Installing Midnight Commander 4.7 on Mac OS X
2 Feb2010

Another short post just to remember the procedure for the next time I’ll be setting up a new mac. For those of my readers who do not know what Midnight Commander (aka mc) is, GNU Midnight Commander is a visual file manager, created under a heavy influence of Norton Commander file manager from dark DOS ages 🙂 For more information, you can visit their web site. Now, get to the installation topic itself.

To install mc on a Mac OS X machine, you need macports installed and then first thing you’ll need to do is to install some prerequisite libraries:

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$ sudo port install libiconv slang2

Next thing, download the sources from their web site and unpack them. When the sources are ready, you can configure the build:

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$ ./configure \
        --prefix=/opt/mc \
        --with-screen=slang \
        --enable-extcharset \
        --enable-charset \
        --with-libiconv-prefix=/opt/local \
        --with-slang-includes=/opt/local/include \
        --with-slang-libs=/opt/local/lib

Then, normal GNU-style build and install procedure:

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$ make
........
$ sudo make install

And the last thing would be to add /opt/mc/bin to your PATH environment variable.