) or /usr/libexec/mc.csh (tcsh users) respectively to
77 define mc as an alias to the appropriate shell script.
78 -s, --slow
80 Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks. If the section
81 [Lines] is not filled, the symbol for the pseudographics frame
82 is a space, otherwise the frame characters are taken from fol‐
83 lowing parameters.
84 You can redefine the following variables:
86 lefttop
88 left-top corner
89 righttop
91 right-top corner
92 centertop
94 center-top cross
95 centerbottom
97 center-bottom cross
98 leftbottom
100 left-bottom corner
101 rightbottom
103 right-bottom corner
104 leftmiddle
106 left-middle cross
107 rightmiddle
109 right-middle cross
110 centermiddle
112 center cross
113 horiz default horizontal line
115 vert default vertical line
117 thinhoriz
119 thin horizontal line
120 thinvert
122 thin vertical line
123 -S arg, --skin=arg
125 Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins
126 is documented in the Skins section.
127 -t, --termcap
129 Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it
130 makes Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP variable
131 for the terminal information instead of the information on the
132 system wide terminal database
133 -u, --nosubshell
135 Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if Mid‐
136 night Commander has been built with concurrent shell support).
137 -U, --subshell
139 Enable use of the concurrent shell support (only makes sense if
140 the Midnight Commander was built with the subshell support set
141 as an optional feature).
142 -v file, --view=file
144 Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also
145 mcview (1).
146 -V, --version
148 Display the version of the program.
149 -x, --xterm
151 Force xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals
152 (two screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
153 -X, --no-x11
155 Do not use X11 to get the state of modifiers Alt, Ctrl, Shift
156 If both paths are specified, the first path name is the directory to
158 show in the active panel; the second path name is the directory to be
159 shown in the other panel.
160 If one path is specified, the path name is the directory to show in the
162 active panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to
163 be shown in the passive panel.
164 If no paths are specified, current directory is shown in the active
166 panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to be
167 shown in the passive panel.
168
170 The screen of Midnight Commander is divided into four parts. Almost
171 all of the screen space is taken up by two directory panels. By
172 default, the second line from the bottom of the screen is the shell
173 command line, and the bottom line shows the function key labels. The
174 topmost line is the menu bar line. The menu bar line may not be visi‐
175 ble, but appears if you click the topmost line with the mouse or press
176 the F9 key.
177 Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same time.
179 One of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in the cur‐
180 rent panel). Almost all operations take place on the current panel.
181 Some file operations like Rename and Copy by default use the directory
182 of the unselected panel as a destination (don't worry, they always ask
183 you for confirmation first). For more information, see the sections on
184 the Directory Panels, the Left and Right Menus and the File Menu.
185 You can execute system commands from Midnight Commander by simply typ‐
187 ing them. Everything you type will appear on the shell command line,
188 and when you press Enter, Midnight Commander will execute the command
189 line you typed; read the Shell Command Line and Input Line Keys sec‐
190 tions to learn more about the command line.
191
193 Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is activated whenever
194 you are running on an xterm(1) terminal (it even works if you take a
195 telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm) or
196 if you are running on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server
197 running.
198 When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is
200 selected; if you click with the right button, the file is marked (or
201 unmarked, depending on the previous state).
202 Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is an
204 executable program; and if the extension file has a program specified
205 for the file's extension, the specified program is executed.
206 Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function
208 key labels by clicking on them.
209 The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400 milliseconds.
211 This may be changed to other values by editing the ~/.config/mc/ini
212 file and changing the mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
213 If you are running Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you can
215 get the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding
216 down the Shift key.
217
220 Some commands in Midnight Commander involve the use of the Control
221 (sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the Meta (sometimes labeled ALT or
222 even Compose) keys. In this manual we will use the following abbrevia‐
223 tions:
224 C-<chr>
226 means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>.
227 Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.
228 Alt-<chr>
230 means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If
231 there is no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release it, then type the
232 character <chr>.
233 S-<chr>
235 means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.
236 All input lines in Midnight Commander use an approximation to the GNU
238 Emacs editor's key bindings (default).
239 You may redefine key bindings. See redefine hotkey bindings
241 for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) are
243 relative to default behavior.
244 There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are
247 the most important.
248 The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands
250 appearing in the File menu. This section includes the function keys.
251 Most of these commands perform some action, usually on the selected
252 file or the tagged files.
253 The Directory Panels section documents the keys which select a file or
255 tag files as a target for a later action (the action is usually one
256 from the file menu).
257 The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are used for enter‐
259 ing and editing command lines. Most of these copy file names and such
260 from the directory panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typ‐
261 ing) or access the command line history.
262 Input Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This means both the
264 command line and the input lines in the query dialogs.
265 Redefine hotkey bindings
268 Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file). Ini‐
269 tially, Midnight Commander creates key bindings using keymap defined in
270 the source code. Then, two files /usr/share/mc/mc.keymap and
271 /etc/mc/mc.keymap are loaded always, sequentially reassigned key bind‐
272 ings defined earlier. User-defined keymap-file is searched on the fol‐
273 lowing algorithm (to the first one found):
274 1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap>
276 2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
277 3) Parameter keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] of config
278 file.
279 4) File ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap
280 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
282 may contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension
283 .keymap or without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the
284 first one found):
285 1) ~/.config/mc
287 2) /etc/mc/
288 3) /usr/share/mc/
289 Miscellaneous Keys
292 Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other categories:
293 Enter if there is some text in the command line (the one at the bottom
295 of the panels), then that command is executed. If there is no
296 text in the command line then if the selection bar is over a
297 directory the Midnight Commander does a chdir(2) to the selected
298 directory and reloads the information on the panel; if the
299 selection is an executable file then it is executed. Finally, if
300 the extension of the selected file name matches one of the
301 extensions in the extensions file then the corresponding command
302 is executed.
303 C-l repaint all the information in Midnight Commander.
305 C-x c run the Chmod command on a file or on the tagged files.
307 C-x o run the Chown command on the current file or on the tagged
309 files.
310 C-x l run the hard link command.
312 C-x s run the absolute symbolic link command.
314 C-x v run the relative symbolic link command. See the File Menu sec‐
316 tion for more information about symbolic links.
317 C-x i set the other panel display mode to information.
319 C-x q set the other panel display mode to quick view.
321 C-x ! execute the External panelize command.
323 C-x h run the add directory to hotlist command.
325 Alt-! executes the Filtered view command, described in the view com‐
327 mand.
328 Alt-? executes the Find file command.
330 Alt-c pops up the quick cd dialog.
332 C-o when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or
334 under an xterm, it will show you the output of the previous com‐
335 mand. When ran on the Linux console, Midnight Commander uses an
336 external program (cons.saver) to handle saving and restoring of
337 information on the screen.
338 When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time
340 and you will be taken back to Midnight Commander's main screen, to
341 return to your application just type C-o. If you have an application
342 suspended by using this trick, you won't be able to execute other pro‐
343 grams from Midnight Commander until you terminate the suspended appli‐
344 cation.
345 Directory Panels
347 This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If
348 you want to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a look
349 at the section on Left and Right Menus.
350 Tab, C-i
352 change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the new
353 current panel and the old current panel becomes the new other
354 panel. The selection bar moves from the old current panel to the
355 new current panel.
356 Insert, C-t
358 to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo
359 sequence). To untag files, just retag a tagged file.
360 M-e to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
362 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
363 recoding, select "No translation" in the dialog of encodings.
364 Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j
366 used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the
367 bottom one, respectively.
368 Alt-t toggle the current display listing to show the next display
370 listing format. With this it is possible to quickly switch to
371 brief listing, long listing, user defined listing format, and
372 back to the default.
373 C-\ (control-backslash)
375 show the directory hotlist and change to the selected directory.
376 + (plus)
378 this is used to select (tag) a group of files. Midnight Comman‐
379 der will prompt for a selection options. When Files only check‐
380 box is on, only files will be selected. If Files only is off,
381 as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Patterns
382 checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
383 globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters
384 and ? standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off,
385 then the tagging of files is done with normal regular expres‐
386 sions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on, the
387 selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensitive
388 is off, the case will be ignored.
389 \ (backslash)
391 use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the oppo‐
392 site of the Plus key.
393 up-key, C-p
395 move the selection bar to the previous entry in the panel.
396 down-key, C-n
398 move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.
399 home, a1, Alt-<
401 move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
402 end, c1, Alt->
404 move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
405 next-page, C-v
407 move the selection bar one page down.
408 prev-page, Alt-v
410 move the selection bar one page up.
411 Alt-o If the currently selected file is a directory, load that direc‐
413 tory on the other panel and moves the selection to the next
414 file. If the currently selected file is not a directory, load
415 the parent directory on the other panel and moves the selection
416 to the next file.
417 Alt-i make the current directory of the current panel also the current
419 directory of the other panel. Put the other panel to the list‐
420 ing mode if needed. If the current panel is panelized, the
421 other panel doesn't become panelized.
422 C-PageUp, C-PageDown
424 only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the
425 currently selected directory respectively.
426 Alt-y moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to
428 clicking the < with the mouse.
429 Alt-u moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to click‐
431 ing the > with the mouse.
432 Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H
434 displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v'
435 with the mouse.
436 Quick search
438 The Quick search mode allows you to perform fast file search in file
439 panel. Press C-s or Alt-s to start a filename search in the directory
440 listing.
441 When the search is active, the user input will be added to the search
443 string instead of the command line. If the Show mini-status option is
444 enabled the search string is shown on the mini-status line. When typ‐
445 ing, the selection bar will move to the next file starting with the
446 typed letters. The Backspace or DEL keys can be used to correct typing
447 mistakes. If C-s is pressed again, the next match is searched for.
448 If quick search is started with double pressing of C-s, the previous
450 quick search pattern will be used for current search.
451 Besides the filename characters, you can also use wildcard characters
453 '*' and '?'.
454 Shell Command Line
456 This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
457 entering shell commands.
458 Alt-Enter
460 copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
461 C-Enter
463 same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some ter‐
464 minals.
465 C-Shift-Enter
467 copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the
468 command line. May not work on remote systems and some termi‐
469 nals.
470 Alt-Tab
472 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
473 pletion for you.
474 C-x t, C-x C-t
476 copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged files, the
477 selected file) of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other
478 panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.
479 C-x p, C-x C-p
481 the first key sequence copies the current path name to the com‐
482 mand line, and the second one copies the unselected panel's path
483 name to the command line.
484 C-q the quote command can be used to insert characters that are oth‐
486 erwise interpreted by Midnight Commander (like the '+' symbol)
487 Alt-p, Alt-n
489 use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
490 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
491 Alt-h displays the history for the current input line.
493 General Movement Keys
495 The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common code
496 to handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same keys. Each of
497 them also accepts some keys of its own.
498 Other parts of Midnight Commander use some of the same movement keys,
500 so this section may be of use for those parts too.
501 Up, C-p
503 moves one line backward.
504 Down, C-n
506 moves one line forward.
507 Prev Page, Page Up, Alt-v
509 moves one page up.
510 Next Page, Page Down, C-v
512 moves one page down.
513 Home, A1
515 moves to the beginning.
516 End, C1
518 move to the end.
519 The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addi‐
521 tion the to ones mentioned above:
522 b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete
524 moves one page up.
