Briefly: Midnight Commander 6 has been released — a fork of the classic file manager with panel plugins (Docker, S3, Git, SFTP), an integrated terminal, and sudo-editing. We analyze what’s new and whether it’s worth installing on a production server.
For many of us, mc is muscle memory: SSH into a server, click through two panels, F5 to copy, F4 to tweak a config. The classic Midnight Commander hardly changed for decades, and on August 3 a new fork, Midnight Commander 6, arrived — a fork that brings in 2026-era features to the familiar two-pane layout: panel plugins, built-in terminal, JSON/YAML syntax highlighting, and sudo editing. For those who live in the terminal on their VPS and home servers, this is worth a closer look.
The main feature: panel plugins
The core novelty of the six is the panel plugins. The idea is simple, but almost revolutionary for a file manager: MC’s panels can now show content from external services, not just local and FTP directories, and you navigate them with the arrow keys as if they were ordinary folders. Out of the box, it supports:
- SFTP/FTP/FTPS and Samba resources;
- Git repositories — navigation through the tree right in the panel;
- Docker and Kubernetes — view containers/pods as a file system;
- S3 storage and MongoDB.
For our audience this is literal: connect to a server, open local files in one panel, open an S3 bucket or the contents of a docker container in another, and move files between them without a single aws s3 cp or docker cp command. A file manager as a single interface to infrastructure — a long-awaited idea.
What else did they add
mcterm — built-in PTY terminal with full ANSI/VT support. Previously, running interactive programs (vim, htop, even clear) from MC worked poorly; now you can run them inside MC.
mcedit — the integrated editor now has extended Undo/Redo and, especially for servers, sudo-edited editing without leaving MC or juggling temporary copies.
mcview — the viewer now understands JSON, YAML, XML with syntax highlighting, as well as Markdown and ANSI. For someone who edits dozens of configs daily, readable YAML right in the viewer is a small but daily joy.
A sober assessment: is it worth rushing to install
Here’s an honest take, because details matter. MC 6 is a fork of GNU Midnight Commander (based on version 4.8.33), maintained by Ilya Maslakov; it lives in its own repository ilia-maslakov/mcdev, not in the official MC upstream. On Habra and in discussions it’s already labeled as “a file manager suspiciously similar to Midnight Commander” — community sentiment is still cautious.
What this means in practice:
- It is not an official continuation of MC; the project has its own trajectory, pace, and support risks;
- Installing the fresh fork on a production server with a single command is not advisable — first test in a staging environment or container;
- Install from official project packages for your system (DEB, RPM, pkg.tar.zst, Gentoo available), not from random builds;
- license is GPLv3+, source code is open, so you can inspect what’s inside.
In short: the idea is great and the features are genuinely useful, but this is a young fork, not an update of “the same” MC from your distribution’s repos. Treat it accordingly.
What to do
- Want to try it — spin up a test VM or container, install the project’s release package for your OS (the current tag at release was
v6.0.3). - Check the plugins you need for your tasks: SFTP, Docker, S3 — that’s the point of the switch.
- Don’t rush on production. The familiar mc from the distro repo hasn’t disappeared; let the fork settle first.
- Keep an eye on community feedback — the fate of forks is unpredictable, and you’ll want to see if it gains enough users.
Sources
Are you still living in mc on servers — or have you long since moved to ranger/yazi/lf? And would you want plugins for Docker and S3 right in the panels, or is this already a Swiss Army knife that’s easier to replace with a couple of separate tools?