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Welcome to Midnight Commander

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GNU Midnight Commander (or mc) is a visual, dual-pane file manager. It is released under the GNU General Public License and therefore qualifies as Free Software.

Midnight Commander is a feature-rich, full-screen, text-mode application that allows you to copy, move, and delete files and entire directory trees, search for files, and execute commands in the subshell. Internal viewer, editor and diff viewer are included.

mc uses versatile text interface libraries such as ncurses or S-Lang, which allows it to work on a regular console, inside an X Window terminal, over ssh connections, and in all kinds of remote shells.

Midnight Commander screenshot

Installation

The easiest way to install mc is to use your system package manager:

# apt-get install mc
# dnf install mc
# pkg install mc
% brew install midnight-commander

Our source releases are kindly mirrored by OSU OSL. Our canonical repository is hosted on GitHub. See the Source code page for details.

Documentation

The primary way to learn about mc is to use the context-sensitive online help available via F1.

We also have extensive manual pages, which are the primary source of official documentation:

$ man mc

... or read the latest development version online.

$ man mcedit

... or read the latest development version online.

$ man mcview

... or read the latest development version online.

$ man mcdiff

... or read the latest development version online.

Contributing & support