525 Space bar
527 moves one page down.
528 u, d moves one half of a page up or down.
530 g, G moves to the beginning or to the end.
532 Input Line Keys
534 The input lines (they are used for the command line and for the query
535 dialogs in the program) accept these keys:
536 C-a puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
538 C-e puts the cursor at the end of the line.
540 C-b, move-left
542 move the cursor one position left.
543 C-f, move-right
545 move the cursor one position right.
546 Alt-f moves one word forward.
548 Alt-b moves one word backward.
550 C-h, Backspace
552 delete the previous character.
553 C-d, Delete
555 delete the character in the point (over the cursor).
556 C-@ sets the mark for cutting.
558 C-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer
560 and removes the text from the input line.
561 Alt-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buf‐
563 fer.
564 C-y yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
566 C-k kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
568 Alt-p, Alt-n
570 Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
571 takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
572 Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace
574 delete one word backward.
575 Alt-Tab
577 does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com‐
578 pletion for you.
579
582 The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse on the top
583 row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus: "Left", "File", "Com‐
584 mand", "Options" and "Right".
585 The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appearance of the left
587 and right directory panels.
588 The File Menu lists the actions you can perform on the currently
590 selected file or the tagged files.
591 The Command Menu lists the actions which are more general and bear no
593 relation to the currently selected file or the tagged files.
594 The Options Menu lists the actions which allow you to customize Mid‐
596 night Commander.
597 Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus
599 The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the Left and
600 Right menus (they are named Above and Below when the horizontal panel
601 split is chosen from the Layout options dialog).
602 Listing Format...
604 The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are
605 four different listing formats available: Full, Brief, Long and User.
606 The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file and
607 the modification time.
608 The brief view shows only the file name and it has from 1 up to 9 col‐
610 umns (therefore showing more files unlike other views). The long view
611 is similar to the output of ls -l command. The long view takes the
612 whole screen width.
613 If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to specify the
615 display format.
616 The user display format must start with a panel size specifier. This
618 may be "half" or "full", and they specify a half screen panel and a
619 full screen panel respectively.
620 After the panel size, you may specify how many listings to fit in the
622 panel, side-by-side (in other words: how many times to repeat the
623 fields horizontally). This defaults to 1. You may change this by adding
624 a number from 1 to 9 to the format string.
625 After this you add the name of the fields with an optional size speci‐
627 fier. This are the available fields you may display:
628 name displays the file name.
630 size displays the file size.
632 bsize is an alternative form of the size format. It displays the size
634 of the files and for directories it just shows SUB-DIR or
635 UP--DIR.
636 type displays a one character wide type field. This character is
638 similar to what is displayed by ls with the -F flag - * for exe‐
639 cutable files, / for directories, @ for links, = for sockets, -
640 for character devices, + for block devices, | for pipes, ~ for
641 symbolic links to directories and ! for stale symlinks (links
642 that point nowhere).
643 mark an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
645 mtime file's last modification time.
647 atime file's last access time.
649 ctime file's status change time.
651 perm a string representing the current permission bits of the file.
653 mode an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.
655 nlink the number of links to the file.
657 ngid the GID (numeric).
659 nuid the UID (numeric).
661 owner the owner of the file.
663 group the group of the file.
665 inode the inode of the file.
667 Also you can use following keywords to define the panel layout:
669 space a space in the display format.
671 | add a vertical line to the display format.
673 To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add :
675 followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If
676 the number is followed by the symbol +, then the size specifies the
677 minimal field size - if the program finds out that there is more space
678 on the screen, it will then expand that field.
679 For example, the Full display corresponds to this format:
681 half type name | size | mtime
683 And the Long display corresponds to this format:
685 full perm space nlink space owner space group space size space mtime
687 space name
688 This is a nice user display format:
690 half name | size:7 | type mode:3
692 Panels may also be set to the following modes:
694 Info The info view display information related to the currently
696 selected file and if possible information about the current file
697 system.
698 Tree The tree view is quite similar to the directory tree feature.
700 See the section about it for more information.
701 Quick View
703 In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced viewer that
704 displays the contents of the currently selected file, if you
705 select the panel (with the tab key or the mouse), you will have
706 access to the usual viewer commands.
707 Sort Order...
709 The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modification time,
710 by access time, and by inode information modification time, by size, by
711 inode and unsorted. In the Sort order dialog box you can choose the
712 sort order and you may also specify if you want to sort in reverse
713 order by checking the reverse box.
714 By default directories are sorted before files but this can be changed
716 from the Panel options menu (option Mix all files).
717 Filter...
719 The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern (for example
720 *.tar.gz) which the files must match to be shown. Regardless of the
721 filter pattern, the directories and the links to directories are always
722 shown in the directory panel.
723 Reread
725 The reread command reload the list of files in the directory. It is
726 useful if other processes have created or removed files.
727 File Menu
729 Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard shortcuts for
730 commands appearing in the file menu. The escape sequences for the
731 function keys are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals
732 without function key support, you can achieve the same functionality by
733 pressing the ESC key and then a number in the range 1 through 9 and 0
734 (corresponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).
735 The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in paren‐
737 theses):
738 Help (F1)
740 Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the help viewer, you
742 can use the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to follow
743 that link. The keys Space and Backspace are used to move forward and
744 backward in a help page. Press F1 again to get the full list of
745 accepted keys.
746 Menu (F2)
748 Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way to provide
750 users with a menu and add extra features to Midnight Commander.
751 View (F3, F13)
753 View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the Internal
755 File Viewer but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an
756 external file viewer specified by the VIEWER environment variable. If
757 VIEWER is undefined, the PAGER environment variable is tried. If PAGER
758 is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use F13
759 instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or
760 preprocessing to the file.
761 See parameters for external viewer for explain how you may specify an
763 extended command line options for external viewers.
764 Filtered View (Alt-!)
766 This command prompts for a command and its arguments (the argument
768 defaults to the currently selected file name), the output from such
769 command is shown in the internal file viewer.
770 Edit (F4, F14)
772 Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually F14) to
774 start the editor with a new, empty file. Currently they invoke the vi
775 editor, or the editor specified in the EDITOR environment variable, or
776 the Internal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
777 See parameters for external editor for explain how you may specify an
779 extended command line options for external editors.
780 Copy (F5, F15)
782 Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
784 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
785 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
786 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. Space for destina‐
787 tion file may be preallocated relative to preallocate_space configure
788 option. During this process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort the
789 operation. For details about source mask (which will be usually either
790 * or ^\(.*\)$ depending on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible
791 wildcards in the destination see Mask copy/rename.
792 F15 (usually F15) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
794 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
795 any tagged files.
796 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
798 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
799 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
800 Link (C-x l)
802 Create a hard link to the current file.
804 Absolute symlink (C-x s)
806 Create a absolute symbolic link to the current file.
808 Relative symLink (C-x v)
810 Create a relative symbolic link to the current file.
812 To those of you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a
814 file is a bit like copying the file, but both the source filename and
815 the destination filename represent the same file image. For example, if
816 you edit one of these files, all changes you make will appear in both
817 files. Some people call links aliases or shortcuts.
818 A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there is no way of
820 telling which one is the original and which is the link. If you delete
821 either one of them the other one is still intact. It is very difficult
822 to notice that the files represent the same image. Use hard links when
823 you don't even want to know.
824 A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original file. If the
826 original file is deleted the symbolic link is useless. It is quite easy
827 to notice that the files represent the same image. Midnight Commander
828 shows an "@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic link to
829 somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a tilde (~)). The orig‐
830 inal file which the link points to is shown on mini-status line if the
831 Show mini-status option is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to
832 avoid the confusion that can be caused by hard links.
833 When you press "C-x s" Midnight Commander will automatically fill in
835 the complete path+filename of the original file and suggest a name for
836 the link. You can change either one.
837 Sometimes you may want to change the absolute path of the original into
839 a relative path. An absolute path starts from the root directory:
840 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> /home/frodo/new/mc
842 A relative link describes the original file's location starting from
844 the location of the link itself:
845 /home/frodo/mc/mc -> ../new/mc
847 You can force Midnight Commander to suggest a relative path by pressing
849 "C-x v" instead of "C-x s".
850 Rename/Move (F6, F16)
852 Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
854 (or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
855 directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
856 defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. For more details
857 look at Copy (F5) operation above, most of the things are quite simi‐
858 lar.
859 F16 (usually F16) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
861 selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
862 any tagged files.
863 On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
865 clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
866 box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
867 Mkdir (F7)
869 Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory specified.
871 Delete (F8)
873 Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in the currently
875 selected panel. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort
876 the operation.
877 Quick cd (Alt-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full command line
879 and want to cd somewhere.
880 Select group (+)
882 This is used to select (tag) a group of files. Midnight Commander will
884 prompt for a selection options. When Files only checkbox is on, only
885 files will be selected. If Files only is off, as files as directories
886 will be selected. When Shell Patterns checkbox is on, the regular
887 expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (* standing
888 for zero or more characters and ? standing for one character). If
889 Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal
890 regular expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on,
891 the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensitive is
892 off, the case will be ignored.
893 Unselect group (\)
895 Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of the Select
897 group command.
898 Quit (F10, Shift-F10)
900 Terminate Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when you want to quit
902 and you are using the shell wrapper. Shift-F10 will not take you to
903 the last directory you visited with Midnight Commander, instead it will
904 stay at the directory where you started Midnight Commander.
905 Quick cd
907 This command is useful if you have a full command line and want to cd
908 somewhere without having to yank and paste the command line. This com‐
909 mand pops up a small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter
910 after cd on the command line and then you press enter. This features
911 all the things that are already in the internal cd command.
912 Command Menu
914 The Directory tree command shows a tree figure of the directories.
915 The "Find file" command allows you to search for a specific file.
917 The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the two directory pan‐
919 els.
920 The "Switch panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell
922 command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD console.
923 The "Compare directories" command compares the directory panels with
925 each other. You can then use the Copy (F5) command to make the panels
926 identical. There are three compare methods. The quick method compares
927 only file size and file date. The thorough method makes a full
928 byte-by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available if the
929 machine does not support the mmap(2) system call. The size-only com‐
930 pare method just compares the file sizes and does not check the con‐
931 tents or the date times, it just checks the file size.
932 The "External panelize" allows you to execute an external program, and
934 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
935 The "Command history" command shows a list of typed commands. The
937 selected command is copied to the command line. The command history can
938 also be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-n.
939 The "Directory hotlist" command makes changing of the current directory
941 to often used directories faster.
942 The "Screen list" command shows a dialog window with the list of cur‐
944 rently running internal editors, viewers and other MC modules that sup‐
945 port this mode.
946 The "Edit extension file" command allows you to specify programs to
948 executed when you try to execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other
949 thing on files with certain extensions (filename endings).
950 The "Edit Menu File" command may be used for editing the user menu
952 (which appears by pressing F2).
953 Directory Tree
955 The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the directories. You
956 can select a directory from the figure and Midnight Commander will
957 change to that directory.
958 There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory tree command
960 is available from Commands menu. The other way is to select tree view
961 from the Left or Right menu.
962 To get rid of long delays, Midnight Commander creates the tree figure
964 by scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the direc‐
965 tory which you want to see is missing, move to its parent directory and
966 press C-r (or F2).
