✦ TECHNICAL BEAUTY ✦
Episode 22: mc – Midnight Commander

1994. A computer science student in Mexico City writes a file manager. Thirty-one years later, it's still running. One pkg install on FreeBSD. One apt install on Debian. Available on anything with a C compiler and a pulse.

Miguel de Icaza built mc as a Norton Commander clone for Unix. Then he co-founded GNOME. Then Mono. Then Xamarin. Then Microsoft acquired it. The man kept rather busy. The file manager quietly kept working.

220,000 lines of C. One binary. 12 MB of RAM. Here's what you get for that:

■ Dual-panel file management
■ Built-in editor (mcedit) with syntax highlighting
■ Built-in viewer (mcview) and diff (mcdiff)
■ FTP, SFTP, SMB: browse remote servers as local directories
■ FISH: file transfer over SSH without SCP on the remote
■ Archive browsing: .tar.gz, .zip, .rpm, .deb as directories

Hardik Pandya

I am generally curious about the concept of legibility of work. Look around in your workplace. You can find documents, messages, presentations, design files. Evidence of people’s work. While it may look like a lot, there is a whole other type of work that is very hard to see. The invisible work.