[pantulis]

Some colleagues believed I was some kind of Unix demigod when they were working with SunOS ksh command line and I had my own copy of mc (probably downloaded from Solaris Freeware site or something like that).

There's one powerful thing that mc does and almost any other dual file manager omits: it has the concept of "pop up menus" for commonly used commands --with the option of sending the selected file(s). Also, these menus can be global or local, configured for each specific folder or in my case working copies of some proprietary version control repositories (Subversion was too cool then).

Not only viewing files with F3 instead of using 'more' made you go significantly faster when there was no IDE to quickly grok a codebase, in ancient times where version control and diffing and merging was not exactly like today this was extremely powerful, only surpassed by Emacs.

Edit: to add that in macOS Forklift has something like this in a specific "Tools" section.

[Sakos]

I've experimented a lot with making my own CLI programs to change how I interact with the terminal, for example wrapping things like cp and mv in a stateful way. I feel like I'd reached some form of enlightenment when I was able to do

> cp file

> z folder (which is deeply nested somewhere else)

> paste

instead of having to type everything out.

It feels to me like the possibilities of the CLI and how we interact with it have barely been explored.

[jackthetab]

Code? Detailed explanation of possibilities?

[TacticalCoder]

> There's one powerful thing that mc does and almost any other dual file manager omits: it has the concept of "pop up menus" for commonly used commands

I never really used mc because once I switched to Linux I became an Emacs user but... I have fond memories of Norton Commander on my 386 PC (running DOS, before Windows 95 became a thing). I think Norton Commander was first and mc was a clone of Norton Commander (even copying the color scheme). And Norton Commander, IIRC, already had these "popup menus" (but my memory may be playing me tricks).

[red_admiral]

Yes, to the point that `mc` is wordplay on `nc`.

[machomaster]

You missed a lot if you never switched to Dos Navigator.

[anthk]

mc was uber-fast on reading docs from /usr/share/docs, often in .gz format.