duguyue100/midnight-captain: Inspired by Midnight Commander, tailored to my taste. · GitHub

Midnight Commander has always been my favorite terminal file manager.
It’s feature-rich, fast, and actually tries to be a file manager compared to modern alternatives.
However, there are quite some features that I never used, and I couldn’t configure a Vim bindings that works well for me.

With OpenCode, I can finally make my own terminal file manager.
I borrowed the main design concepts from Midnight Commander and some behavior from NVim-Tree file explorer.

I hope you would like it, at least I do. Since this project is entirely vibe-coded, so I’m not going to accept PR from the community, but feel free to open issues and fork it.

• Dual pane — navigate two directories side by side, copy/move between them
• Tree expand — expand/collapse directories inline with l/h, nerd font icons
• Vim keybindings — j/k/h/l, gg/G, ctrl+d/ctrl+u
• Visual selection — select ranges with V, operate on multiple files at once
• File operations — copy, cut, paste, delete (with confirmation), rename
• Smart create — a creates a file or directory (trailing / = dir, nested paths supported)
• Fuzzy search — space opens fuzzy search in current dir; :find searches recursively
• Command palette — : opens a command prompt for power-user actions
• Goto — :goto with live directory listing, tab-complete, and ~ expansion
• SSH — browse and operate on remote servers over SFTP via :ssh user@host
• Nerd font icons — file type icons, open/closed folder glyphs
• TokyoNight theme — easy on the eyes

• A terminal with Nerd Fonts support (recommended: JetBrainsMono Nerd Font, FiraCode Nerd Font)
• macOS or Linux

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/duguyue100/midnight-captain/main/install.sh | bash

Downloads the correct pre-built binary for your OS and architecture from the latest GitHub Release and places it at ~/.local/bin/mc. If ~/.local/bin is not in your $PATH, the installer will tell you what to add.

Requires Go 1.22+.

git clone https://github.com/duguyue100/midnight-captain
cd midnight-captain
./install.sh --local-build

Runs make build and copies bin/mc to ~/.local/bin/mc.

make build   # binary at bin/mc
./bin/mc

Launches in the current directory with dual panes.

Open with :, then type a command.