----- Original Message -----
From: "Carlos E. R."
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The Tuesday 2008-07-29 at 10:13 +0200, Nico Sabbi wrote:
Hi, is there a console/text file-manager alternative to mc? mc works quite well, but it has some limitations (especially in its ftp part) that sometimes annoy me a lot.
I don't know of any other.
There was an XTree look alike, but I haven't seen it for a long time, and mc was more powerful.
For ftp there are several clients: I know of "ftp" and "pftp", but I think there is another one I can't find now. Ah, lftp. But no one like "mc".
ncftp is another good swiss army knife ftp client. As is ckermit beleive it or not, just by virtue of the kermit scripting language built in and it's ability to use ssh as well as ftp, though kermit is not in any way a full screen interactive app like mc, then again, that scripting language is so powerful you could actually write a ui in it that looks pretty full if you wanted to. For full screen two-panel file browser type app there is a thing called "git" which I don't think anyone has used in ages. Mc was way more useful even 10 years ago. I think I need to hear in what he means by "better". I think there is no better full screen interactive file browser. There may or may not be better ftp clients but mc's main purpose is to be a file browser, and it's ftp client functionality is just there to be a part of the file browser functionality. There might be dedicated ftp clients that have more and more powerful ftp client features, but they would lack everything else mc does. The best ftp client isn't going to for example: Consider 3 machines, A, B, C. A and C are production machines in different locations, owned by different people, running different os's, behind different firewall policies. But you, their consultant, have some form of access from B to both. A allows ftp from B only by ip. C allows only ssh and only from B, by ip. (A and C can't directly talk to each other at all. Maybe A is only reachable via vpn as well and only B may become an endpoint in that vpn.) You can sit on B, and in mc, open one panel into A via ftp, browse to an rpm file, dive into the rpm file, dive into the cpio archive within the rpm, dive into a .tar.gz within the cpio. Open up the other panel via ssh into C, browse around and copy files from within the cpio within the rpm on A , over to C, all point-click-drool in a few seconds. All necessary copying and ftp-ing and sftping and bunzip2/gunzip/cpio/tar/rpm/etc... all that's handled automatically on the fly and transparently in temp dirs in the background and you are just presented with the magic. Oh which reminds me, you could actually be doing that litterly by point-click, since mc has xterm mouse integration, not that I consider that an especially useful feature, but it's a feature almost nothing else has none the less. Then there is the customizeable context menus and action menus. You want mc to recognize a new kind of file? no sweat you can edit the context menu and/or you can write your own file unpacker/browser script in the case the new type of file happens to be any kind of archive, like say, a few years ago when Stapede Linux looked promising, I wrote a mc integration script to browse the insides of .slp files (Stampede's package format). It wasn't that hard. You just take one of the existing scripts for something similar like rpm and modify a few functions for unpacking, listing contents in a defined format that mc expects, repackaging. I don't think there is anything even remotely close to mc, for what mc does, in a text interface. There may be more or at least equally useful gui apps, and there definitely are ftp clients with more ftp-specific features, at the expense of the million other mc features. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org