How to install Midnight Commander under Mac OS X (the easiest way?)

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog. We have used the information here to install Midnight Commander 4.8.10 under OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and also to install Midnight Commander 4.8.12 under MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and in both cases it was a quick and painless install, and works great!
Midnight Commander
Image by mcastellani via Flickr

Over the many months that this blog has been available, one of the most consistently popular posts has been, How to install Midnight Commander under Mac OS X (the easy way, using Rudix). Unfortunately, at the article notes, the developer of Rudix changed his package and while you can still use Rudix to install Midnight Commander on your Mac, it’s not quite as straightforward an installation as it once was.

This morning I received a comment from reader LouiSe on that article, that read as follows:

What do you think about an up2date universal binary installer package? … http://louise.hu/poet/tag/mc/

Well, if it works I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t have the time to fully test it and since I’m still running Leopard, I have no way to test it under Snow Leopard.  So I’ll just throw it out there and say that if any of you would like to test it (at your own risk, of course) and see how well it works for you, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment.  For the time being, be as careful as you might be with any software from an unknown source.  But if you’re daring enough to give it a try, this might indeed be the easiest way to get the latest version of Midnight Commander onto your Mac.

Since Midnight Commander is free and available for virtually all versions of Linux, learning to use it now will put you a step ahead for the day when you get sick of being seen as a cash cow by Apple, and are ready to move on to a computer that runs Linux.  Ubuntu Linux in particular has finally matured to the point that it is actually usable by non-geeky types, and the vast majority of the software in the Linux world is still free.  I like free software, and I don’t like watching the “spinning beach ball of death” on my Mac Mini, so unless someone gives me a newer one as a gift or something (not likely), the Mac Mini I’m using now is probably going to be the last Mac I will ever own.

5 thoughts on “How to install Midnight Commander under Mac OS X (the easiest way?)

  1. I installed Midnight Commander 4.7.5 OSX from ‘http://louise.hu/poet/?tag=mc’ on my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.7) and so far it seems to work fine. I recently switched from Windows and loved Total Commander, so I’ve been trying to find a good replacement on the Mac. I would rather a GUI version, so I probably won’t be using this as a replacement file manager, unless I get really good at using this inside a terminal window.

    The application is installed into the /usr/local folder and can be accessed by launching /usr/local/bin/mc.

  2. I also installed the LouIse version on OSX 10.7 and it works fine. It is much quicker to download and install than Rudix. Although the page doesn’t make it clear, the linked libraries are included and the package can be installed directly.
    It is so worth having mc running on your mac and once again I thank you for your blog.

  3. NOTICE: All comments above this one were imported from the original Michigan Telephone Blog and may or may not be relevant to the edited article above.

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