967 You can use the following keys:
969 General movement keys are accepted.
971 Enter. In the directory tree, exits the directory tree and changes to
973 this directory in the current panel. In the tree view, changes to this
974 directory in the other panel and stays in tree view mode in the current
975 panel.
976 C-r, F2 (Rescan). Rescan this directory. Use this when the tree figure
978 is out of date: it is missing subdirectories or shows some subdirecto‐
979 ries which don't exist any more.
980 F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure. Use this to
982 remove clutter from the figure. If you want the directory back to the
983 tree figure press F2 in its parent directory.
984 F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic navigation mode
986 (default) and the static navigation mode.
987 In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
989 select a directory. All known directories are shown.
990 In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
992 select a sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent direc‐
993 tory, and the Right key to move to a child directory. Only the parent,
994 sibling and children directories are shown, others are left out. The
995 tree figure changes dynamically as you traverse.
996 F5 (Copy). Copy the directory.
998 F6 (RenMov). Move the directory.
1000 F7 (Mkdir). Make a new directory below this directory.
1002 F8 (Delete). Delete this directory from the file system.
1004 C-s, Alt-s. Search the next directory matching the search string. If
1006 there is no such directory these keys will move one line down.
1007 C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search string.
1009 Any other character. Add the character to the search string and move
1011 to the next directory which starts with these characters. In the tree
1012 view you must first activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The
1013 search string is shown in the mini status line.
1014 The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They
1016 aren't supported in the tree view.
1017 F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
1019 Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.
1021 The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See also the
1023 section on mouse support.
1024 Find File
1026 The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the search
1027 and the filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree button you
1028 can select the start directory from the directory tree figure.
1029 The "File name" input field contains a filename pattern to be searched
1031 for. It is interpreted as a shell pattern or as a regular expression
1032 depending on the state of the "Using shell patterns" checkbox. An empty
1033 value is valid and matches any file name.
1034 The "Content" input field contains a string to search for within the
1036 files. Leave this field empty to disable searching file contents.
1037 Option "Whole words" allows select only those files containing matches
1039 that form whole words. Like grep -w.
1040 You can start the search by pressing the OK button. During the search
1042 you can stop from the Stop button and continue from the Start button.
1043 You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow keys. The Chdir
1045 button will change to the directory of the currently selected file. The
1046 Again button will ask for the parameters for a new search. The Quit
1047 button quits the search operation. The Panelize button will place the
1048 found files to the current directory panel so that you can do addi‐
1049 tional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete and so on). To
1050 return to the normal file listing, change directory to "..".
1051 The 'Enable ignore directories' checkbox and input field below it allow
1053 one to set up the list of directories that should be skip during the
1054 search files (for example, you may want to avoid searches on a CD-ROM
1055 or on a NFS directory that is mounted across a slow link). List compo‐
1056 nents must be separated with a colon, here is an example:
1057 /cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
1059 Relative paths are supported also. The following example shows how to
1061 skip special directories of version control systems:
1062 /cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs:.svn:.git:CVS
1063 Attention: input field can contain a dot (.), this means the current
1065 absolute path.
1066 You may consider using the External panelize command for some opera‐
1068 tions. Find file command is for simple queries only, while using Exter‐
1069 nal panelize you can do as mysterious searches as you would like.
1070 External panelize
1072 The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and
1073 make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
1074 For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the panels all the
1076 symbolic links in the current directory, you can use external paneliza‐
1077 tion to run the following command:
1078 find . -type l -print
1080 Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no
1082 longer be the directory listing of the current directory, but all the
1083 files that are symbolic links.
1084 If you want to panelize all of the files that have been downloaded from
1086 your FTP server, you can use this awk command to extract the file name
1087 from the transfer log files:
1088 awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/xferlog
1090 You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive
1092 name, so that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the
1093 command on the input line and pressing Add new button. Then you enter a
1094 name under which you want the command to be saved. Next time, you just
1095 choose that command from the list and do not have to type it again.
1096 Hotlist
1098 The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the directories in
1099 the directory hotlist. Midnight Commander will change to the directory
1100 corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dialog, you can
1101 remove already created label/directory pairs and add new ones. To add
1102 new directories quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist command (C-x
1103 h), which adds the current directory into the directory hotlist, asking
1104 just for the label for the directory.
1105 This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using
1107 the CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
1108 Edit Extension File
1110 This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.config/mc/mc.ext. The for‐
1111 mat of this file following:
1112 All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
1114 Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
1116 keyword/expr, i.e. everything after the slash until new line is expr.
1118 keyword can be:
1120 shell - expr is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name
1122 ends with expr. Example: shell/.tar matches *.tar.
1123 regex - expr is a regular expression. File matches if its name
1125 matches the regular expression.
1126 directory
1128 - expr is a regular expression. File matches if it is a direc‐
1129 tory and its name matches the regular expression.
1130 type - expr is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
1132 file %f without the initial "filename:" part matches regular
1133 expression expr.
1134 default
1136 - matches any file. expr is ignored.
1137 include
1139 - denotes a common section. expr is the name of the section.
1140 Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the for‐
1142 mat: keyword=command (with no spaces around =), where keyword should
1143 be: Open (invoked on Enter or double click), View (F3), Edit (F4) or
1144 Include (to add rules from the common section). command is any
1145 one-line shell command, with the simple macro substitution.
1146 Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If
1148 the appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule
1149 didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and
1150 View action is missing in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View
1151 action from the second entry will be used). default should match all
1152 the actions.
1153 Background Jobs
1155 This lets you control the state of any background Midnight Commander
1156 process (only copy and move files operations can be done in the back‐
1157 ground). You can stop, restart and kill a background job from here.
1158 Edit Menu File
1160 The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized by the
1161 user. When you access the user menu, the file .mc.menu from the current
1162 directory is used if it exists, but only if it is owned by user or root
1163 and is not world-writable. If no such file found, ~/.config/mc/menu is
1164 tried in the same way, and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide
1165 menu /usr/share/mc/mc.menu.
1166 The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with any‐
1168 thing but space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in order to
1169 be able to use it like a hot key, the first character should be a let‐
1170 ter). All the lines that start with a space or a tab are the commands
1171 that will be executed when the entry is selected.
1172 When an option is selected all the command lines of the option are
1174 copied to a temporary file in the temporary directory (usually
1175 /usr/tmp) and then that file is executed. This allows the user to put
1176 normal shell constructs in the menus. Also simple macro substitution
1177 takes place before executing the menu code. For more information, see
1178 macro substitution.
1179 Here is a sample mc.menu file:
1181 A Dump the currently selected file
1183 od -c %f
1184 B Edit a bug report and send it to root
1186 I=`mktemp ${MC_TMPDIR:-/tmp}/mail.XXXXXX` || exit 1
1187 vi $I
1188 mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < $I
1189 rm -f $I
1190 M Read mail
1192 emacs -f rmail
1193 N Read Usenet news
1195 emacs -f gnus
1196 H Call the info hypertext browser
1198 info
1199 J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
1201 tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
1202 K Make a release of the current subdirectory
1204 echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
1205 read tar
1206 ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
1207 cd ..
1208 tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
1209 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1211 X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
1212 tar xzvf %f
1213 Default Conditions
1215 Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condition must
1217 start from the first column with a '=' character. If the condition is
1218 true, the menu entry will be the default entry.
1219 Condition syntax: = <sub-cond>
1221 or: = <sub-cond> | <sub-cond> ...
1222 or: = <sub-cond> & <sub-cond> ...
1223 Sub-condition is one of following:
1225 y <pattern> syntax of current file matching pattern?
1227 (for edit menu only)
1228 f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
1229 F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
1230 d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
1231 D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
1232 t <type> current file of type?
1233 T <type> other file of type?
1234 x <filename> is it executable filename?
1235 ! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
1236 Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according to
1238 the shell patterns option. You can override the global value of the
1239 shell patterns option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first line
1240 of the menu file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).
1241 Type is one or more of the following characters:
1243 n not a directory
1245 r regular file
1246 d directory
1247 l link
1248 c character device
1249 b block device
1250 f FIFO (pipe)
1251 s socket
1252 x executable file
1253 t tagged
1254 For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't' type
1256 is a little special because it acts on the panel instead of the file.
1257 The condition '=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the current
1258 panel and false if not.
1259 If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be
1261 shown whenever the value of the condition is calculated.
1262 The conditions are calculated from left to right. This means
1264 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1265 is calculated as
1266 ( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
1267 Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
1269 = f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
1271 L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
1272 gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
1273 Addition Conditions
1275 If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it
1277 is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will
1278 be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will
1279 not be included in the menu.
1280 You can combine default and addition conditions by starting condition
1282 with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you
1283 want to use two different conditions, one for adding and another for
1284 defaulting, you can precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one
1285 starting with '+' and another starting with '='.
1286 Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start
1288 with '#', space or tab.
1289 Options Menu
1291 Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and off in
1292 several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options are
1293 enabled if they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.
1294 The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change
1296 most of settings of Midnight Commander.
1297 The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of
1299 options how mc looks like on the screen.
1300 The Panel options command pops up a dialog from which you specify
1302 options of file manager panels.
1303 The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which
1305 actions you want to confirm.
1306 The Appearance command pops up a dialog from which you specify the
1308 skin.
1309 The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select
1311 which characters is your terminal able to display.
1312 The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys
1314 which are not working on some terminals and you may fix them.
1315 The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS
1317 related options.
1318 The Save setup command saves the current settings of the Left, Right
1320 and Options menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.
1321 Configuration
1323 The options in this dialog are divided into several groups: "File oper‐
1324 ation options", "Esc key mode", "Pause after run" and "Other options".
1325 File operation options
1327 Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and
1329 Delete operations are verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each
1330 operation). If you have a slow terminal, you may wish to disable the
1331 verbose operation. It is automatically turned off if the speed of your
1332 terminal is less than 9600 bps.
1333 Compute totals. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander computes
1335 total byte sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy, Rename
1336 and Delete operations. This will provide you with a more accurate
1337 progress bar at the expense of some speed. This option has no effect,
1338 if Verbose operation is disabled.
1339 Classic progressbar. If this option is enabled, the progressbar of
1341 Copy/Move/Delete operations is always grown form left to right. If dis‐
1342 abled, the growing direction of progressbar follows to direction of
1343 Copy/Move/Delete operation: from left panel to right one and vice
1344 versa. Enabled by default.
1345 Mkdir autoname. When you press F7 to create a new directory, the input
1347 line in popup dialog will be filled by name of current file or direc‐
1348 tory in active panel. Disabled by default.
1349 Preallocate space. Preallocate space for whole target file, if possi‐
1351 ble, before copy operation. Disabled by default.
1352 Esc key mode.
1354 By default, Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key prefix.
1356 Therefore, you should press Esc code twice to exit a dialog. But there
1357 is a possibility to use a single press of ESC key for that action.
1358 Single press. By default this option is disabled. If you'll enable it,
1360 the ESC key will act as a prefix key for set up time interval (see
1361 Timeout option below), and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC
1362 key is interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).
1363 Timeout. This options is used to setup the time interval (in microsec‐
1365 onds) for single press of ESC key. By default, this interval is one
1366 second (1000000 microseconds). Also the timeout can be set via KEY‐
1367 BOARD_KEY_TIMEOUT_US environment variable (also in microseconds), which
1368 has higher priority than Timeout option value.
