Midnight Commander Themes

slack_ · 12-29-2013, 12:02 AM

Hello. I've recently decided to try out midnight commander. I've never used it before but I like the idea of command line file management(aside from cp, mv, ls, rm, and whathaveyou). I'm having a rather frustrating problem though. I can't edit the colors. There seems to be pathetically little in the way of documentation on the internet regarding mc. I have no ~/.mc folder, but I do have a ~/.config/mc folder. Located in there is a default ini as well as a panels.ini. I created a .mc folder in my home directory and I've tried copying various themes from /usr/share/mc/skins to both ~/.config/mc as well as ~/.mc. I am not sure if it has anything to do with the fact that I'm running as root.

Yes yes I know running as root is highly unrecommended and I could break my system and blah blah blah. I've been running as root for quite awhile now and I'm not scared of breaking my system.

Anyway, I hope someone here has had the same problem as I, because I've searched google as well as Arch Linux forums, and there is no wiki on midnight commander in the ArchWiki. Thanks for reading.

TobiSGD · 12-29-2013, 12:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by slack_

Yes yes I know running as root is highly unrecommended and I could break my system and blah blah blah. I've been running as root for quite awhile now and I'm not scared of breaking my system.

No one of us cares if you break your system because you think running as root is a good idea. But we care about being attacked from your system that is wide open to any script kiddie out there.

Anyways, to use a theme you have not only to copy it to your machine, but also choose the theme in mc's INI-file: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/0...ght-commander/

slack_ · 12-29-2013, 11:55 AM

So there isn't a way to just modify the default.ini after copying it to ~/.mc/ini? Also sorry, didn't mean to come off as rude, I'm just used to people ignoring the point of the post and shouting reasons why running as root is a bad idea at me as if I didn't know. Thanks for replying.

TobiSGD · 12-29-2013, 01:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by slack_

So there isn't a way to just modify the default.ini after copying it to ~/.mc/ini?

Yes, there is. I don't run mc (I prefer Ranger, another CLI file-manager), so I had to try what happens when you run the linked script. It does nothing more than replacing the (by default empty) line base-color= with the entries it finds in the theme file.
So a theme file that looks like this:

Code:

BASE_COLOR=gray,black                                                                                  
NORMAL=white,black                                                                                     
MENU=yellow,gray                                                                                       
VIEWUNDERLINE=black,green                                                                              
EDITNORMAL=white,black                                                                                 
EDITMARKED=black,white                                                                                 
MENUHOT=red,gray                                                                                       
DIRECTORY=yellow,gray                                                                                  
EXECUTABLE=brightgreen,gray                                                                            
DEVICE=magenta,gray                                                                                    
INPUT=yellow,gray                                                                                      
LINK=brightcyan,gray                                                                                   
STALLEDLINK=white,gray                                                                                 
REVERSE=brightmagenta,black                                                                            
SELECTED=black,brown                                                                                   
MARKED=black,lightgray                                                                                 
MARKSELECT=black,yellow

will look in the ini-file like this

Code:

base_color=gray,black:normal=white,black:selected=black,brown:marked=black,lightgray:markselect=black,yellow:errors=white,red:menu=yellow,gray:reverse=brightmagenta,black:dnormal=black,lightgray:dfocus=black,cyan:dhotnormal=blue,lightgray:dhotfocus=blue,cyan:viewunderline=black,green:menuhot=red,gray:menusel=white,black:menuhotsel=yellow,black:helpnormal=black,lightgray:helpitalic=red,lightgray:helpbold=blue,lightgray:helplink=black,cyan:helpslink=yellow,blue:gauge=white,black:input=yellow,gray:directory=yellow,gray:executable=brightgreen,gray:link=brightcyan,gray:stalelink=brightred,blue:device=magenta,gray:core=red,blue:special=black,blue:editnormal=white,black:editbold=yellow,blue:editmarked=black,white:errdhotnormal=yellow,red:errdhotfocus=yellow,lightgray

It seems that the script also inserts some default values if they are not present in the theme-file.
If you download the archive with script and theme-files and look at them they are pretty self explanatory.

slack_ · 12-29-2013, 04:14 PM

There's obviously a deeper problem here. I must have done something wrong when copying files, because I tried the script and no changes take effect. I've made sure mc isn't running either. I also tried a couple different themes. Not really getting why it's not working, and it's not like I'm getting an helpful errors to post here either. I'm willing to bet it's a simple and embarrasing mistake.

TobiSGD · 12-29-2013, 06:20 PM

Open the script and make sure that the variable MCINI points to the correct location (for example ~/.config/mc/ini), but you should get an error message if it does not.
Also, check that you run the script as the same user as you are running mc with.

slack_ · 12-29-2013, 09:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

Open the script and make sure that the variable MCINI points to the correct location

That did it. Thanks a bunch.