You can download the source package for Midnight Commander from Softpedia

Sep 8, 2014 13:52 GMT  ·  By

Midnight Commander is a visual file manager and a full-screen text mode application that has been around for longer than some of the readers of this material have been alive. It owes its resilience to the immense popularity it once had, and it looks like it's making a comeback.

There are very few applications that can be easily recognized at a glance and Midnight Commander falls into that category. It was hard to miss with that blue background. For a very long time, this was pretty much what you might have called a GUI for systems that didn't have a desktop.

What’s even more interesting about it is that users continued to use it well after the current modern desktop surfaced. In fact, it's fair to say that the project never really gave up. The developers continued to improve it and they never made a compromise. The interface is pretty much the way you would remember it, for example.

What the developers are saying about it

"GNU Midnight Commander is a visual file manager, licensed under GNU General Public License and therefore qualifies as Free Software. It's a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included."

"Midnight Commander is based on versatile text interfaces, such as Ncurses or S-Lang, which allows it to work on a regular console, inside an X Window terminal, over SSH connections and all kinds of remote shells," is noted in the official announcement.

The development cycle for Midnight Commander has picked up a little Steam in the past few months and now we get a new version just a few months after the previous one. It's quite consistent and the devs have repaired a lot of issues.

It's all about the fixes

According to the changelog, a new engine has been implemented for user-friendly interruption of long-time operations, syntax highlighting has been improved, a separate normal (default) color pair has been added for the viewer, the first Backspace/Delete is no longer ignored after clicking in an input widget, the recursive find file now works on Samba share, the quick view now grabs the focus on mouse click, and viewbold and viewselected are no longer missing from some skins.

A complete list of changes and new features can be found on the official website. You can download Midnight Commander 4.8.13 right now from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that this is the source package and that you will have to compile it yourself, unless you find it in a repository.