1369 Pause after run
1371 After executing your commands, Midnight Commander can pause, so that
1373 you can examine the output of the command. There are three possible
1374 settings for this variable:
1375 Never. Means that you do not want to see the output of your command.
1377 If you are using the Linux or FreeBSD console or an xterm, you will be
1378 able to see the output of the command by typing C-o.
1379 On dumb terminals. You will get the pause message on terminals that
1381 are not capable of showing the output of the last command executed (any
1382 terminal that is not an xterm or the Linux console).
1383 Always. The program will pause after executing all of your commands.
1385 Other options
1387 Use internal editor. If this option is enabled, the built-in file edi‐
1389 tor is used to edit files. If the option is disabled, the editor speci‐
1390 fied in the EDITOR environment variable is used. If no editor is spec‐
1391 ified, vi is used. See the section on the internal file editor.
1392 Use internal viewer. If this option is enabled, the built-in file
1394 viewer is used to view files. If the option is disabled, the pager
1395 specified in the PAGER environment variable is used. If no pager is
1396 specified, the view command is used. See the section on the internal
1397 file viewer.
1398 Ask new file name. If this option is enabled, file name is asked
1400 before open new file in editor.
1401 Auto menus. If this option is enabled, the user menu will be invoked
1403 at startup. Useful for building menus for non-unixers.
1404 Drop down menus. When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will
1406 be activated as soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only
1407 get the menu title, and you will have to activate the menu either with
1408 the arrow keys or with the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using
1409 hotkeys.
1410 Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Filter commands
1412 will use shell-like regular expressions. The following conversions are
1413 performed to achieve this: the '*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more
1414 characters); the '?' is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and
1415 '.' by the literal dot. If the option is disabled, then the regular
1416 expressions are the ones described in ed(1).
1417 Complete: show all. By default, Midnight Commander pops up all possi‐
1419 ble completions if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
1420 Alt-Tab for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as
1421 much as possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this
1422 option if you want to see all possible completions even after pressing
1423 Alt-Tab the first time.
1424 Rotating dash. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander shows
1426 a rotating dash in the upper right corner as a work in progress indica‐
1427 tor.
1428 Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes Midnight Commander to
1430 follow the logical chain of directories when changing current directory
1431 either in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default
1432 behavior of bash. When unset, Midnight Commander follows the real
1433 directory structure, so cd .. if you've entered that directory through
1434 a link will move you to the current directory's real parent and not to
1435 the directory where the link was present.
1436 Safe delete. If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory
1438 hotlist entries unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default
1439 selection in the confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from Yes to
1440 No. This option is disabled by default.
1441 Safe overwrite. If this option is enabled, overwriting files uninten‐
1443 tionally becomes more difficult. The default selection in the over‐
1444 write confirmation dialog changes from Yes to No. This option is dis‐
1445 abled by default.
1446 Auto save setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit Midnight
1448 Commander, the configurable options of Midnight Commander are saved in
1449 the ~/.config/mc/ini file.
1450 Layout
1452 The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout
1453 of screen. The options in this dialog are divided into several groups:
1454 "Panel split", "Console output" and "Other options".
1455 Panel split
1457 The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory panels. You
1459 can specify whether the area is split to the panels in Vertical or Hor‐
1460 izontal direction. Panel layout can be changed using Alt-, (Alt-comma)
1461 shortcut.
1462 Equal split. By default, panels have equal sizes. Using this option
1464 you can specify an unequal split.
1465 Console output
1467 On the Linux or FreeBSD console you can specify how many lines are
1469 shown in the output window. This option is available if Midnight Com‐
1470 mander runs on native console only.
1471 Other options
1473 Menu bar visible. If enabled, main menu of Midnight Commander is
1475 always visible on the top row of screen above panels. Enabled by
1476 default.
1477 Command prompt. If enabled, command line is available. Enabled by
1479 default.
1480 Keybar visible. If enabled, 10 labels associated with F1-F10 keys are
1482 located at the bottom row of screen. Enabled by default.
1483 Hintbar visible. If enabled, the one-line hints are visible below pan‐
1485 els. Enabled by default.
1486 XTerm window title. When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight
1488 Commander sets the terminal window title to the current working direc‐
1489 tory and updates it when necessary. If your terminal emulator is bro‐
1490 ken and you see some incorrect output on startup and directory change,
1491 turn off this option. Enabled by default.
1492 Show free space. If enabled, free space and total space of current
1494 file system is shown at the bottom frame of panel. Enabled by default.
1495 Panel options
1497 Main panel options
1498 Show mini-status. If enabled, one line of status information about the
1500 currently selected item is shown at the bottom of the panels. Enabled
1501 by default.
1502 Use SI size units. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander will
1504 use SI prefixes (base 10) when displaying any byte sizes. If disabled
1505 (default), Midnight Commander will use IEC prefixes (base 2).
1506 Mix all files. If this option is enabled, all files and directories
1508 are shown mixed together. If the option is disabled (default), direc‐
1509 tories (and links to directories) are shown at the beginning of the
1510 listing, and other files below.
1511 Show backup files. If enabled, Midnight Commander will show files end‐
1513 ing with a tilde. Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls option
1514 -B). Enabled by default.
1515 Show hidden files. If enabled, Midnight Commander will show all files
1517 that start with a dot (like ls -a). Disabled by default.
1518 Fast directory reload. If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander
1520 will use a trick to determine if the directory contents have changed.
1521 The trick is to reload the directory only if the i-node of the direc‐
1522 tory has changed; this means that reloads only happen when files are
1523 created or deleted. If what changes is the i-node for a file in the
1524 directory (file size changes, mode or owner changes, etc) the display
1525 is not updated. In these cases, if you have the option on, you have to
1526 rescan the directory manually (with C-r). Disabled by default.
1527 Mark moves down. If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you
1529 mark a file (with Insert key). Enabled by default.
1530 Reverse files only. Allow revert selection of files only. Enabled by
1532 default. If enabled, the reverse selection is applied to files only,
1533 not to directories. The selection of directories is untouched. If off,
1534 the reverse selection is applied to files as well to directories: all
1535 unselected items become selected, and vice versa.
1536 Simple swap. If both panels contain file listing, simple swap means
1538 that panels exchange its screen positions: left panel become right one,
1539 and vice versa. If this option is unchecked, file listing panels
1540 exchange its content keeping listing format and sort options. Unchecked
1541 by default.
1542 Auto save panels setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit Mid‐
1544 night Commander, the current settings of panels are saved in the
1545 ~/.config/mc/panels.ini file. Disabled by default.
1546 Navigation
1548 Lynx-like motion. If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows
1550 keys to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory
1551 and the shell command line is empty. By default, this setting is off.
1552 Page scrolling. If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the
1554 display when the cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel,
1555 otherwise it will just scroll a file at a time.
1556 Center scrolling. If set, panel will scroll when the cursor reaches
1558 the middle of the panel column, only hitting the top or bottom of the
1559 panel when actually on the first or last file. This behavior applies
1560 when scrolling one file at a time, and does not apply to the page
1561 up/down keys.
1562 Mouse page scrolling. Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse wheel
1564 is done by pages or line by line on the panels.
1565 File highlight
1567 You can specify whether permissions and file types should be high‐
1569 lighted with distinctive Colors. If the permission highlighting is
1570 enabled, the parts of the perm and mode display fields which apply to
1571 the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with the color
1572 defined by the selected keyword. If the file type highlighting is
1573 enabled, file names are colored according to rules described in
1574 /etc/mc/filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for more info.
1575 Quick search
1577 You can specify how the Quick search mode should work: case insensi‐
1579 tively, case sensitively or be matched to the panel sort order: case
1580 sensitive or not.
1581 Confirmation
1583 In this dialog you configure the confirmation options for file dele‐
1584 tion, overwriting files, execution by pressing enter, quitting the pro‐
1585 gram, directory hotlist entries deletion and history cleanup.
1586 Appearance
1588 In this dialog you can select the skin to be used.
1589 See the Skins section for technical details about the skin definition
1591 files.
1592 Display bits
1594 This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the
1595 screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/curses supports
1596 only seven output bits, ISO-8859-1 displays all the characters in the
1597 ISO-8859-1 map and full 8 bits is for those terminals that can display
1598 full 8 bit characters.
1599 Learn keys
1601 This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor
1602 arrows and some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal.
1603 They often don't, since many terminal databases are incomplete or bro‐
1604 ken.
1605 You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h'
1607 left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor move‐
1608 ment key and it is recognized, you can use that key as well.
1609 You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a key
1611 and it is recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name of
1612 that key. Once a key is marked OK it starts working as usually, e.g.
1613 F1 pressed the first time will just check that the F1 key works, but
1614 after that it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys. The
1615 Tab key should be working always.
1616 If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after
1618 pressing one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by
1619 pressing the button with the name of that key (either by the mouse or
1620 by Enter or Space after selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then
1621 a message box will appear asking you to press that key. Do it and wait
1622 until the message box disappears. If you want to abort, just press
1623 Escape once and wait.
1624 When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions
1626 for the keys you have redefined will be written into the [termi‐
1627 nal:TERM] section of your ~/.config/mc/ini file (where TERM is the name
1628 of your current terminal). The definitions of the keys that were
1629 already working properly are not saved.
1630 Virtual FS
1632 This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File
1633 System.
1634 Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some of
1636 the virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the
1637 file system (for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).
1638 Also, in order to access the contents of compressed files (for example,
1640 compressed tar files), Midnight Commander needs to create temporary
1641 uncompressed files on your disk.
1642 Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk
1644 take up resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
1645 information to decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of
1646 access to frequently used file systems.
1647 Because of the format of the tar archives, the Tar filesystem needs to
1649 read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most tar
1650 files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in
1651 extinction), the tar file system has to uncompress the file on the disk
1652 in a temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a reg‐
1653 ular tar file.
1654 Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
1656 it's common that you will leave a tar file and then re-enter it later.
1657 Since decompression is slow, Midnight Commander will cache the informa‐
1658 tion in memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires, all the
1659 resources associated with the file system are released. The default
1660 timeout is set to one minute.
1661 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote
1663 FTP servers. It has several options.
1664 ftp anonymous password is the password used when you login as "anony‐
1666 mous". Some sites require a valid e-mail address. On the other hand,
1667 you probably don't want to give your real e-mail address to untrusted
1668 sites, especially if you are not using spam filtering.
1669 ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a
1671 cache. The cache expire time is configurable with the ftpfs directory
1672 cache timeout option. A low value for this option may slow down every
1673 operation on the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a
1674 request to the FTP server.
1675 You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern
1677 firewalls are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below),
1678 so FTP proxies are considered obsolete.
1679 If Always use ftp proxy is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to
1681 enable proxy for certain hosts. See FTP File System for examples.
1682 If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
1684 /usr/lib/mc/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names that are
1685 local (if the host name starts with a dot, it is assumed to be a
1686 domain) and to assume that any hostnames without dots in their names
1687 are directly accessible. All other hosts will be accessed through the
1688 specified FTP proxy.
1689 You can enable using ~/.netrc file, which keeps login names and pass‐
1691 words for ftp servers. See netrc (5) for the description of the .netrc
1692 format.
