Midnight Commander

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Midnight Commander
started by: Nassho

Posted by Nassho on Nov. 03 2004,18:21

First of all. DSL is the best Linux Distro so far. Good work John, really good work.
It would be nice to have a full MC in DSL. Editing files in MC will be much easier instead of using Vi for a newbie like me and many others.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Nov. 03 2004,18:52

If you SEARCH the forums for "mc" ,you'll find many posts covering this topic.
Here is a recent thread, allowing you to CHOOSE your editor of choice in mc.

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=3171 >

73
ke4nt

Posted by Nassho on Nov. 03 2004,19:59

Thanks a lot ke4nt1.
I´ll give it a try.

Nassho

Posted by ke4nt1 on Nov. 03 2004,20:36

Curious to know which one you will pick?
Wondering if that decision would make a good poll ?
( as to which editor everyone would pick for mc use )

73
ke4nt

Posted by Nassho on Nov. 03 2004,21:10

I think i´ll choose Nano.
It looks so much simpler than Vi.

Maybe, in future ISO´s this can be a standard... I know there´s a lot of Vi lovers, but DSL is such a simple distro and Vi is a little complicated for newbies.

Thanks a lot again.

Nassho

Posted by ke4nt1 on Nov. 03 2004,21:46

Interesting... I would have chosen scite...

It gives you line numbers,
highlights different types of texts in color,
depending on what type of file your working on, etc...
Easy to cut/paste between multiple open windows ..
bksp-ins-del-home-end all work like you' d THINK they should ..

When is SOMEBODY gonna contribute a "Nedit" .dsl ??
Nedit was nice.. real nice..

73
ke4nt

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 04 2004,03:39

In my opinion, nano is a better choice than scite or nedit.

I like scite and nedit, but sometimes people will use mc as their file editor while they are running in console text mode instead of inside an XWindows terminal and neither scite nor nedit will work in this situation.

So for the folks who boot with "dsl 2", nano is a good fit because like mc it is also a text-based application.

Just my $0.02

Posted by ke4nt1 on Nov. 04 2004,04:05

........excellent point .

I'm usually root when I'm at a prompt editing system files ..

For menu and /home/dsl items, the scite/nedit choices are good ..
I wonder if you can setup each user to have its own default option ?

73
ke4nt

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 04 2004,05:17

Actually, you could do this:

Set the default environment variable for all users to EDITOR=nano

(this will start the nano editor from mc in most situations)

and then create a small wrapper script that exports EDITOR=scite and then starts up mc with this argument.

You then call this wrapper script from the fluxbox menu.

In this way, if you are running from the console you will get nano as your editor but if you are running from the fluxbox menu you will get scite as your editor.

Posted by regsx on Nov. 04 2004,05:29

nedit is all in one file ... just copy the binary file to DSL and it should run

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 04 2004,14:51

or avoid the wrapper by exporting EDITOR=scite from .xinitrc and EDITOR=nano from .bash_profile

cbagger's idea is less likely to fail, though, in a situation where you may source .bash_profile while in X.

Posted by caulktel on Nov. 04 2004,15:28

Hi,

I made the above changes, it works great! However, even before I made these changes, I was only able to use Midnight Commander as root. If I open it up under the user account it says:

Hotlist Load

was unable to write ~/.mc/hotlist file, your old hotlist entries were not deleted.

So I deleted the .mc/hotlist file all together, and I still get the same error, but it works fine from root. Any Ideas?

Posted by Nassho on Nov. 11 2004,03:06

Quote (ke4nt1 @ Nov. 03 2004,15:36)

Curious to know which one you will pick?
Wondering if that decision would make a good poll ?
( as to which editor everyone would pick for mc use )

If it´s usefull for the poll, now I tried Nano and i´m happy with it.

Nassho

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 11 2004,16:50

Quote (caulktel @ Nov. 04 2004,10:28)

If you launched mc as root from the menu, what version of DSL are you using? This was a menu bug which was fixed in version 0.8.0 (or maybe 0.7.3?).

If you launch mc from console using "sudo mc" before running it as a regular user, your configs are created with root ownership and can not be viewed/modified as regular user.

You can avoid this trouble in three ways:
1) Don't launch mc from console with "sudo mc" until after mc has been run once as normal user.
2) Use the fluxbox menu to launch mc (DSL 0.8.0+).
3) From console, use "sudo su - -c mc" to start mc as root instead of just "sudo mc". This creates the root mc configs in /root instead of /home/dsl.

Posted by ico2 on Nov. 11 2004,17:37

i generally use scite, nano is good for editing config files that prevent x from going though lol