After five months of development, The release of version 4.8.33 of Midnight Commander has been announced, a file manager for the console that has been in evolution since 1994. New features in this version of Midnight Commander 4.8.33 include the addition of a VFS module, the transition from the base to the C99 standard, as well as support for ksh variants such as subshell and better compatibility with Fish 4.0, among other things.
For those who are not familiar with this file manager, it is based on Norton Commander. This software offers a two-panel interface and has several advanced features, such as mouse support, an integrated file viewer and a text editor with syntax highlighting. It also allows navigation within compressed files, packages and network storages and much more.
Main news in Midnight Commander 4.8.33
In this new version of Midnight Commander 4.8.33 A VFS module has been incorporated that allows exploring the contents of torrent files, as well as improvements to sound playback, image display, and video playback in non-graphical sessions using console drivers. Additionally, Support for Rust Box package format and ipk files from OpenEmbedded within the mc.ext.ini configuration file.
As for the code base, now The use of elements from the C99 standard is permitted, which has led to the requirement of a C99-compatible compiler and an Automake version of at least 1.14. Integration with different shell environments has also been improved, including support for ksh variants such as subshell and better compatibility with Fish 4.0, which was recently rewritten in Rust.
For advanced users, the following has been incorporated: Possibility of defining arrays of values ​​in the PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable, while those using vim will find a new keymapping file designed to provide keybindings similar to those in that editor. For FreeBSD, support for TERM=xterm-clear has now been added.
Another relevant change is the ability to choose the web browser that will open when viewing HTML files, with automatic detection of options such as Firefox, Konqueror, Opera and Chromium. In addition, the project's continuous integration has migrated from Travis to GitHub Actions to streamline the development flow.
Finally, Various bugs have been fixed, including a bug in mcedit that caused crashes when creating new files, as well as problems with the VFS virtual filesystem: in tar, a double freeing of memory was removed, and in sftpfs, an improper access to memory after it had been freed was fixed.
If you are interested in knowing more about it About the release of this new version, you can check the details in the original announcement. The link is this.
How to install Midnight Commander on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install Midnight Commander on their system, you can do so by following the instructions we share below. To install the new version, one method is by compiling the source code. This they can get it from the following link and the compilation is with the commands:
./configure make make install
While for those who prefer to make use of already compiled packages, they can install the new version by typing the following commands, depending on the Linux distribution they are using.
Those who use Debian, Ubuntu or any of the derivatives From this, in a terminal you will type the following as appropriate. Only for Ubuntu and derivatives, must inhabit the universe repository:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
Now for anyone, they can install the application with:
sudo apt install mc
For those who use Arch Linux or some derivative of it:
sudo pacman -S mc
In the case of Fedora, RHEL, CentOS or derivatives:
sudo dnf install mc
While for those who are Guix users, they can perform the installation by typing the following command:
guix install mc
Finally, para OpenSUSE:
sudo zypper in mc