GNU Midnight Commander - extended

mcdev

This is a long-term project extending GNU Midnight Commander with new capabilities.

The goal is not to replace Midnight Commander, but to push it further: richer data sources, a stronger viewer, plugin-based editor extensions, better terminal input tooling, and practical improvements that make the daily workflow sharper.

View on GitHub See extended features

master

The master branch contains stable features.

DEV_*

Branches named DEV_* contain work in progress.

Project Focus

Midnight Commander, rebuilt for modern workflows

mcdev keeps the familiar Midnight Commander core and extends it where terminal work has changed the most: containers, object storage, remote systems, archive-heavy workflows, streaming logs, live filtering, and better tooling around keys, editor helpers, and privilege-sensitive actions.

What it means

classic two-panel workflow
+ plugin panels
+ terminal-aware viewer
+ editor plugins
+ stronger key tooling
= mcdev

Extended Features

Panel Plugins

A plugin system for panels similar to VFS, but designed for arbitrary data sources.

Docker Container and image browser with project grouping.

Git Commit list with diff, favorites, and cross-panel navigation.

Samba SMB/CIFS browser.

SFTP SSH connections with progress, key auth, and compression.

FTP FTP browser.

S3 Object storage browser.

arcmc Archive browser for zip, tar, jar, war, and ear.

Viewer

Terminal-aware file inspection

Real-time streaming with F3 on commands like docker logs.
ANSI color rendering.
Terminal emulation mode.
Live grep filtering.
Markdown rendering.
Fixes for archive viewing crashes.

Editor

Focused, extensible editing

Code folding.
Spell checker as plugin.
etags as plugin.

Key Handling

Better control over terminal input

Incremental history search.
Key bindings editor.
Learn terminal keys.
Key sniffer.

Misc

Practical workflow improvements

Small improvements matter in a terminal file manager. mcdev also includes quality-of-life changes that remove friction from everyday use.

Plugin panels in drive menu.
Temp file extension preservation.
Save with sudo.
Various fixes across the codebase.