mc6 -- a fork of GNU Midnight Commander, based on version 4.8.33.

Midnight Commander (MC) is a text-mode, full-screen file manager: two panels, a built-in editor and viewer, and a virtual filesystem for browsing archives and remote hosts. It runs on the OS console, in xterm, and over ssh.

This fork is not an official GNU package. Report issues here, not upstream.

Own version numbering starts at v6.0.1, independent of upstream.

Full notes: Releases wiki.

• Panel plugins. Panel contents can come from a dynamically loaded plugin. Shipped: git, docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, S3, FTP/FTPS, SFTP, Samba, systemd, shell connections, External Panelize, and arcmc. The old built-in ftpfs and sftpfs VFS modules are replaced by the FTP and SFTP plugins.

• arcmc — an archive manager on libarchive: browse, create, pack and extract (zip, 7z, tar.*, cpio) with progress and cancel. The legacy built-in tarfs and cpiofs VFS modules have been removed.

  

• Editor — code folding, an undo history browser, a macro explorer, and an editor plugin framework.

• Viewer — a structured tree mode for JSON, YAML, XML and HTML, a grep-style live filter, ANSI colour and terminal replay, and streaming of never-ending command output.

  

  

• Embedded terminal — run a shell inside the file manager, panels stay in sync with its directory.

• Panels — user-editable view modes, dialogs for managing key bindings and learning terminal keys, and the classic hide-a-panel / run-a-command flow.

  

See INSTALL for dependencies and instructions.

./autogen.sh          # from a git checkout
./configure
make
sudo make install

mc --version identifies this fork.

This fork is packaged as mc6, while its commands deliberately remain mc, mcedit, mcview, mcdiff and mctree. It replaces the distribution mc package rather than coexisting with it.

There is no public package repository yet. Each release builds .deb, .rpm and .pkg.tar.zst and attaches them to its GitHub release; to build them yourself, see packaging/README.md. The recipes carry no version of their own: packaging/prepare.sh <version> generates the version-bearing files from the release tag, and every build starts with it.

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ./mc6_*.deb ./mc6-data_*.deb ./mc6-plugins_*.deb
• RHEL/Fedora: sudo dnf swap mc mc6, then sudo dnf install ./mc6-plugins-*.rpm
• Arch: sudo pacman -U ./mc6-*.pkg.tar.zst ./mc6-plugins-*.pkg.tar.zst
• Gentoo: copy packaging/gentoo into a local overlay as app-misc/mc6, then emerge app-misc/mc6

Install downloaded packages through the package manager -- apt install ./file.deb and dnf install ./file.rpm -- never dpkg -i or rpm -i, which skip the dependency and replacement handling.

• Wiki
• Built-in help: press F1 inside mc
• Manual pages: mc(1), mcedit(1), mcview(1)

Open an issue: https://github.com/ilia-maslakov/mcdev/issues

Include mc --version, your OS and distribution, and the compiler and configure flags if you know them. For a crash, attach a gdb backtrace (gdb mc core, then where).

GNU General Public License, version 3 or any later version. See COPYING.