Go on, ask me how I know ...
I've not had much cause to use it since then though.
How do you know?
That was not a good day, about a week before submission was due. I unmounted the disk the second I realised what I'd done and started to look for guides on finding lost ext2 inodes. MC to the rescue!
If you were quick and unmounted as soon as you had realised what you’d done, and the space had not been re-used for anything, you could often get the file back because rm just unlinked the inodes on ext2 IIRC.
I imagine that the commands it used under the hood were accessible to anyone with the right know-how, but at the time that’s not something I had, and all the guides started with “use midnight commander” so I did :)
(Saying “only way” to recover might be a stretch, it’s true)
For some reason, the technical term for these is Orthodox File Manager, which I've always thought was an obscure cultural in-joke from the countries where these were most popular --- Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
This origin is elaborated at length here: https://softpanorama.org/Articles/introduction_to_orthodox_f...
This is an excellent way to build powerful UIs. It is what drives things like Vim, and often why Lisp-based software is so hackable -- think Emacs, StumpWM, etc. Instead of writing plugins against some small plugin API, you're wiring new functionality directly into the application.
The article you reference goes into more detail, as you say.
Now that I am more into the command line, I may need to give it a try.
For GUI file managers, I have to say you can't get better than Dolphin. It has an integrated shell for the current directory, and you can split the view. It can also directly open ssh and SFTP URLs. For local things the combination of Dolphin and it's shell is unbeatable.
You could do the same with Nautilus. But in their infinite wisdom GNOME developers decided to remove that ability.
I thought mc and mcedit was cool, but needed something small and portable within a fairly locked-down environment ( "No [root] for you!" as the admin would say.) =3
It was originally written by Miguel de Icaza who became a semi-famous for his work on Mono and others.
For people who like the power of Emacs dired, there used to be Sunrise Commander but last I looked it wasn't so actively maintained and had some bugs, so I've sadly gone back to regular dired.
Today, the DOS Think is far less prevalent.
Midnight Commander's screenshots would have looked a little off to OFM users with DOS Think. Today, it's the original MS/PC/DR-DOS tools that will appear odd to novices. They did things like have a narrow 8.3 filename column, omit the dots, use graphics in the filename for system files, use glyphs that one could only obtain through poking C0-range codes into video RAM, change UI elements as one pressed and released the Alt key, and so forth.
https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20191228133344.GA4943@...
It now even supports true keyboard reporting (through Kitty TTY protocol on compatible terminals) for SSH connections.
Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...
shmerl•2h ago
ilvez•2h ago
JdeBP•1h ago
xiphias2•1h ago
lepicz•1h ago
its size was right at the edge of segment (64k) so when a virus appended to the .com binary, volkov stopped working
selcuka•25m ago
I made a COM-to-EXE convertor back in time so that I can compress them with LZEXE (I don't remember anything about it, but I guess I just prepended an empty relocation table). It would have been interesting to incorporate that functionality in a virus.
tyfon•23m ago
And MC on the *nixes of course.
auselen•1h ago