{"slug": "midnight-commander", "name": "Midnight Commander", "category": "files", "category_name": "Files, sync and backup", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 13, "warners": 2, "score": 3.655, "rising": 0.02, "first": "2026-02-15", "latest": "2026-10-18", "why": "I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 6, "compare": 1, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "midnight-commander.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://midnight-commander.org/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Midnight Commander"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 802202720, "item_id": 50137670, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137670", "by": "blackfawn", "date": "2026-10-18", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love Midnight Commander!", "excerpt": "I haven't used many of the others, but I love Midnight Commander! Especially after enabling \"Lynx-like motion\" - it's so nice being able to walk around directories with arrow keys", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)"}, {"id": 781957792, "item_id": 48872362, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872362", "by": "btrettel", "date": "2026-07-11", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu.", "excerpt": "I would suggest looking at more powerful file managers. I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu. My organization system makes heavy use of various Bash/Python scripts and Midnight Commander user menu items to make the file system work for me. *** A friend of mine has a similar single folder PDF or", "context": "", "use_case": "file management and organization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet"}, {"id": 763879265, "item_id": 47742454, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742454", "by": "duguyue100", "date": "2026-04-12", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's why Midnight Commander was feeling so great.", "excerpt": "I actually used Yazi a while back. And it's definitely >100x more robust and production-ready than what I iterated for ~3 hours :). And I have no doubt that it is probably way faster. The only problem for me is that it's not how I use a file manager. I learned to have two parallel windows when moving files, even before I learned how to use a terminal. That's why Midnight Commander was feeling so great. Until the day ", "context": "", "use_case": "dual-pane file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Midnight Captain \u2013 A midnight commander inspired file manager"}, {"id": 760177760, "item_id": 47511110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511110", "by": "pamcake", "date": "2026-03-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For Linux you have", "excerpt": "For Linux you have https://midnight-commander.org/ https://krusader.org/ http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html", "context": "", "use_case": "Dual-pane file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft's \"Fix\" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 790520160, "item_id": 49407510, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407510", "by": "ordu", "date": "2026-08-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "But I wouldn't touch Midnight Commander or whatever.", "excerpt": "I don't use TUI when I can avoid it. I happily use CLI apps, or GUI apps, but TUIs are not here, not there. They lose all the appeal of CLI apps, while getting some weird text interface instead of a polished GUI library and all the possibilities that you can get from rendering pixels, not characters. When I moved from DOS to Linux, I chuck away TUI file managers and switched to pure CLI and never looked back. I could", "context": "", "use_case": "file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop Making TUIs"}, {"id": 767445605, "item_id": 47965350, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47965350", "by": "iLemming", "date": "2026-04-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired", "excerpt": "I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim motions in my editors, my IDEs, my browsers, my WMs, my terminals. I use vim-like navigation system-wide - e.g. for the volume control I switch to \"media\" mode and press \"j/k\". Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I have officially retired from Emacs"}]}], "who": [{"by": "teddyh", "context": "came to Unix from MS-DOS", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132369", "date": "2026-10-17"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["file management", "file manager", "two-pane file management", "file management and organization", "terminal file manager", "dual-pane file management"], "compared": [{"slug": "gnu-emacs", "name": "GNU Emacs", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "yazi", "name": "yazi", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "krusader", "name": "Krusader", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115354", "title": "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384210", "title": "Stop Making TUIs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819612", "title": "Documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668199", "title": "Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002938", "title": "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906651", "title": "I have officially retired from Emacs", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "quotes": [{"id": 802202720, "item_id": 50137670, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137670", "by": "blackfawn", "date": "2026-10-18", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love Midnight Commander!", "excerpt": "I haven't used many of the others, but I love Midnight Commander! Especially after enabling \"Lynx-like motion\" - it's so nice being able to walk around directories with arrow keys", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)"}, {"id": 802117905, "item_id": 50132369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132369", "by": "teddyh", "date": "2026-10-17", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "not even Midnight Commander, which was a key-for key clone, and should have fit me perfectly", "excerpt": "I came to Unix from an MS-DOS background, where I used Norton Commander a lot. I used to keep an older version of NC \u2013 which would fit on a floppy \u2013 with me at all times. But on Unix, I ended up not using any of the clones; not even Midnight Commander, which was a key-for key clone, and should have fit me perfectly. It turns out you, or at least I, just don\u2019t use Unix the same way as I did MS-DOS. When I need to mani", "context": "came to Unix from MS-DOS", "use_case": "file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)"}, {"id": 802101329, "item_id": 50131333, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131333", "by": "falsaberN1", "date": "2026-10-17", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Nowadays