[HN Gopher] Neo-mc - a Midnight Commander fork with scripting an...
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Neo-mc - a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other
features
Author : URfejk
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-02-07 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| sfy wrote:
| Although MC is great, I really like Ranger, and its somewhat
| faster sister LF, which is written in Go.
| thom wrote:
| Missed opportunity to call it Midnight Captain.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Neo MC has that cool Hip-Hop vibe though
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just
| have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services
| around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and
| tweaking services and chmodding/chowning.
|
| However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano
| is... Okay at best?
|
| Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from
| shell and nano.
| dbtc wrote:
| Maybe try thinking of vi as a programming language (for
| interacting with text) rather than a text editor. It's really a
| Human Programming Interface (HPA not API?) which you can run in
| the line editor of your shell (readline), or in emacs, tmux,
| even firefox, but of course it works best in vi/vim/nvim.
|
| Learning the vi language makes me think about interacting with
| computers in a new way.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I recently discovered 'micro' which is along the lines of nano
| in a way but more modern and just about perfect for me.
|
| I wish TextAdept had become more popular since I always thought
| it was a strong choice for a modern editor with solid Lua
| customization support. But it seems like 'micro' is the popular
| one. Has 16000 stars on GitHub.
| adamweld wrote:
| If you're interested in becoming proficient text editing in the
| shell, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning
| the basics with vim. It's significantly less of a "cliff" than
| you'd expect. Just spend a few minutes running through the
| built-in tutorial (vimtutor), learn how to save and open files
| and move around the document, and set a few defaults in your
| config.
|
| Only about 30 minutes of effort will be enough to make it much
| easier to use than nano, in my opinion. Then over time you can
| learn what makes it powerful, play with mouse control, check
| out neovim, etc...
| ilaksh wrote:
| 30 minutes of effort will NOT make vim much easier to use
| than nano. That's ridiculous.
|
| People, get your mind out of the 1970s and check out the
| micro editor.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Upvoting/seconding this. It doesn't take as much effort/pain
| as you think it will. Don't believe the FUD. That said, plain
| old vi on older Solaris systems is still a pain in the ass
| lol.
| ilaksh wrote:
| As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how
| to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get
| peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or
| use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent
| decades.
| weaksauce wrote:
| you don't need to eschew model editing if you go to something
| like vscode... there's a great neovim plugin for vscode that
| gives you full vim in the background but also has a nicer
| vscode interface for the frontend.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I just suspect that people who advocate for modal editing
| and hjkl etc. think that those things are some grand UX
| secret that only real nerds know about. But really they are
| just artifacts of that particular historical circumstance.
|
| http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.ht
| m...
|
| "How did vi's mode switching idea came from? Back in 1970s,
| terminal screen are 80 columns by 24 lines. There's no
| real-time editing. You edit by typing a command, then call
| another command to have the screen update to show the
| result of your command. Vi's "modal editing" is evolved
| from this. This is also why emacs's manual calls itself
| "Real Time Display Editor". Emacs is the first or one of
| the first "Real Time Display" editor.
|
| Why vi uses j k h l for cursor movement? Unix vi's use of j
| k h i for cursor movement, and the choice of Escape key for
| mode switching, came from the keyboard it was developed on,
| the ADM-3A terminal."
| weaksauce wrote:
| > I just suspect that people who advocate for modal
| editing and hjkl etc. think that those things are some
| grand UX secret that only real nerds know about. But
| really they are just artifacts of that particular
| historical circumstance.
|
| while it's true that it was born of historical necessity
| and the decisions for it were partly due to keyboard
| constraints and the other constraints, I disagree
| vehemently with the assertion that it's not a more
| efficient way to edit code. writing a screenplay? maybe
| not but programming? yes... especially in the context of
| a larger ide.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What makes it more efficient? Have there been any
| studies?
|
| I disagree vehemently with your vehement disagreement. I
| just don't believe you are really saving that much time.
