Is mc a must... or any "Commander" would suffice?
Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Is mc a must... or any "Commander" would suffice?
started by: MakodFilu
Posted by MakodFilu on Feb. 01 2006,00:14
I asked this in the wrong forum and I would like to learn. Search has neither provided a clue.I just don't use any file manager, but I saw how passionately Midnight Commander was defended in the RC1 forum. I have a personal taste for text based applications over X only apps, a matter of pragmatism in case X doesn't start for whatever the reason.
At the same time, even as it was assured that MC will be in the next release, there was at least an intent of dropping it in favour of emelFM. Googling around (well, "Aptituding") I found deco, Demos Commander.
My question is: is it just a matter of having a text based file manager whatever it is, or is it that MC is badly needed for unique features not reproducible or attainable even in other "Commander" clones?
Posted by Churchill on Feb. 05 2006,16:09
If we are going to need a text-based file manager (which I will because I break things all the time 
) why not just leave MC and emelfm alone? Is deco smaller? I think it's better to stick with stuff we know because that makes life easier for newbs like me. I had never used Linux in my life until I installed DSL a month ago. Have mercy on us! 
Posted by MakodFilu on Feb. 09 2006,00:57
Yeah, deco seems significantly smaller (twentyfold smaller?).But I don't know to what extent mc 5MB figure have been tuned down in DSL compared to deco 250KB figure. Dependencies seems to put deco in an even more favourable position.
That is why I am asking if 5MB are really needed to do the job a tiny deco seems to do.
As there is a great difference in size, I assume mc is plentiful of features that deco has not, but I don't know what are those or if those would be really missed in DSL.
Posted by mikshaw on Feb. 09 2006,02:29
I don't know where you got the 5mb figure for mc....it's grossly inaccurate. I'm not in DSL at the moment to see what the actual size is for DSL's stripped-down version of mc, but when i compiled the most recent version of mc it came out to be less than 500k without the syntax and extfs files (which i know are not a part of DSL's version)
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 09 2006,05:04
On the previous DSL version, mc.bin was 432.7KB uncompressed. Even smaller when compressed into the filesystem.
Posted by MakodFilu on Feb. 09 2006,15:21
| Quote (mikshaw @ Feb. 09 2006,02:29) |
| I don't know where you got the 5mb figure for mc....it's grossly inaccurate. |
I knew that at 5MB it was absurdly high, but that is what apt told me about mc. Talking about Debian Unstable size figures for mc. It was far beyond reasonable and that was the point to start this thread.
But your comments show that mc is not that heavy, so now I have the answer. I understand that the question was somewhat weird if all you know beforehand is deco and mc were similar in size (and was me who had overgrown figures). It would have seemed to you a matter of tastes instead of pure pragmatism till now.
Thanks for your time and patience.
Posted by dzubin on Feb. 09 2006,19:01
OK, I know this isn't taking into account shared libraries or anything, but I just started up DSL 2.1x. The "RAM Usage" display on the upper right hand side shows: 22.4M / 92.1M.I started up Midnight Commander.
it now shows: 23.2M / 92.1M
To me, that says 0.8M (800K) usage which isn't much.
Since mc is used more than deco, I'm voting for keeping mc
Posted by Guest on Mar. 06 2006,18:33
I'm not all too familiar with Deco, but I think that MC is cool.Now, if it's a matter of size constraints I've written a filemanager in perl that's only 3KB in size (mind you this is without a gui, but I can make it run from a gui click without much change in size) also I still need to add in a few functions, but I don't expect this application to go beyond 10KB in size... It runs great on DSL too
If interested send me an email or post here your interest... I can always make it available either in source or as a tar.gz download from my website.
Posted by Guest on Mar. 06 2006,21:53
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The 3KB size I mentioned is an uncompressed size.
Posted by Onikage on Mar. 08 2006,17:49
poppe, gurus here don't like to respond to anyone with an opinion other than their own... They prefer 'sheep' in this forum.
Posted by pr0f3550r on Mar. 08 2006,17:58
I like and prefer Pilot (the one that comes with Pine) but unfortunately licence and insatllation method probably prevent it from working fine with DSL.