1693 Use passive mode enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection
1695 for data transfer is initiated by the client, not by the server. This
1696 option is recommended and enabled by default. If this option is turned
1697 off, the data connection is initiated by the server. This may not work
1698 with some firewalls.
1699 Save Setup
1701 At startup, Midnight Commander tries to load initialization information
1702 from the ~/.config/mc/ini file. If this file doesn't exist, the sys‐
1703 tem-wide file /etc/mc/mc.ini is used. If this file doesn't exist, the
1704 system-wide file /usr/share/mc/mc.ini is used. If this file doesn't
1705 exist, MC uses the default settings.
1706 The Save Setup command creates the ~/.config/mc/ini file by saving the
1708 current settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
1709 If you activate the auto save setup option, MC will always save the
1711 current settings when exiting.
1712 There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To
1714 change these settings you have to edit the setup file with your
1715 favorite editor. See the section on Special Settings for more informa‐
1716 tion.
1717
1720 You may execute commands by typing them directly in Midnight Comman‐
1721 der's input line, or by selecting the program you want to execute with
1722 the selection bar in one of the panels and hitting Enter.
1723 If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, Midnight Comman‐
1725 der checks the extension of the selected file against the extensions in
1726 the Extensions File. If a match is found then the code associated with
1727 that extension is executed. A very simple macro expansion takes place
1728 before executing the command.
1729 The cd internal command
1731 The cd command is interpreted by Midnight Commander, it is not passed
1732 to the command shell for execution. Thus it may not handle all of the
1733 nice macro expansion and substitution that your shell does, although it
1734 does some of them:
1735 Tilde substitution. The (~) will be substituted with your home direc‐
1737 tory, if you append a username after the tilde, then it will be substi‐
1738 tuted with the login directory of the specified user.
1739 For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while
1741 ~/guest is the directory guest in your home directory.
1742 Previous directory. You can jump to the directory you were previously
1744 by using the special directory name '-' like this: cd -
1745 CDPATH directories. If the directory specified to the cd command is
1747 not in the current directory, then Midnight Commander uses the value in
1748 the environment variable CDPATH to search for the directory in any of
1749 the named directories.
1750 For example you could set your CDPATH variable to ~/src:/usr/src,
1752 allowing you to change your directory to any of the directories inside
1753 the ~/src and /usr/src directories, from any place in the file system
1754 by using its relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
1755 /usr/src/linux).
1756 Macro Substitution
1758 When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension dependent com‐
1759 mand, or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
1760 substitution takes place.
1761 The macros are:
1763 %i The indent of blank space, equal the cursor column position.
1765 For edit menu only.
1766 %y The syntax type of current file. For edit menu only.
1768 %k The block file name.
1770 %e The error file name.
1772 %m The current menu name.
1774 %f and %p
1776 In file manager user menu: the current file name in selected
1777 panel. In mcedit user menu: the name of opened file.
1778 %x The extension of current file name.
1780 %b The current file name without extension.
1782 %d The current directory name.
1784 %F The current file in the unselected panel.
1786 %D The directory name of the unselected panel.
1788 %t The currently tagged files.
1790 %T The tagged files in the unselected panel.
1792 %u and %U
1794 Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are
1795 untagged. You can use this macro only once per menu file entry
1796 or extension file entry, because next time there will be no
1797 tagged files.
1798 %s and %S
1800 The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise
1801 the current file.
1802 %cd This is a special macro that is used to change the current
1804 directory to the directory specified in front of it. This is
1805 used primarily as an interface to the Virtual File System.
1806 %view This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer. This macro
1808 can be used alone, or with arguments. If you pass any arguments
1809 to this macro, they should be enclosed in brackets.
1810 The arguments are: ascii to force the viewer into ascii mode;
1812 hex to force the viewer into hex mode; nroff to tell the viewer
1813 that it should interpret the bold and underline sequences of
1814 nroff; unformatted to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff
1815 commands for making the text bold or underlined.
1816 %% The % character
1818 %{some text}
1820 Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text
1821 inside the braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted
1822 by the text typed by the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to
1823 cancel. This macro doesn't work on the command line yet.
1824 %var{ENV:default}
1826 If environment variable ENV is unset, the default is substi‐
1827 tuted. Otherwise, the value of ENV is substituted.
1828 The subshell support
1830 The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the
1831 shells: bash, ash (BusyBox and Debian), tcsh, zsh and fish.
1832 When the subshell support is active, Midnight Commander will spawn a
1834 concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the SHELL variable
1835 and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run
1836 it in a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time you
1837 execute a command, the command will be passed to the subshell as if you
1838 had typed it. This also allows you to change the environment vari‐
1839 ables, use shell functions and define aliases that are valid until you
1840 quit Midnight Commander.
1841 bash users may specify startup commands in ~/.local/share/mc/bashrc
1843 (fallback ~/.bashrc) and special keyboard maps in
1844 ~/.local/share/mc/inputrc (fallback ~/.inputrc).
1845 ash/dash users (BusyBox or Debian) may specify startup commands in
1847 ~/.local/share/mc/ashrc (fallback ~/.profile).
1848 tcsh, zsh, fish users cannot specify mc-specific startup commands at
1850 present. They have to rely on shell-specific startup files.
1851 The following paragraphs are relevant only when the subshell support is
1853 active:
1854 You can suspend applications at any time with the sequence C-o and jump
1856 back to Midnight Commander, if you interrupt an application, you will
1857 not be able to run other external commands until you quit the applica‐
1858 tion you interrupted.
1859 The basic prompt displayed by Midnight Commander is of the form
1861 "user@host:current_path$ ". When using a capable shell, like Bash, the
1862 prompt displayed by Midnight Commander will be the same prompt that you
1863 are currently using in your shell.
1864 (There's a known problem when using fish: the prompt is displayed only
1866 in full screen mode (Ctrl-o), not when the panels are visible.)
1867 The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can control sub‐
1869 shell usage (-U/-u). Furthermore, to set a specific subshell different
1870 from your current SHELL variable or login shell defined in /etc/passwd,
1871 you may call MC like this: SHELL=/bin/myshell mc
1872
1874 The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of
1875 files and directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key combina‐
1876 tion.
1877 The Chmod window has two parts - Permissions and File.
1879 In the File section are displayed the name of the file or directory and
1881 its permissions in octal form, as well as its owner and group.
1882 In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons which corre‐
1884 spond to the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute bits,
1885 you can see the octal value change in the File section.
1886 To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons) use the arrow
1888 keys or the Tab key. To change the state of the check buttons or to
1889 select a button use Space. You can also use the hotkeys on the buttons
1890 to quickly activate them. Hotkeys are shown as highlighted letters on
1891 the buttons.
1892 To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
1894 When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on
1896 the bits you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits you
1897 want to change, you select one of the action buttons (Set marked or
1898 Clear marked).
1899 Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use
1901 the [Set all] button, which will act on all the tagged files.
1902 [Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected files
1904 [Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1906 [Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files
1908 [Set] set the attributes of one file
1910 [Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
1912
1914 The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot
1915 key for this command is C-x o.
1916
1918 The Advanced Chown command is the Chmod and Chown command combined into
1919 one window. You can change the permissions and owner/group of files at
1920 once.
1921
1923 When you copy, move or delete files, Midnight Commander shows the file
1924 operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed and
1925 uses up to three progress bars. The file bar indicates the percentage
1926 of the current file that has been processed so far. The count bar
1927 shows how many of the tagged files have been handled. The bytes bar
1928 indicates the percentage of the total size of the tagged files that has
1929 been handled. If the verbose option is off, the file and bytes bars
1930 are not shown.
1931 There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip
1933 button will skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort but‐
1934 ton will abort the whole operation, the rest of the files are skipped.
1935 There are three other dialogs which you can run into during the file
1937 operations.
1938 The error dialog informs about error conditions and has three choices.
1940 Normally you select either the Skip button to skip the file or the
1941 Abort button to abort the operation altogether. You can also select
1942 the Retry button if you fixed the problem from another terminal.
1943 The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or move a file on
1945 the top of an existing file. The dialog shows the dates and sizes of
1946 the both files. Press the Yes button to overwrite the file, the No
1947 button to skip the file, the All button to overwrite all the files, the
1948 None button to never overwrite and the Update button to overwrite if
1949 the source file is newer than the target file. You can abort the whole
1950 operation by pressing the Abort button.
1951 The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to delete a directory
1953 which is not empty. Press the Yes button to delete the directory
1954 recursively, the No button to skip the directory, the All button to
1955 delete all the directories and the None button to skip all the
1956 non-empty directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing
1957 the Abort button. If you selected the Yes or All button you will be
1958 asked for a confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are really sure you
1959 want to do the recursive delete.
1960 If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the
1962 files on which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped
1963 files are left tagged.
1964
1966 The copy/move operations let you translate the names of files in an
1967 easy way. To do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and
1968 usually in the trailing part of the destination specify some wildcards.
1969 All the files matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
1970 the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the tagged files
1971 matching the source mask are renamed.
1972 There are other options which you can set:
1974 Follow links
1976 determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source direc‐
1978 tory (recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target directory
1979 or whether would you like to copy their content.
1980 Dive into subdirs
1982 determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be
1984 copied, but the target directory already exists. The default action is
1985 to copy the contents of the source directory into the target directory.
1986 Enabling this option causes copying the source directory itself into
1987 the target directory.
1988 For example, you want to copy directory /foo containing file bar to
1990 /bla/foo, which is an already existing directory. Normally (when Dive
1991 into subdirs is not set), mc would copy file /foo/bar into the file
1992 /bla/foo/bar. By enabling this option the /bla/foo/foo directory will
1993 be created, and /foo/bar will be copied into /bla/foo/foo/bar.
1994 Preserve attributes
1996 determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you
1998 are root) the ownership of the original files. If this option is not
1999 set, the current value of the umask will be respected.
2000 Use shell patterns
2002 When this option is on you can use the '*' and '?' wildcards in the
2004 source mask. They work like they do in the shell. In the target mask
2005 only the '*' and '\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wild‐
2006 card in the target mask corresponds to the first wildcard group in the
2007 source mask, the second '*' corresponds to the second group and so on.
2008 The '\1' wildcard corresponds to the first wildcard group in the source
2009 mask, the '\2' wildcard corresponds to the second group and so on all
2010 the way up to '\9'. The '\0' wildcard is the whole filename of the
2011 source file.
2012 Two examples:
2014 If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is "/bla/*.tgz" and
2016 the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will be "foo.tgz" in
2017 "/bla".
2018 Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
2020 become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is "*.*" and the
2021 destination is "\2.\1".
2022 Use shell patterns off
2024 When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic
2026 grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source mask
2027 to specify meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is more
2028 flexible but also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are sim‐
2029 ilar to the situation when the shell patterns option is on.
2030 Two examples:
2032 If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
2034 "/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will
2035 be "/bla/foo.tgz".
2036 Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
2038 will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
2039 "^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".
2040 Case Conversions
2042 You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u' or '\l'
2044 in the target mask, the next character will be converted to uppercase
2045 or lowercase correspondingly.
2046 If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will be
2048 converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next '\E'
2049 or next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.
