Midnight Commander - terminal based twin pane file manager

Tips and Tricks
1 
sudo apt install mc

Download size: 1,891 kB - Space needed: 8,056 kB

Works in the terminal in Cockpit or via SSH. Even though it’s in a terminal, a mouse works for many things. No drag and drop.

It’s in Debian and has been for some time - Debian -- Details of package mc in trixie
Wikipedia page
Home Page

mc
mc1518×707 99.2 KB

Screenshot is after me having updated WordPress.

Files and wp-content folder remain on the left as I didn’t move those. The files had the same date so they haven’t been updated and wp-content never gets replaced when updating wp.

The numbers at the bottom of MC pertain to F keys. F6 is RenMov or rename/move.

MC gives a popup to confirm move/location and a second popup with an option to overwrite all.

I’m not afraid of a terminal but I use it so infrequently, I have to look up commands every time for most things. Overwriting 3,217 files that will break my website if I screw up? Yeah, I’d like it to be visual.

Commands also work within MC down in the black panel near the bottom. I was able to navigate to Downloads in left pane, use wget to fetch the latest.tar.gz, use tar to unpack it and F6 to move the new files from Downloads to /usr/share/wordpress all in one interface in just a few minutes.

I would say this should be built into FBX but it runs in a terminal so there’s nothing to build in. Maybe preinstalled with mention of it in the FBX Manual and/or the SSH welcome text.

2

If you like file managers in the terminal, you could have a look at lf, ranger (those two have similarities), nnn, vifm (as the name says, you can use the vim commands in it) and ytree.

In a terminal (not so much on freedombox on which I rarely use anything else than the web interface), I mostly use commands, like ls, mv, rm, find, grep, a bit of awk and bash scripting. I can agree that mv is command for which thinking twice, or trying with dummy files/folders, before running is a good idea.

I forgot: I often run “apt search” to find useful software (I use Trisquel, not Debian, but it works the same).

3

Just tried apt search

Question; how do you get out of the view with that long list of results?

I tries q, Esc, Ctrl+D

4

For me, q works. The keys I normally use from “less” work, so you could look at “man less”.