|
| Again, saying that as someone who has used vim for 30
| years. Among other editors.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Sure, but if someone is trying to get into *nix SA, or even
| cloudy/devopsy/CI stuff, you really do need to learn vi/m.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Why? It's just as easy to install micro as it is vim.
|
| sudo apt install micro
|
| or
|
| curl https://getmic.ro | bash
|
| Or just download the binary from github.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| *nix system administration at many companies means that
| there are 1000s of RHEL or CentOS or older Solaris
| servers that you may very often need to edit a file if
| there is no config management (which is often the case).
| What all these servers will have to do that will be vi
| (or vim if you're lucky). In most cases you can't just go
| install some random other text editor that you happen to
| like better or be more proficient in. That means you have
| to be at least somewhat functional in vi to be able to
| perform basic tasks.
| ilaksh wrote:
| If you literally have to log into an ssh session on 1000s
| of machines running discontinued operating systems to
| manually edit files and can never install new tools for
| editing or anything else in those machines, then you
| deserve to go out of business.
| theonemind wrote:
| In my experience, that's not a real option in large,
| professional system admin settings. You wouldn't dare do
| that on a production machine without your change
| management process, and your team of admins won't care
| about installing micro on the thousands of machines you
| have to manage. You'd have to do a pull request to some
| kind of config management repo, and no one will agree
| your pet editor merits a deploy, and your boss will think
| you're wasting everyone's time.
|
| I'm not covering half of it. Trust me, it is just
| generally not an option for system administration in the
| large.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You're right, of course it's impossible for anyone to
| approve installing a modern editor. How ignorant of me to
| suggest that. Everyone must use the editor and paradigm
| from the late 1970s. That's the only way professional
| system administrators and organizations can operate. No
| one has time to approve a pull request, no matter how
| outdated the editor is. We all learned it. Everyone else
| has to learn it also. Until the end of time. Amen.
| weaksauce wrote:
| If you think of vim as a language to edit text it becomes a lot
| easier to remember how to do something... if you just try to
| memorize a bunch of incantations it will be awful.
|
| for instance in normal mode where you issue commands to edit
| text(opposed to insert mode which is akin to any other editor
| where it's mostly just typing information into the document)
| you can issue something like delete a(round) word and it
| deletes the word `daw`. or delete inner word `diw`. want to
| change a word? change d to c and it deletes the word and leaves
| you in insert mode to type. all of the commands are very
| composable and form a "language" to edit text that's a lot more
| approachable than you'd think. one fun one is something like
| `ci'` or `ci"` which will if you are on a line with an open and
| closing " or ' will search forward in the line for a " or ' and
| delete what's inside that and leave you in insert mode to make
| your edits....
|
| some more fun reading: https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878
| theonemind wrote:
| You'll probably save yourself a lot of trouble if you can edit
| with vi. It's installed everywhere, and editors like nano are
| really painful without a mouse.
|
| I don't recommend wasting your time getting great with it or
| anything. Just enough to be able to use it to do anything you
| could do with nano...but it will be 3x faster and easier on a
| console instead of using nano if you learn enough to do what
| you can do with nano with it.
| [deleted]
| coolreader18 wrote:
| Just something I noticed, the way that "neo" is "spelled" in the
| README (h[?]o) would be pronounced /heo/, i.e. "heyo" :)
| smlckz wrote:
| Neomutt, Neovim... and now Neo MC!! Where is the Neo Emacs?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Maybe guile emacs?
| talhah wrote:
| I doubt Neo Emacs' existence, emacs is very extensible and
| rather than a separate fork you'd get something like
| Spacemacs[0] which builds over the default Emacs distribution.
|
| https://www.spacemacs.org
| tarkin2 wrote:
| And what happens when another dev can't think of a name for
| their clone? What do they do then? Name it Neoneomc? The dev
| should have gone down the less-more-most route. Midnight
| commander, Twilight commander, Dusk commander, Midnight
| Admiral, Twilight Mutiny... I may give 'mc' a try again. Never
| bothered before.
