You can also use your mouse pointer to click on interface elements. You can quickly return to its interface by hitting the same key combination. This lets you focus on the command line or see previous command output while Midnight Commander runs in the background. Shortcut keys are a combination of keys pressed together that allow you to quickly access specific actions. When an input field is selected, hold ALT down before pressing on the highlighted letter. Let’s return to your previous view: press F9 then l (L) and then g to get back to File listing. These are keys that you can press to navigate the menus faster. Once you hit the F9 key, some letters get highlighted, e.g., C in Command. Press F9 and then the DOWN arrow key multiple times until Tree is highlighted. These are drop-down menus that can be accessed by pressing F9 and then navigating with your arrow keys. In most cases, reading or copying objects owned by root doesn’t require special privileges, so try to run mc as a regular user.Īt the top of the screen, you can see a colored bar with text: Keep in mind that running as root is not a good idea unless you need to modify or delete files/directories owned by this user. To start Midnight Commander with the command prompt: mc

On CentOS, the command is: sudo yum install mc On Debian or Ubuntu run: sudo apt-get install mc This may result in small behavioral differences on other operating systems. While this file manager should work in almost identically on all Linux distributions, a particular distro may not package the exact same Midnight Commander version (4.8.18, in this case).

There is no special requirement to install Midnight Commander, and it works on all Linux distributions.

The methods in this tutorial have been tested on Debian 9. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, see the Users and Groups guide. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. This guide is written for a non-root user.

Installing midnight commander mac