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shmerl
Very cool successor of Norton Commander idea.
Nursie
I haven't used this for a long old time. Back in the day it was the only way to recover your university dissertation when you'd rm -rf'd in the wrong directory.

Go on, ask me how I know ...

I've not had much cause to use it since then though.

sigttou
Brings back great memories, used to be my default diff viewer for several years.
riffraff
When I was young and incompetent mc was the only way I knew to remove files starting with a dash :)
fithisux
Fun fact, on Windows I stopped using File Explorer and use Midnight Commander.

Now that I am more into the command line, I may need to give it a try.

kouteiheika
I love Midnight Commander so much; I install it on every system I use. It's so much more efficient/pleasant when in comes to navigating the filesystem and doing basic operations, especially when you learn the shortcuts and learn how to use it along with other command-line tools (hint: if you press Ctrl+O in MC it will switch to a normal shell command prompt it the directory you're in, and you can press Ctrl+O again to get back to MC; this allows you to easily use MC for things it is the most efficient for, and normal command-line for things where that is better).
kees99
> Ctrl+O in MC will switch to a normal prompt

Better yet! (one-line) shell prompt is always available and has some nifty integrations via <Ctrl+X>. For example, one has a bunch of files visually tagged (selected) on current panel, and wants to tar them up as "/tmp/foo.tgz". Well...

   tar czf /tmp/foo.tgz <Ctrl+X><T>
lepicz
Mouseless Commander :)
vsviridov
I've been using `mc` for decades... In fact, in my early professional days as a software dev, I've written entire systems with PHP using `mcedit` (the built-in editor), because I didn't know `vim` then, and `mcedit` had syntax highlighting...
latchkey
Brings back memories. This is one of my older open source contributions that's still visible. I helped port it to a/ux in the early 90's. Line 98: https://fossies.org/linux/mc/AUTHORS

It was originally written by Miguel de Icaza who became a semi-famous for his work on Mono and others.

bmackenty
Still used in Poland. I still manage some systems using mcedit.
kqr
For people on Android phones, Ghost Commander is neat.

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.

imiric
I liked X-plore on Android, which also supports dual panes. It's not open source, unfortunately.
JdeBP
The thing about Orthodox File Managers when they first came about, that does not occur today, was the amount of time that had to be devoted to explaining that particular features would not work on OS/2, Unices, Linux-based operating systems, or Windows NT because only MS/PC/DR-DOS let programs do things like directly manipulate stuff in some other program's PSP or directly peek/poke video RAM or the keyboard buffer; or that filenames did not necessarily have "extensions"; or that there was more than 1 type of timestamp; or that links and symbolic links existed; or that different people can have different local times on a single machine; or that directories actually have sizes.

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.

pantulis
The killer feature in mc was the popup menu that you could configure to run several commands on the selected files. And if memory serves it could be customized on a global or directory specific way.
faangguyindia
most of the russian programmers i worked with use this. Not sure if it's taught in university or something.
EbNar
Great FM. I still use it consistently, especially when dealing with a large number of files.
glimmung
I just couldn't live without this thing. Well, I could but I would be less productive and more grumpy.

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...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder

axiolite
I never could use mc. None of the keyboard shortcuts were at all intuitive to me, who had been using many different GUI file managers over the decades. Which is a shame, because I use SSH a LOT and doing normal file housework via pure CLI is super tedious and error-prone... Fortunately, I went looking more recently, and found the nnn file manager, which works properly with the basic keyboard commands I would expect, and really helped improve my workflow a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nnn_(file_manager)

mischief6
my one gripe after using mc for a few years is no parallel transfer support. it slows down significantly when transferring small files compared to one large file.