| layer8 wrote:
| > What do they do then? Name it Neoneomc?
|
| ArgoMC, obviously. ;)
| eointierney wrote:
| https://github.com/remacs/remacs
|
| and yep it's in rust
| kh_hk wrote:
| https://github.com/emacs-ng/emacs-ng
| mhd wrote:
| XEmacs is pining for the fjords.
| boboche wrote:
| I miss diskmasher on ye ol workbench.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Total commander is the one and only windows app I miss on a mac.
| I know there are "clones" but none of them comes close to TC.
| BozeWolf wrote:
| Voting this up, because mc is great and deserves more attention.
| Sometimes cp/mv/rm or grep just are not sufficient. Mc is great
| for browsing your filesystem quickly and for example copy partial
| content of certain directories only. I use it on macos and even
| on my vps. Using it since windows xp - when i switched to linux
| from scratch ;-)
|
| That said, i am not sure what this fork adds. I know a lot of mc
| tricks, i use it a few times a week. But im not a shell, editor,
| whatever customizer anyways. So not sure if i would miss
| scripting. I like it if stuff works out of the box, which mc
| already does!
|
| A few screenshots of those editing features would help. And maybe
| contribute some of those new features to the main project.
| Anyways, nice job!
| bayindirh wrote:
| mc is a wonderful piece of software. We call it morton
| commander as an inside joke.
|
| When I install a server the first command I run is
| <package_manager> install screen vim mc
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| Seconded! A double panel file manager is a very convenient
| concept, strongly suggest those that have not tried it do so!
|
| I mostly use the core feature of organizing files such as
| downloads, moving from one folder to another; sorting by size,
| date, etc, for a quick overview. What would your tricks be?
| tux1968 wrote:
| Not sure if it really qualifies as a trick, but the game
| changer for me was <ctrl-o>. Being able to pop into and out
| of MC from the shell, even while in the middle of typing a
| command is great. It's easy to ignore if the command line
| suffices, and instantly available when helpful.
| StreamBright wrote:
| I wish somebody created Volkov Commander for modern computers. I
| need exactly that much functionality. Just two fixed sized panels
| (50/50) and the ability to navigate in the folder structure.
| Nothing else.
| smartmic wrote:
| I do not know Volkov Commander but have a look at the simple
| file manager, it basically does exactly what you describe:
| https://github.com/afify/sfm
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| For those who enjoy history:
|
| http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/Paradigm/Ch04/mc.shtml
| mpol wrote:
| I see this is mostly about the editor MCedit, not the dual-pane
| filemanager itself.
|
| Does anyone know if the contributors of this fork ever talked to
| the current maintainers of mc? Since the fork of mc about 10
| years ago, there has come a lot of new features and bugfixes into
| mc the filemanager. I would assume they are open for
| contributions.
|
| Anyone, I really love this Midnight Commander, It is maybe my
| most important and most used piece of software :)
| lumpa wrote:
| He also has MC with Python scripting:
| https://github.com/psprint/mc
|
| Edit: and is submitting at least some code upstream e.g.
| https://midnight-commander.org/ticket/4160
| smartmic wrote:
| > Does anyone know if the contributors of this fork ever talked
| to the current maintainers of mc?
|
| Yes, and there was a kind of dispute about this. The gist of it
| can be found in this ticket: https://midnight-
| commander.org/ticket/4187
|
| EDIT: Interesting read also about the pros and cons of Slang2
| as scripting language, some history and the job of maintaining
| mc in general ...
| mpol wrote:
| Interesting read, thank you.
|
| So there is also a plugin system in Lua waiting, it just
| needs someone to care for it. The S-lang plugin system will
| not go in mc itself since they prefer to get rid of S-lang
| alltogether, in favor of ncurses as screen library. This same
| author had a Python plugin system first, but scrapped it in
| favor of this S-lang plugin system.
|
| And yes, I can imagine they are looking more for people doing
| maintenance instead of innovators. They do seem genuine nice
| guys though.
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