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.
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Have you tried using fink? It's a very useful port of apt-get and dpkg for Mac OS X. I checked and mc is available on fink.
Once fink is installed (very easily with a Mac OS X installer), you select the desired packages with a command-line utility that will resolve dependencies, download all you need and install it. Most of the time, there are precompiled binaries of the packages, so you won't need the developper tools to compile them. Try it!----- I'll second using fink for mc. That's how I installed it. One caveat: it will make you pull down a metric-buttload of gnome libraries if you grab the precompiled version. Not a problem if you wanted them anyway (as I did), but if you're finicky about libraries and extraneous files this may not work for you.
by Andrew White @ 30/08/2005 6:09 pm • Permalink •
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If you read the MacOSXhints link and particularly the comments, you will see that the poster thinks that the version of mc installed by fink is severely compromised. bsag, if you have not read the comments, there is also a possible reason there for your compile failure and a fix.
by ThoughtBadger @ 30/08/2005 11:09 pm • Permalink •
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Timtom and Andrew White: No, I try to avoid fink because of the 'metric-buttload of gnome libraries' issue that Andrew mentioned. I usually install from source on Mac OS X, and that usually works out quite well and is a lot cleaner.
ThoughtBadger: Yes, I saw that too. And no, the issue in the comments isn't the reason for my compile failure, unfortunately. I might have another go when I get back.
by bsag @ 31/08/2005 1:09 pm • Permalink •
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