Midnight commander
In the process of setting up The Emperor I installed GNU Midnight Commander, otherwise known as mc. It’s a two-pane file manager (with a built in previewer and editor) with a great, stripped-down interface which can be driven entirely from the keyboard. I’d seen it some time ago, but never managed to install it successfully on the Mac. However, it installed very easily with apt-get install on the Emperor, and I’ve been really enjoying it—-so much so that I’d love to have it on my Mac.
I tried this hint on MacOSXHints, but the compilation failed at the last hurdle. Despite the Smart Folder features and much improved searching in Tiger, Finder is still irritating to work with if you have a deeply nested folder structure. I’m a big fan of Path Finder, and am waiting impatiently for version 4 which will exploit Tiger features fully—-I just hope that it’s possible to view Smart Folders in the new Path Finder. Although it isn’t as keyboard-driven as mc, it has much of the same feeling of easy control over your files. One feature I love is that you can open a Terminal in a drawer which automatically has the working directory set to the path of the selected file or folder. That’s really convenient if you need to tinker with an invisible configuration file in a deeply-nested folder.