2050 The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
2052 For example, if the source mask is '*' ( Use shell patterns on) or
2054 '^\(.*\)$' ( Use shell patterns off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the
2055 file names will be converted to have initial upper case and otherwise
2056 lower case.
2057 You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is a back‐
2059 slash and '\*' is an asterisk.
2060 Stable symlinks
2062 commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the tar‐
2064 get, so that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With
2065 absolute symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative
2066 one, it will recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other direc‐
2067 tory parts and making the value as short as possible (most modern
2068 filesystems keep short symlinks inside inodes and thus don't waste much
2069 disk space).
2070
2073 The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection.
2074 The input line allow enter the regular expression of filenames that
2075 will be selected/unselected.
2076 When Files only checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files
2078 only is off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat‐
2079 terns checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename
2080 globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ?
2081 standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging
2082 of files is done with normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When
2083 Case sensitive checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive
2084 characters. If Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
2085
2087 The mcdiff is a visual diff tool. You can compare two files and edit
2088 them in-place (diffs are updated dynamically). You can browse and view
2089 a working copy from popular version control systems (GIT, Subversion,
2090 etc).
2091 Following shortcuts are available in internal diff viewer of Midnight
2093 Commander.
2094 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2096 F2 Save modified files.
2098 F4 Edit file of the left panel in the internal editor.
2100 F14 Edit file of the right panel in the internal editor.
2102 F5 Merge the current hunk. Only the current hunk will be merged.
2104 F7 Start search.
2106 F17 Continue search.
2108 F10, Esc, q Exit from diff viewer.
2110 Alt-s, s Toggle show of hunk status.
2112 Alt-n, l Toggle show of line numbers.
2114 f Maximize left panel.
2116 = Make panels equal in width.
2118 > Reduce the size of the right panel.
2120 < Reduce the size of the left panel.
2122 c Toggle show of trailing carriage return (CR) symbol as ^M.
2124 2, 3, 4, 8 Set tabulation size
2126 C-u Swap contents of diff panels.
2128 C-r Refresh the screen.
2130 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2132 Enter, Space, n Find next diff hunk.
2134 Backspace, p Find previous diff hunk.
2136 g Go to line.
2138 Down Scroll one line forward.
2140 Up Scroll one line backward.
2142 PageUp Move one page up.
2144 PageDown Mves one page down.
2146 Home, A1 Moves to the line beginning.
2148 End Moves to the line end.
2150 C-Home Move to the file beginning.
2152 C-End, C1 Move to the file end.
2154
2156 The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To
2157 toggle between modes, use the F4 key.
2158 The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
2160 the file type to display the information. Some character sequences,
2161 which appear most often in preformatted manual pages, are displayed
2162 bold and underlined, thus making a pretty display of your files.
2163 When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and con‐
2165 stant numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing the
2166 quotes. Each number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text with
2167 constants like this:
2168 "String" 34 0xBB 012 "more text"
2170 Numbers are always interpreted in hex. In the example above, "34" is
2172 interpreted as 0x34. The prefix "0x" isn't really needed: we could type
2173 "BB" instead of "0xBB". And "012" is interpreted as 0x12, not as an
2174 octal number.
2175 Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Mid‐
2177 night Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
2178 F1 Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.
2180 F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
2182 F4 Toggle the hex mode.
2184 F5 Goto. You can specify a line number, offset or percentage of file
2186 size of position that you want to view.
2187 F7, /, ? Start search. These keys call the dialog window that allows
2189 you to set up the search options. If key is ? the "Backwards" option is
2190 on.
2191 C-s Continue forward search.
2193 C-r Continue reverse search.
2195 F17, n Continue search in the chosen direction.
2197 N Temporary change the search direction: backwards if forward search is
2199 chosen, and vice versa.
2200 F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or
2202 if a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the
2203 output from the filter. Current mode is always the other than written
2204 on the button label, since on the button is the mode which you enter by
2205 that key.
2206 F9 Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on the viewer
2208 will interpret some string sequences to show bold and underline with
2209 different colors. Also, on button label is the other mode than current.
2210 F10, Esc. Exit the internal file viewer.
2212 next-page, space, C-v. Scroll one page forward.
2214 prev-page, Alt-v, C-b, Backspace. Scroll one page backward.
2216 down-key Scroll one line forward.
2218 up-key Scroll one line backward.
2220 C-l Refresh the screen.
2222 C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
2224 [n] m Set the mark n.
2226 [n] r Jump to the mark n.
2228 C-f Jump to the next file.
2230 C-b Jump to the previous file.
2232 Alt-r Toggle the ruler.
2234 Alt-e to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recod‐
2236 ing is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
2237 recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2238 It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look
2240 at the Edit Extension File section
2241
2244 The internal file editor is a full-featured full screen editor. It can
2245 edit files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files.
2246 The internal file editor is invoked using F4 if the use_internal_edit
2247 option is set in the initialization file.
2248 The features it presently supports are: block copy, move, delete, cut,
2250 paste; key for key undo; pull-down menus; file insertion; macro com‐
2251 mands; regular expression search and replace; shift-arrow text high‐
2252 lighting (if supported by the terminal); insert-overwrite toggle; word
2253 wrap; autoindent; tunable tab size; syntax highlighting for various
2254 file types; and an option to pipe text blocks through shell commands
2255 like indent and ispell.
2256 Sections:
2258 Options of editor in ini-file
2260 The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring. To see what
2262 keys do what, just consult the appropriate pull-down menu. Other keys
2263 are: Shift movement keys do text highlighting. Ctrl-Ins copies to the
2264 file mcedit.clip and Shift-Ins pastes from mcedit.clip. Shift-Del cuts
2265 to mcedit.clip, and Ctrl-Del deletes highlighted text. Mouse highlight‐
2266 ing also works, and you can override the mouse as usual by holding down
2267 the shift key while dragging the mouse to let normal terminal mouse
2268 highlighting work.
2269 To define a macro, press Ctrl-R and then type out the key strokes you
2271 want to be executed. Press Ctrl-R again when finished. You can then
2272 assign the macro to any key you like by pressing that key. The macro is
2273 executed when you press Ctrl-A and then the assigned key. The macro is
2274 also executed if you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the assigned key,
2275 provided that the key is not used for any other function. Once defined,
2276 the macro commands go into the file
2277 ~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/mcedit.macros You can delete a macro by delet‐
2278 ing the appropriate line in this file.
2279 To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
2281 made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recod‐
2282 ing you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
2283 F19 will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or C or C++
2285 code or another). This is controlled by the file
2286 /usr/share/mc/edit.indent.rc which is copied to
2287 ~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/edit.indent.rc in your home directory the
2288 first time you use it.
2289 The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When editing binary
2291 files, you should set display bits to 7 bits in the options menu to
2292 keep the spacing clean.
2293
2296 Some editor options of ini-file are described in this section. Options
2297 are placed in [Midnight-Commander] section
2298 editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file
2300 Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from
2301 begin of file to cursor position (0)
2302
2305 Midnight Commander supports running many internal modules (such as edi‐
2306 tor, viewer and diff viewer) simultaneously and switching between them
2307 without closing open files. Using several file managers at a time, how‐
2308 ever, is not currently supported.
2309 Let's call each of these modules a screen. There are three ways to
2311 switch between screens, using one of these global shortcuts:
2312 Alt-} switch to the next screen;
2314 Alt-{ switch to the previous screen;
2316 Alt-` open a dialog window with the list of currently open screens (or
2318 use the "Screen list" menu item).
2319
2321 Let Midnight Commander type for you.
2322 Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC
2324 attempts completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins
2325 with $), username (if the text begins with ~), hostname (if the text
2326 begins with @) or command (if you are on the command line in the posi‐
2327 tion where you might type a command, possible completions then include
2328 shell reserved words and shell built-in commands as well) in turn. If
2329 none of these matches, filename completion is attempted.
2330 Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input
2332 lines, command completion is command line specific. If the completion
2333 is ambiguous (there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the
2334 following action depends on the setting of the Complete: show all
2335 option in the Configuration dialog. If it is enabled, a list of all
2336 possibilities pops up next to the current position and you can select
2337 with the arrow keys and Enter the correct entry. You can also type the
2338 first letters in which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of
2339 all possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you press
2340 Alt-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise
2341 the first item which matches all the previous characters will be high‐
2342 lighted. As soon as there is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you
2343 can hide it by canceling keys Esc, F10 and left and right arrow keys.
2344 If Complete: show all is disabled, the dialog pops up only if you press
2345 Alt-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.
2346 Apply escaping of ?, * and & symbols (as \?, \*, \& ) in filenames to
2348 disallow use them as metasymbols in regular expressions when substitu‐
2349 tion is performed in the input line.
2350
2353 Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file
2354 system; this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch.
2355 The virtual file system switch allows Midnight Commander to manipulate
2356 files not located on the Unix file system.
2357 Currently, Midnight Commander is packaged with some Virtual File Sys‐
2359 tems (VFS): the local file system, used for accessing the regular Unix
2360 file system; the ftpfs, used to manipulate files on remote systems with
2361 the FTP protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed tar
2362 files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on ext2 file systems
2363 (the default file system for Linux systems), fish (for manipulating
2364 files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh). If the code was
2365 compiled with sftpfs (for manipulating files over SFTP connections).
2366 If the code was compiled with smbfs support, you can manipulate files
2367 on remote systems with the SMB (CIFS) protocol.
2368 A generic extfs (EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to
2370 easily expand VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.
2371 The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will
2373 forward them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one
2374 of the file systems is described later in their own section.
2375 FTP File System
2377 The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote
2378 machines. To actually use it, you can use the FTP link item in the
2379 menu or directly change your current directory using the cd command to
2380 a path name that looks like this:
2381 ftp://[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
2383 The user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2385 the user element, Midnight Commander will login to the remote machine
2386 as that user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the login name
2387 from the ~/.netrc file. The optional pass element is the password used
2388 for the connection. Using the password in the VFS directory name is
2389 not recommended, because it can appear on the screen in clear text and
2390 can be saved to the directory history.
2391 To enable using FTP proxy, prepend ! (an exclamation sign) to the
2393 hostname.
2394 Examples:
2396 ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
2398 ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
2399 ftp://!behind.firewall.edu/pub
2400 ftp://guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
2401 ftp://miguel:xxx@server/pub
2402 Please check the Virtual File System dialog box for ftpfs options.
2404 Tar File System
2406 The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar
2407 files and compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change
2408 your directory to a tar file, you change your current directory to the
2409 tar file by using the following syntax:
2410 /filename.tar/utar://[dir-inside-tar]
2412 The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means
2414 that usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter
2415 into the tar file, see the Edit Extension File section for details on
2416 how this is done.
2417 Examples:
2419 mc-3.0.tar.gz/utar://mc-3.0/vfs
2421 /ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar/utar://
2422 The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
2424 FIle transfer over SHell filesystem
2426 The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
2427 manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use
2428 this, the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have
2429 bash-compatible shell.
2430 To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
2432 directory which name is in the following format:
2433 sh://[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]
2435 The user, options and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2437 the user element, Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
2438 machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
2439 The available options are:
2441 'C' - use compression;
2442 'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
2443 port - specify the port used by remote server.
2444 If the remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the
2445 remote machine will be set to this one.
