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Add to SafariWhen comparing Midnight Commander vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Midnight Commander for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for UNIX-like systems?” Midnight Commander is ranked 6th while Spacemacs is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Midnight Commander is:
Midnight commander uses the full screen of the terminal in a very efficient way. It displays two panels for files horizontally. On the bottom it has the most useful commands with their corresponding key attached. All of this makes for a very intuitive interface both for beginners and experienced users.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitive interface
Midnight commander uses the full screen of the terminal in a very efficient way. It displays two panels for files horizontally. On the bottom it has the most useful commands with their corresponding key attached. All of this makes for a very intuitive interface both for beginners and experienced users.
Pro Can be run in the terminal
Being a terminal application means that it's suited for people who spend most of their time on the terminal because they don't have to switch windows in order to open their file manager. It also means that they can use it both locally and remotely.
Pro Easy to use
Midnight commander is easy and intuitive to use. The most common commands are displayed in the bottom (move, copy, paste, delete, edit, view, make directory). Files can be selected with the arrow keys which move the cursor through them. The Enter key goes down in a directory. To move the focus between two panels the tab key is used.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Stable
Pro Often available in default repository
and hence easy to install by usually package manager.
Pro Lynx-like motion
Cursor+left to go to parent directory, cursor+right to go into child directory.
Pro Well-presented
Pro Preconfigured emacs distro
Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.
Pro VIM Keybindings with EMACS ecosystem
EMACS ecosystem and language support is best in show. The EMACS is a great IDE that was in search of a good text editor. Spacemacs makes EMACS have a good text editor.
Cons
Con File viewer: searching can be quite cumbersome
Especially searching next or previous.
Con No directory bookmarks
Con No easy way to change colors matching certain files
There probably is a possibility, but it is not easy.
Con Quirky and hard to remember shortcuts
E.g. when trying to take the current directory's path to the command line.
Con Lacks drag and drop feature
With midnight commander you cannot drag and drop files to move them around. Instead, you have to do the necessary actions in order to move files around (cut and paste or copy and delete).
Con Can only be run in the terminal
MC lacks a standalone GUI option.
Con Emacs is slow
Emacs is single threaded which means that if you enable all the great features you might be used to from Vim, it will run noticeably slower which can be quite frustrating at times. There are efforts at a concurrent Emacs, but they don't seem to be going anywhere.
