GNU Midnight Commander

GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a free, open-source visual file manager for Unix-like systems and Windows, originally created by Miguel de Icaza in 1994. As one of the oldest actively maintained open-source file managers, Midnight Commander provides a text-based, dual-pane interface inspired by Norton Commander, the legendary DOS file manager from the 1980s. Written in C using the ncurses or S-Lang terminal library, mc runs in any terminal emulator and provides a rich set of file management features without requiring a graphical environment. Key features include: dual-pane layout (showing two directory trees side by side for easy file copying and moving between directories), function key shortcuts (F1-F10 mapped to Help, Menu, View, Edit, Copy, Rename, Mkdir, Delete, PullDn, Quit), built-in file viewer (mcedit with syntax highlighting for over 80 languages, hex dump mode, and full text editing capabilities), virtual file systems (accessing remote files via FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, and tar/zip archives as if they were local directories), internal viewer with hex and text modes, subshell support (running shell commands in a dedicated terminal panel while keeping mc active), user menu (customizable commands accessible via F2), directory hotlist (bookmarking frequently accessed directories), directory tree view, file find (searching for files by name, content, or size), file compare and diff, batch rename, archive support (browsing and extracting from tar, zip, rar, 7z, and other archive formats without external tools), ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem undelete, and customizable color themes and key bindings.