2446 Examples:
2448 sh://onlyrsh.mx:r/linux/local
2450 sh://joe@want.compression.edu:C/private
2451 sh://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
2452 sh://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
2453 SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) filesystem
2455 The SFTP file system is a network based file system that allows you to
2456 manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local.
2457 To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
2459 directory which name is in the following format:
2460 sftp://[user@]machine:[port]/[remote-dir]
2462 The user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
2464 the user element, Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
2465 machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name. port -
2466 specify the port used by remote server (22 by default). If the
2467 remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the remote
2468 machine will be set to this one.
2469 Examples:
2471 sftp://onlyrsh.mx/linux/local
2473 sftp://joe:password@want.compression.edu/private
2474 sftp://joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
2475 sftp://joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
2476 Undelete File System
2478 On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs undelete
2479 facilities, you will have the undelete file system available. Recovery
2480 of deleted files is only available on ext2 file systems. The undelete
2481 file system is just an interface to the ext2fs library to retrieve all
2482 of the deleted files names on an ext2fs and provides and to extract the
2483 selected files into a regular partition.
2484 To use this file system, you have to chdir into the special file name
2486 formed by the "undel://" prefix and the file name where the actual file
2487 system resides.
2488 For example, to recover deleted files on the second partition of the
2490 first SCSI disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:
2491 undel://sda2
2493 It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
2495 before you start browsing files there.
2496 SMB File System
2498 The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB
2499 (or CIFS) protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups, Windows
2500 9x/ME/XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Samba. To actually use it, you
2501 may try to use the panel command "SMB link..." (accessible from the
2502 menubar) or you may directly change your current directory to it using
2503 the cd command to a path name that looks like this:
2504 smb://[user@]machine[/service][/remote-dir]
2506 The user, service and remote-dir elements are optional. The user,
2508 domain and password can be specified in an input dialog.
2509 Examples:
2511 smb://machine/Share
2513 smb://other_machine
2514 smb://guest@machine/Public/Irlex
2515 EXTernal File System
2517 extfs allows you to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU
2518 Midnight Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.
2519 Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:
2521 1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing
2523 file. They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree.
2524 You can invoke them by typing 'cd fsname://' where fsname is an extfs
2525 short name (see below). Examples of such filesystems include audio
2526 (list audio tracks on the CD) or apt (list of all Debian packages in
2527 the system).
2528 For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type
2530 cd audio://
2532 2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent
2534 contents of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files
2535 compressed in an archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages in
2536 a mailbox (mailfs) or parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such
2537 filesystems 'fsname://' should be appended to the archive name. Note
2538 that the archive itself can be on another vfs.
2539 For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type
2541 cd documents.zip/uzip://
2543 In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For
2545 instance, you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory
2546 history. An important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell com‐
2547 mands inside extfs, just like any other non-local VFS.
2548 Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:
2550 a access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette (cd a://).
2552 apt front end to Debian's APT package management system (cd apt://).
2554 audio audio CD ripping and playing (cd audio:// or cd
2556 device/audio://).
2557 bpp package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution (cd
2559 file.bpp/bpp://).
2560 deb package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.deb/deb://).
2562 dpkg Debian GNU/Linux installed packages (cd deb://).
2564 hp48 view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator (cd hp48://).
2566 lslR browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs (cd file‐
2568 name/lslR://).
2569 mailfs mbox-style mailbox files support (cd mailbox/mailfs://).
2571 patchfs
2573 extfs to handle unified and context diffs (cd file‐
2574 name/patchfs://).
2575 rpm RPM package (cd filename/rpm://).
2577 rpms RPM database management (cd rpms://).
2579 ulha, urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha
2581 archivers (cd archive/xxxx:// where xxxx is one of: ulha, urar,
2582 uzip, uzoo, uar, uha).
2583 You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in
2585 the Edit Extension File section. Here is an example entry for Debian
2586 packages:
2587 regex/.deb$
2589 Open=%cd %p/deb://
2590
2592 Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports color
2593 using the terminal database and your terminal name. Sometimes it gets
2594 confused, so you may force color mode or disable color mode using the
2595 -c and -b flag respectively.
2596 If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager instead of
2598 ncurses, it will also check the variable COLORTERM, if it is set, it
2599 has the same effect as the -c flag.
2600 You may specify terminals that always force color mode by adding the
2602 color_terminals variable to the Colors section of the initialization
2603 file. This will prevent Midnight Commander from trying to detect if
2604 your terminal supports color. Example:
2605 [Colors]
2607 color_terminals=linux,xterm
2608 color_terminals=terminal-name1,terminal-name2...
2609 The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang, ncurses does
2611 not provide a way to force color mode: ncurses uses just the informa‐
2612 tion in the terminal database.
2613 Midnight Commander provides a way to change the default colors. Cur‐
2615 rently the colors are configured using the environment variable
2616 MC_COLOR_TABLE or the Colors section in the initialization file.
2617 In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
2619 base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a ter‐
2620 minal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:
2621 [Colors]
2623 base_color=
2624 xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
2625 The format for the color definition is:
2627 <keyword>=<fgcolor>,<bgcolor>,<attributes>:<keyword>=...
2629 The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal, selected, dis‐
2631 abled, marked, markselect, errors, input, inputmark, inputunchanged,
2632 commandlinemark, reverse, gauge, header, inputhistory, commandhistory.
2633 Button bar colors are: bbarhotkey, bbarbutton. Status bar color: sta‐
2634 tusbar. Menu colors are: menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, men‐
2635 uinactive. Dialog colors are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus,
2636 dtitle. Error dialog colors are: errdfocus, errdhotnormal, errdhotfo‐
2637 cus, errdtitle. Help colors are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold,
2638 helplink, helpslink, helptitle. Viewer colors are: viewnormal, view‐
2639 bold, viewunderline, viewselected. Editor colors are: editnormal, edit‐
2640 bold, editmarked, editwhitespace, editlinestate. Popup menu colors are:
2641 pmenunormal, pmenusel, pmenutitle.
2642 header determines the color of panel header, the line that contains
2644 column titles and sort mode indicator.
2645 input determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.
2647 gauge determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar
2649 (gauge), which is used to show the user the progress of file opera‐
2650 tions, such as copying.
2651 disabled determines the color of the widget that cannot be selected.
2653 The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal is used for the nor‐
2655 mal text, dfocus is the color used for the currently selected compo‐
2656 nent, dhotnormal is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in
2657 normal components, whereas the dhotfocus color is used for the high‐
2658 lighted color in the currently selected component.
2659 Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot,
2661 menuhotsel and menuinactive tags instead.
2662 Help uses the following colors: helpnormal is used for normal text,
2664 helpitalic is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual
2665 page, helpbold is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the man‐
2666 ual page, helplink is used for not selected hyperlinks and helpslink is
2667 used for selected hyperlink.
2668 Popup menu uses following colors: pmenunormal is used for non-selected
2670 menu items and as a main color of popup menu window, pmenusel is used
2671 for selected menu item, pmenutitle is used for popup menu title.
2672 The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, bright‐
2674 green, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan,
2675 brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword for
2676 transparent background. It is 'default'. The 'default' can only be used
2677 for background color. Another special keyword "base" means mc's main
2678 colors. When 256 colors are available, they can be specified either as
2679 color16 to color255, or as rgb000 to rgb555 and gray0 to gray23. Exam‐
2680 ple:
2681 [Colors]
2683 base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default
2684 Attributes can be any of bold, italic, underline, reverse and blink,
2686 appended by a plus sign if more than one are desired. The special word
2687 "none" means no attributes, without attempting to fall back to
2688 base_color. Example:
2689 menuhotsel=yellow;black;bold+underline
2691
2694 You can change the appearance of Midnight Commander. To do this, you
2695 must specify a file that contain descriptions of colors and lines to
2696 draw boxes. Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible with the
2697 assignment of colors, as described in Section Colors.
2698 If your skin contains any true-color definitions, you should define the
2700 'truecolors' key set to TRUE value in [skin] section. If true-color is
2701 not used but 256-color is, you should define '256colors' instead.
2702 A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
2704 found):
2705 1) command line option -S <skin> or --skin=<skin>
2707 2) Environment variable MC_SKIN
2708 3) Parameter skin in section [Midnight-Commander] in config
2709 file.
2710 4) File /etc/mc/skins/default.ini
2711 5) File /usr/share/mc/skins/default.ini
2712 Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
2715 may contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini
2716 or without it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one
2717 found):
2718 1) ~/.local/share/mc/skins/
2720 2) /etc/mc/skins/
2721 3) /usr/share/mc/skins/
2722 For getting extended info, refer to:
2725 Description of section and parameters
2727 Color pair definitions
2728 Color and attribute aliases
2729 Draw lines
2730 Compatibility
2731 Description of section and parameters
2734 Section [skin] contain metainfo for skin-file. Parameter description
2735 contain short text about skin.
2736 Section [filehighlight] contain descriptions of color pairs for file‐
2739 names highlighting. Name of parameters must be equal to names of sec‐
2740 tions into filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for getting
2741 more info.
2742 Section [core] describes the elements that are used everywhere.
2745 _default_
2747 Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not con‐
2748 tain color definitions
2749 selected
2751 cursor
2752 marked selected data
2754 markselect
2756 cursor on selected data
2757 gauge color of the filled part of the progress bar
2759 input color of input lines used in query dialogs
2761 inputmark
2763 color of input selected text
2764 inputunchanged
2766 color of input text before first modification or cursor movement
2767 commandlinemark
2769 color of selected text in command line
2770 reverse
2772 reverse color
2773 Section [dialog] describes the elements that are placed on dialog win‐
2775 dows (except error dialogs).
2776 _default_
2778 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2779 specified
2780 dfocus Color of active element (in focus)
2782 dhotnormal
2784 Color of hotkeys
2785 dhotfocus
2787 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2788 Section [error] describes the elements that are placed on error dialog
2791 windows
2792 _default_
2794 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2795 specified
2796 errdhotnormal
2798 Color of hotkeys
2799 errdhotfocus
2801 Color of hotkeys in focused element
2802 Section [menu] describes the elements that are placed in menu. This
2805 section describes system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus
2806 (called by F2 in panels and by F11 in editor).
2807 _default_
2809 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2810 specified
2811 entry Color of menu items
2813 menuhot
2815 Color of menu hotkeys
2816 menusel
2818 Color of active menu item (in focus)
2819 menuhotsel
2821 Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item
2822 menuinactive
2824 Color of inactive menu
2825 Section [help] describes the elements that are placed on help window.
2828 _default_
2830 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2831 specified
2832 helpitalic
2834 Color pair for element with italic attribute
2835 helpbold
2837 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2838 helplink
2840 Color of links
2841 helpslink
2843 Color of active link (on focus)
2844 Section [editor] describes the colors of elements placed in editor.
2847 _default_
2849 Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
2850 specified
2851 editbold
2853 Color pair for element with bold attribute
2854 editmarked
2856 Color of selected text
2857 editwhitespace
2859 Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting
2860 editlinestate
2862 Color for line state area
2863 Section [viewer] describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.
2866 viewunderline
2868 Color pair for element with underline attribute
2869 Color pair definitions
2872 Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.
2873 Color pairs described as two colors and the optional attributes sepa‐
2875 rated by ';'. First field sets the foreground color, second field sets
2876 background color, third field sets the attributes. Any of the fields
2877 may be omitted, in this case value will be taken from default color
2878 pair (global color pair or from default color pair of this section).