I mostly use clones like Midnight Commander, Krusader and Double Commander", "excerpt": "I owe Norton a lot of joy for bringing orthodox file managers (the ones with two panes) and I can't live without them. They make file managing so comfortable compared to stuff like Windows Explorer or Nautilus (not saying they are bad though, I just prefer two panes). Nowadays I mostly use clones like Midnight Commander, Krusader and Double Commander, and I used Worker (a clone of a clone, this time a clone of Direct", "context": "", "use_case": "two-pane file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)"}, {"id": 790520160, "item_id": 49407510, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407510", "by": "ordu", "date": "2026-08-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "But I wouldn't touch Midnight Commander or whatever.", "excerpt": "I don't use TUI when I can avoid it. I happily use CLI apps, or GUI apps, but TUIs are not here, not there. They lose all the appeal of CLI apps, while getting some weird text interface instead of a polished GUI library and all the possibilities that you can get from rendering pixels, not characters. When I moved from DOS to Linux, I chuck away TUI file managers and switched to pure CLI and never looked back. I could", "context": "", "use_case": "file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop Making TUIs"}, {"id": 781957792, "item_id": 48872362, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872362", "by": "btrettel", "date": "2026-07-11", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu.", "excerpt": "I would suggest looking at more powerful file managers. I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu. My organization system makes heavy use of various Bash/Python scripts and Midnight Commander user menu items to make the file system work for me. *** A friend of mine has a similar single folder PDF or", "context": "", "use_case": "file management and organization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet"}, {"id": 778785185, "item_id": 48674074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674074", "by": "nbaksalyar", "date": "2026-06-25", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the terminal does not flicker in a lot of other complex TUI apps that I use every day - Midnight Commander, Emacs, tmux, etc.", "excerpt": "People keep saying things like > it's probably an issue with your usage of if > I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt > a skill/PEBKAC issue But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute. Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a \"skill issue\" too? I mean, the terminal does not fli", "context": "", "use_case": "terminal file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?"}, {"id": 768055648, "item_id": 48003478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48003478", "by": "Beijinger", "date": "2026-05-03", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use mc as a file manager.", "excerpt": "I use mc as a file manager. I have no idea what you are talking about.", "context": "", "use_case": "file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"}, {"id": 767445605, "item_id": 47965350, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47965350", "by": "iLemming", "date": "2026-04-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired", "excerpt": "I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim motions in my editors, my IDEs, my browsers, my WMs, my terminals. I use vim-like navigation system-wide - e.g. for the volume control I switch to \"media\" mode and press \"j/k\". Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I have officially retired from Emacs"}, {"id": 763879265, "item_id": 47742454, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742454", "by": "duguyue100", "date": "2026-04-12", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's why Midnight Commander was feeling so great.", "excerpt": "I actually used Yazi a while back. And it's definitely >100x more robust and production-ready than what I iterated for ~3 hours :). And I have no doubt that it is probably way faster. The only problem for me is that it's not how I use a file manager. I learned to have two parallel windows when moving files, even before I learned how to use a terminal. That's why Midnight Commander was feeling so great. Until the day ", "context": "", "use_case": "dual-pane file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Midnight Captain \u2013 A midnight commander inspired file manager"}, {"id": 762035505, "item_id": 47627219, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627219", "by": "sgbeal", "date": "2026-04-03", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "bash, bc, convert, cp, df, du, fossil, grep, less, tail, make, man, mc,", "excerpt": "According to: $ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u Slightly edited: bash, bc, convert, cp, df, du, fossil, grep, less, tail, make, man, mc, mkdir, mv, ps, rm, ssh, scp, sudo, tar, gzip, unzip", "context": "", "use_case": "file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Which CLI tools do you use daily?"}, {"id": 760177760, "item_id": 47511110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511110", "by": "pamcake", "date": "2026-03-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For Linux you have", "excerpt": "For Linux you have https://midnight-commander.org/ https://krusader.org/ http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html", "context": "", "use_case": "Dual-pane file manager", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft's \"Fix\" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating"}, {"id": 757847521, "item_id": 47365470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365470", "by": "rob74", "date": "2026-03-13", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "not that newfangled clone Midnight Commander, the original?", "excerpt": "Yeah, remember good old Norton Commander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander) - not that newfangled clone Midnight Commander, the original? Or the Borland text mode IDEs (https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/ui-museum-turbo-pascal-7-1/), complete with windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, file dialogs etc. etc.?", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "TUI Studio \u2013 visual terminal UI design tool"}, {"id": 752429856, "item_id": 47026866, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026866", "by": "sellmesoap", "date": "2026-02-15", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I had mc on my $20 second hand 286", "excerpt": "I had mc on my $20 second hand 286, there are some newer takes on the classic, ranger and nnn come to mind, support for images on the terminal with sixel is pretty neat! https://github.com/ranger/ranger https://github.com/jarun/nnn", "context": "", "use_case": "file management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a TUI is easy now"}]}