# Using GNU Emacs Key Bindings in GNU Midnight Commander's Mcedit

I've been playing with the GNU Midnight Commander (mc) lately (I'm
editing this post in mc). I've always had a soft spot for orthodox
file managers [0] since my DOS days using Norton Commander, and mc
has some great features, including remote editing, familiar to anyone
who uses GNU Emacs' tramp mode. However, this feature only works with
mc's internal editor (mcedit, which can also be used as a very
capable standalone editor).

However, I've never cared for the default key bindings in mcedit. Old
versions of mc could be configured to use Emacs key bindings in the
editor preferences, but newer versions have a much more configurable
way to change them. Mc ships with a key binding config file you can
use to emulate Emacs (and edit yourself if needed, it is fairly
self-explanatory), it is easy to enable:

    cp /etc/mc/mc.emacs.keymap ~/.config/mc
    cd ~/.config/mc
    ln -sv mc.emacs.keymap mc.keymap

You can just delete this mc.keymap symlink to go back to the default
key bindings, if needed.

After this change, when you restart mc, select a file and hit F4 for
edit (or shift-F4 to open a blank file), and most of the common Emacs
bindings will be there for you. There are some exceptions - you still
need to hit F2 to save your document, and the analogue to Emacs'
fill-paragraph behavior is bound to M-p, not M-q (word wrap line
length, what Emacs calls the fill-column, can be set in the editor
general options). The commands for dealing with text rectangles are
also different in mcedit, I'll go over how to deal with columns of
text in another post.

One behavior that I needed to get used to was with ctrl-k - in Emacs,
you can delete a blank line with ctrl-k. In mcedit, ctrl-k just
literally deletes to the end of the current line, but does not delete
newlines. So blank lines have to be deleted with ctrl-space ctrl-n
ctrl-w (set mark, move down a line, kill region in Emacs), or by just
hitting the backspace key from the beginning of the following
non-blank line, which is probably easier.

Of course, you can configure mc to use an external editor like
emacsclient or vim, but if you do, you lose the remote editing
capability that is builtin to mc, and its ability to switch between
multiple editing sessions and panels (called 'screens' in mc)
with M-`.

[0]: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/File%20manager