Setting Up Midnight Commander Double-Click to Open Files

Midnight Commander (abbreviated as mc) is a powerful dual-pane file manager. It runs in terminal environments and provides rich file operation functionality. However, by default, double-clicking (or pressing Enter) on a file in mc may not perform the “open” operation we expect, especially for text files. This article will explain how to configure mc to open files with your preferred editor when double-clicking.

Step 1: Copy Configuration File

First, we need to copy the system default mc extension configuration file (mc.ext.ini) to the user’s personal configuration directory. This ensures our modifications only affect the current user and won’t be overwritten during system updates.

Open terminal and execute the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.config/mc
cp /etc/mc/mc.ext.ini ~/.config/mc/mc.ext.ini

Step 2: Modify Configuration File

Next, we need to edit the configuration file we just copied: ~/.config/mc/mc.ext.ini. You can use any text editor you prefer, such as vim or nano.

vim ~/.config/mc/mc.ext.ini

In this file, you need to find the [Default] configuration section. This section defines default operations for file types that don’t match specific rules. Find the Open= line and modify it to:

# ... file header content ...

[Default]
# ... other default settings ...
Open=%var{EDITOR:vi} %f
# ... rest of file content ...