Who are these for? People who use the terminal but don’t like running shell commands?
OK sorry for throwing shade. If you use one of these, honestly, what features do you use that make it worthwhile?
I use them for filemanagement on my server over ssh
What is the advantage over using SFTP with Nautilus/Dolphin/… ?
It’s faster. Because I have to move directorys relatively often from different drives on my server and nemo seems to be moving the files to my local machine before moving them to their right location on the server.
Oh very good idea. I didn’t even consider this
Genuinely curious what you did consider.
My daily driver. I hit the terminal a lot
Sometimes it helps to have a visual aide for what you’re doing. CLI/TUI apps are often faster, or when accessing remotely, lower bandwidth.
Also, let people enjoy thing.
They’re better than
cd something ls cd something-else ls cd ../.. lsBut you don’t need to
cdbefore runningls. And in most cases you don’t even needls, autocompletion is enough.Well… WinSCP or something like that is even better.
Most systems I interface with are remote or headless. Forwarding X is annoying as fuck and to be avoided at all cost, so the more I can do though the terminal, the better.
PS: I’m also old enough to have been a regular user of Norton Commander, the application MC (Midnight Commander) is based on (inspired by).
EDIT: Norton Commander was a DOS app and so useful that it prompted Midnight Commander, one of the earliest applications developed for Linux. So MC kind of pre-dates Linux in a way.
for example, when you need to copy some files and not the other, you can take your time selecting the specific files you need to copy instead of writing the list of files in one command. When you want to check the contents of a lot of files, you can just open file preview. Etc, basically sometimes CLI isn’t as convenient as TUI/GUI
Eh… for home servers, when you want to take a quick glance at the files (maybe you are running a script that copies files around after some time…?). Then again, I don’t really find em useful when I have
ls -alshoved inside my brain. It’s (kind of) “second nature” at this point.As a Linux newb, it’s easier than opening a SFTP session next to the terminal as I’m learning the file structure so it’s either that or
cdthenlsfor every damn folder because I don’t know where I am or what’s in this folder vs that. Ranger has been nice for me as I learn.People who can use them effectively tend to be a way faster with the regular admin work. Also, they can do some things which are not that simple on the command line (browse through tarball, browse through remote directories).
Way back when DOSLinux existed the dev provided a Midnight Commander with a fully loaded F2 menu as well as setup associations. Could literally do almost anything and everything from within the file manager. I later moved the configs over to Slackware and pretty much lived in MC to get things done. At some point the MC code reduced the number of entries in the F2 menu so I would have to rebuild it to remove the limitation.
No longer use it like that today but MC is used constantly for file management locally and remotely (mostly to a Kodi box).
Using OFMs (Norton/Volkov/Midnight Commanders and FAR) has always been easier and faster to use than Explorer-style GUI FMs for me.
Sometimes they are more convenient, than cd ls mv cp everything, when you don’t have access to a file explorer.
Specially if you are working with a server via ssh, or some machine without any Desktop Environment installed.
Nostalgia for those 80s and 90s kids who grew up with norton commander ;-)
I used
mcmany yeas ago until I learned CLI utils well enough to use them efficiently. I think, it is the main point: you get a tool that does not require a lot of time to start using it. But in most usage scenarios TUI FMs are less effective than CLI.Anecdata: I had been “running shell commands” happily enough for 15 years. And then I tried Ranger. It was immediately clear that everything is faster, sometimes much faster. This supposes that you are familiar with basic Vi key bindings. It’s not about “features”, it’s much simpler than that, it’s about keystrokes.
The more time I spend on development at work and at home, the more I truly despise constantly switching from mouse to keyboard and back. I’m no power user, but I may well check this out.
I am not sure there is any killer feature that you cannot do in a cli application. It is just a different way of working. Slightly better at some things slightly worst at others. But the biggest difference is what you are used to more then and single feature set.
Though I don’t personally use them, I also use a shell with a lot more interactive features built in then default bash does. If I where stuck with only default bash maybe I would lean more towards them. But that is just the way I work, others work differently then ai do.
It saves time when you’re dealing with multiple files with different names. Also, MC is a clone of NC and I’ve been using either of them since early 90s. Habits.
