On 2014-12-11 21:26, Doug wrote:
On 12/11/2014 03:19 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I used Midnite Commander 30 years ago on CPM, but I've totally forgotten how to use it, and I don't think it's as user friendly as you indicate--I looked at it recently and it snowed me.
It was user friendly when there were no guis. Norton Commander and similar tools (xtree, pc tools) were the predecessors of the current file browsers like dolphin, nautilus, thunar... or w. explorer. All we had when the those text tools appeared was the bare command line, nothing graphical or with menus. You had to type a command to do things like move, rename, copy: remember the command and type everything correctly. Today Midnight Commander is, in some respects, as powerful as a gui, much faster, without graphics, limited mouse action. It has some limitations and some advantages. For instance: customizable menus, running actions on files or groups of them, which you can customize. Or typing terminal commands. All tools have their place. Let me see, mc can, for instance, compress a whole directory, open a compressed archive, look inside an rpm package, look inside a cd iso image without being root (to loop mount it), do a text search (grep) inside a bunch of files and directories, do operations on the found list (including editing the files). Create/edit hard/symlinks, calculate directory sizes, chown, chmod, rename. Compare files or directories (quick or full compare). Also, it is customizable. The closest GUI is, I think, krusader. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)