orthodox

I switched to using Double Commander as my full-time file manager about six months ago (see: "'go-to' file manager?"), after SpaceFM development ceased.

A few weeks back, I was reading about so-called "Orthodox File Managers" (see: http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml) and decided that taking the time to really learn to use something like Midnight Commander would provide me with tools to work more effectively with any Norton-style, orthodox file manager.

Learning to use Midnight Commander did help me to use Double Commander better; but, at the same time, after a while I became hooked, and now "mc" is my "new" full-time file manager.

Here, I have Midnight Commander running on a second tab in Terminator, in GNOME 3 (in Debian Stretch):

There are lots of online tutorials and so forth to help get someone started with Midnight Commander, but the manual page that comes with Midnight Commander helped me more than anything else; just type man mc at the command line.

Midnight Commander also comes with a Help document, which appears to contain pretty much the same info as the man page, but is easier to navigate. It's accessible with F1 if the terminal has function key support. Otherwise, press Esc and then 1 to open the Help document, or simply click on the Help button at the bottom-left corner of the window.

Once in the main help screen, it's important to press Enter "to learn more on how to use the interactive help facility." The full key list of the help viewer is shown here:

I studied the documentation, took some notes, got in some practice, and stuck with it for several days. After that, I felt so comfortable with Midnight Commander that I couldn't see any reason to go back to using Double Commander or any other file manager. OFM, FTW.