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This is the version 1.0 of the Midnight Commander, a free Norton
Commander Clone with many usefull features. No matter what the name of
the product is, the Midnight Commander comes with optional Mouse
Support on the Linux Console and mouse support on xterms.

The Midnight Commander is a directory browsing tool with a very close
look and feel to John Socha's Norton Commander for DOS. The Midnight
Commander doesn't have all the bells and whistles of his DOS
counterpart, but was written in much less time, mainly because Emacs,
Linux and the GNU project provide much better programming tools than
any environement under DOS.

There is a mailing list for discussion on enhancing the program,
discussing future directions and announcements, if you want to
suscribe, send mail to:

mc-request@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx

The Midnight commander allows you to browse directories and
perform common file management tasks in two different subdirectories.
To switch directories, you press the Tab key.

Common operations are done by selecting a file or a group of files by
tagging them (using the Ins key or C-t) and then applying an operation
to them (copy, rename, delete).

Pressing Enter will change a directory if you are pointing at a
directory; execute a program if you are pointing an executable program
or if you are pointing at a file that has an extension associated to a
program, run the associated program.

Also, if you have the gpm Linux Mouse Server, the Midnight Commander
will activate it's mouse support. Check the man page for more
information on how this works.

The Midnight Commander comes with a simple menuning facility that
allow you to provide your users with a simple menu for the most common
tasks, check the manual page or take a look at the sample nc.ext file
in the distribution directory.

The Midnight Commander is released under the GNU General Public
License version 2.0 or any later version, a copy of the file is
included with this distribution package.

If you have comments, you can send them to me:

miguel@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx

or if it would benefit more people, then to the mailing list:

midnight@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx

If you find this software usefull, drop us a note and consider making
a donation to the Free Software Foundation (the address of the FSF is
in the COPYING file included in this distribution).

Mini-documentation
------------------

o Use the F-Keys for invoking the commands in the function key bar. If
your terminal doesn't support F-keys, you can use the <ESC digit>
sequence to invoke the corresponding F-digit key.

o Tab changes the current panel.

o All input lines have emacs-like key-bindings (History is accesed
  throught the M-p and M-n keys).

o The panels accept C-n, C-p for browsing the panel (like in emacs).

o Esc-Enter copies the currently selected file name to the input line.

o The find-file feature is still under developement.

o Please read the manual page.

o Read the file TODO for the current projects.

You could access the whole documentation online with the F1 key,
altought, it's not so nice as the groff printed manual page :-)


Where you may obtain the Midnight Commander
-------------------------------------------

The software should be available by anonymous ftp in sunsite.unc.edu
in the directory /pub/Linux/utils/file and in ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx
in the directory /linux/local.

The last alpha versions are available in ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx in the
directory /linux/local.