2879 Example:
2881 [core]
2882 # green on black
2883 _default_=green;black
2884 # green (default) on blue
2885 selected=;blue
2886 # yellow on black (default)
2887 # underlined yellow on black (default)
2888 marked=yellow;;underline
2889 Possible colors (names) and attributes are described in Colors. sec‐
2892 tion.
2893 Color and attribute aliases
2896 This optional section might define aliases for single colors (not color
2897 pairs) as well as combination of attributes; in other words, for semi‐
2898 colon-separated fragments of parameters. Aliases can refer to other
2899 aliases as long as they don't form a loop.
2900 Example:
2902 [aliases]
2903 myfavfg=green
2904 myfavbg=black
2905 myfavattr=bold+italic
2906 [core]
2907 _default_=myfavfg;myfavbg;myfavattr
2908 Draw lines
2911 Lines sets in section [Lines] into skin-file. By default single lines
2912 are used, but you may redefine to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to
2913 lines, for example).
2914 WARNING!!! When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen
2916 library usage of drawing lines is limited! Possible only drawing a
2917 single lines. For all questions and comments please contact the devel‐
2918 opers of Ncurses.
2919 Descriptions of parameters [Lines]:
2922 lefttop
2924 left-top line fragment.
2925 righttop
2927 right-top line fragment.
2928 centertop
2930 down branch of horizontal line
2931 centerbottom
2933 up branch of horizontal line
2934 leftbottom
2936 left-bottom line fragment
2937 rightbottom
2939 right-bottom line fragment
2940 leftmiddle
2942 right branch of vertical line
2943 rightmiddle
2945 left branch of vertical line
2946 centermiddle
2948 cross of lines
2949 horiz horizontal line
2951 vert vertical line
2953 thinhoriz
2955 thin horizontal line
2956 thinvert
2958 thin vertical line
2959 Compatibility
2963 Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with the appoint‐
2964 ment of the colors described in Colors. section.
2965 In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin file
2967 and is complementary.
2968
2971 Section [filehighlight] in current skin-file contains key names as
2972 highlight groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented
2973 in Skins section.
2974 Rules of filenames highlight are placed in /usr/share/mc/filehigh‐
2976 light.ini file (~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini). Name of section in
2977 this file must be equal to parameters names in [filehighlight] section
2978 (in current skin-file).
2979 Keys in these groups are:
2981 type file type. If present, all other options are ignored.
2983 regexp regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option is ignored.
2985 extensions
2987 list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.
2988 extensions_case
2990 (make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions'
2991 rule case sensitive (true) or not (false).
2992 `type' key may have values:
2994 - FILE (all files)
2995 - FILE_EXE
2996 - DIR (all directories)
2997 - LINK_DIR
2998 - LINK (all links except stale link)
2999 - HARDLINK
3000 - SYMLINK
3001 - STALE_LINK
3002 - DEVICE (all device files)
3003 - DEVICE_BLOCK
3004 - DEVICE_CHAR
3005 - SPECIAL (all special files)
3006 - SPECIAL_SOCKET
3007 - SPECIAL_FIFO
3008 - SPECIAL_DOOR
3009
3011 Most of Midnight Commander settings can be changed from the menus. How‐
3012 ever, there are a small number of settings which can only be changed by
3013 editing the setup file.
3014 These variables may be set in your ~/.config/mc/ini file:
3016 clear_before_exec
3018 By default, Midnight Commander clears the screen before execut‐
3019 ing a command. If you would prefer to see the output of the
3020 command at the bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.config/mc/ini
3021 file and change the value of the field clear_before_exec to 0.
3022 confirm_view_dir
3024 If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that direc‐
3025 tory. If this flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirma‐
3026 tion before changing the directory if you have files tagged.
3027 ftpfs_retry_seconds
3029 This value is the number of seconds Midnight Commander will wait
3030 before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has denied
3031 the login. If the value is zero, the login will no be retried.
3032 max_dirt_limit
3034 Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the
3035 internal file viewer. Normally this value is not significant,
3036 because the code automatically adjusts the number of updates to
3037 skip according to the rate of incoming keystrokes. However, on
3038 very slow machines or terminals with a fast keyboard auto
3039 repeat, a big value can make screen updates too jumpy.
3040 It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best
3042 behavior, and that is the default value.
3043 mouse_move_pages_viewer
3045 Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by
3046 line on the internal file viewer.
3047 only_leading_plus_minus
3049 Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line
3050 (select, unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line
3051 is empty. You don't need to quote those characters in the mid‐
3052 dle of the command line. On the other hand, you cannot use them
3053 to change selection when the command line is not empty.
3054 show_output_starts_shell
3056 This variable only works if you are not using the subshell sup‐
3057 port. When you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user
3058 screen, if this one is set, you will get a fresh shell. Other‐
3059 wise, pressing any key will bring you back to Midnight Comman‐
3060 der.
3061 timeformat_recent
3063 Change the time format used to display dates less than 6 months
3064 from now. See strftime or date man page for the format specifi‐
3065 cation. If this option is absent, default timeformat is used.
3066 timeformat_old
3068 Change the time format used to display dates older than 6
3069 months from now or for dates in the future. See strftime or
3070 date man page for the format specification. If this option is
3071 absent, default timeformat is used.
3072 torben_fj_mode
3074 If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work
3075 slightly different on the panels, instead of moving the selec‐
3076 tion to the first and last files in the panels, they will act as
3077 follows:
3078 The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else
3080 go to the top line unless it is already on the top line, in this
3081 case it will go to the first file in the panel.
3082 The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line,
3084 if over it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at
3085 the bottom line, in such case it will move the selection to the
3086 last file name in the panel.
3087 use_file_to_guess_type
3089 If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file com‐
3090 mand to match the file types listed on the mc.ext file.
3091 xtree_mode
3093 If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file
3094 system on a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other
3095 panel with the contents of the selected directory.
3096 fish_directory_timeout
3098 This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in
3099 seconds. The default value is 900 seconds.
3100 clipboard_store
3102 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
3103 board utility like 'xclip' to read text into X selection from
3104 file. For example:
3105 clipboard_store=xclip -i
3107 clipboard_paste
3109 This variable contains path (with options) to the external clip‐
3110 board utility like 'xclip' to print the selection to standard
3111 out. For example:
3112 clipboard_paste=xclip -o
3114 autodetect_codeset
3116 This option allows use the `enca' command to autodetect codeset
3117 of text files in internal viewer and editor. List of valid val‐
3118 ues can be obtain by the `enca --list languages | cut -d : -f1'
3119 command. Option must be located in the [Misc] section.
3120 For example:
3122 autodetect_codeset=russian
3124
3126 Midnight Commander provides a way for specify an options for external
3127 editors and viewers. Midnight Commander tries to search the "[External
3128 editor or viewer parameters]" section in the system initialization file
3129 (the mc.lib file located in Midnight Commander's library directory) and
3130 then in the ~/.config/mc/ini file. The option name should be equal to
3131 the name (full pathname) of external editor or viewer. The option value
3132 can contain following variables:
3133 %filename
3135 The filename to edit/view.
3136 %lineno
3138 The start line in the opening file.
3139 For example:
3141 [External editor or viewer parameters]
3143 vi=%filename +%lineno
3144 joe=%filename +%lineno
3145 more=%filename +%lineno
3146 Start line is passed to the external editor/viewer only if it is called
3148 from the Find file results window.
3149 If external editor/viewer is launched via F4/F3 keys, MC hopes that
3151 program (at least "joe", but probably others too) has an own feature
3152 that by default opens the file where it was last open. MC doesn't pre‐
3153 vent external editor/viewer to save and restore position in opened
3154 files.
3155
3157 Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal database
3158 without requiring root privileges. Midnight Commander searches in the
3159 system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in Midnight Comman‐
3160 der's library directory) and in the ~/.config/mc/ini file for the sec‐
3161 tion "terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section "termi‐
3162 nal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol that you
3163 want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for the
3164 key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape character
3165 and the ^x to represent the control-x character.
3166 The possible key symbols are:
3168 f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
3170 bs backspace
3171 home home key
3172 end end key
3173 up up arrow key
3174 down down arrow key
3175 left left arrow key
3176 right right arrow key
3177 pgdn page down key
3178 pgup page up key
3179 insert the insert character
3180 delete the delete character
3181 complete to do completion
3182 For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you
3184 set this in the ini file:
3185 insert=\e[Op
3187 Also now you can use extended learn keys. For example:
3190 ctrl-alt-right=\e[[1;6C
3192 ctrl-alt-left=\e[[1;6D
3193 This means that ctrl+alt+left sends a \e[[1;6D escape sequence and
3196 therefore Midnight Commander interprets "\e[[1;6D" as Ctrl-Alt-Left.
3197 The complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
3200 the completion process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can
3201 define other keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of
3202 nice and unused keys everywhere).
3203
3206 Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also
3207 affected by the MC_DATADIR environment variable. If it's set, its value
3208 is used instead of /usr/share/mc in the paths below.
3209 /usr/share/mc/help/mc.hlp
3211 The help file for the program.
3213 /usr/share/mc/mc.ext
3215 The default system-wide extensions file.
3217 ~/.config/mc/mc.ext
3219 User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
3221 file. They override the contents of the system wide files if
3222 present.
3223 /etc/mc/mc.ini
3226System-wide setup files for Midnight Commander, used only if the user doesn't
3228have his own ~/.config/mc/ini file. If /etc/mc/mc.ini exists,
3229/usr/share/mc/mc.ini isn't used.
3230
3232 Global settings for Midnight Commander. Settings in this file affect
3234 all users, whether they have ~/.config/mc/ini or not. Currently, only
3235 terminal settings are loaded from mc.lib.
3236
3238 User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is loaded from
3240 here instead of the system-wide startup file.
3241
3243 This file contains the hints displayed by the program.
3245
3247 This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
3249
3251 User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used instead
3253 of the system-wide applications menu.
3254
3256 The directory list for the directory tree and tree view features.
3258
3260 Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used instead of
3262 the home or system-wide applications menu.
3263To change default root directory of MC, you can use MC_PROFILE_ROOT environ‐
3265ment variable. The value of MC_PROFILE_ROOT must be an absolute path. If
3266MC_PROFILE_ROOT is unset or empty, HOME variable is used. If HOME is unset or
3267empty, MC directories are get from GLib library.
3268
3270 This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
3271 License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in
3272 help for details on the License and the lack of warranty.
3273
3275 The latest version of this program can be found at http://ftp.mid‐
3276 night-commander.org/.
3277
3279 ed(1), gpm(1), terminfo(1), view(1), sh(1), bash(1), tcsh(1), zsh(1).
3280 Midnight Commander's page on the World Wide Web:
3282 http://www.midnight-commander.org/
3283
3285 Authors and contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file in the source
3286 distribution.
3287
3289 See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains
3290 to be done.
3291 If you want to report a problem with the program, please create bugre‐
3293 port at http://www.midnight-commander.org/.
3294 Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program
3296 you are running (mc -V displays this information), the operating system
3297 you are running the program on. If the program crashes, we would
3298 appreciate a stack trace.
3299MC Version 4.8.23 June 2019 MC(1)