The newcomers who have never used a dual pane file manager like Midnight Commander find it hard to believe that these file managers have continued to stay popular with millions of users worldwide. This is because they are very lightweight and can carry out the tasks much faster than the modern file managers.
One benefit of the dual pane file managers is that they make it extremely easy to perform all sorts of file operations between two folders. We can copy, move, and compare the files between any two folders or drives. Imagine, you attach an external hard disk drive and with just one command you can start copying files to it.
File copy operation works faster in native dual pane file managers like Midnight Commander because it does all the work without depending on the Windows’ API functions.
Here is how we can change the skin for the Midnight Commander:
- Launch Midnight Commander by giving the command mc in the command prompt.
- Use your mouse cursor and click on the Options and then Appearance from the menu.
- You will see a drop-down list from which you can select one of the skins. There are many skins available such as Bluemoon, Dark, Darkened, Darkfar, Darkone, Double-Lines, Electric-Blue, Elite Commander, Featured, Featured Plus, Gotar, Julia, MC-andorbit, Nicedark, Seasons, Xoria, Yadt etc.
- From the same interface we can choose to drop shadows in menus and windows.
- Finally click on the OK button to apply the changes.
There are many people who prefer using dual-pane file managers such as Midnight Commander. There are many file managers like Midnight Commander but it is perhaps the one of the few ones that allows the users to change the look and feel of the user interface.
If you have not already been using Midnight Commander, you can download it from https://github.com/adamyg/mcwin32.