Midnight Commander

Introduction
GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a powerful text based file manager for Unix. mc gives an jumpstart for Windows power-users who would like to transition to Unix. It also has several advanced features to keep experienced Unix users happy. mc can run from any Unix terminal. If your terminal can execute vi, you can execute mc to view the midnight commander user interface. Midnight commander supports mouse when you are running it under xterm.

mc supports several virtual file systems (VFS) such as, tarfs to view the content of the several archive files (tar, tgz, bz2, rpm etc.), ftpfs to browse FTP repositories of a remote server, fish to manipulate files on a remote server over ssh, undelfs to recover a deleted file.

Links

 * Official website
 * GNU Midnight Commander User's Guide
 * Download for Windows

Keys
Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of the Control and Meta (ALT or even Compose).

Abbreviations used here:
 * C-chr - Press the key Control + character.
 * M-chr - Press the key Alt + character.
 * M-chr1 chr2 - Press the key Alt + character 1. Release them and press the character 2.

Miscellaneous Keys

 * C-l   :Repaint all the information in the Midnight Commander.
 * C-x c   :Run the  command on a file or on the tagged files.
 * C-x o   :Run the  command on the current file or on the tagged files.
 * C-x l   :Run the  command.
 * C-x i   :Set the other panel display mode to information.
 * C-x q   :Set the other panel display mode to quick view.
 * C-x h   :Run the add directory to hotlist command.
 * M-?   :Executes the Find file command.
 * F10    : Quit

Directory Panels

 * TAB  :Switch between panels.
 * Insert, C-t :To (un)tag files.
 * C-s, M-s   :Start a filename search in the directory listing.
 * M-t   :Show the next display listing mode.
 * C-\ (control-backslash)   :Show the directory hotlist and change to the selected directory.
 * + (plus)   :Used to select (tag) a group of files.
 * - (minus), \ (backslash)   :Used to unselect (untag) a group of files.
 * M-o   :The other panel contents are set to the parent dir of the current dir.
 * M-S-h, M-H   :Displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v' with the mouse.
 * M-c (Quick cd)  :Use the quick cd command if you have full command line and want to  somewhere.
 * C-x d    : Compares the directory panels with each other. The quick method compares only file size and file date. The through method makes a full byte-by-byte compare. The size-only compare method just compares the file sizes and ignore date and time.
 * C-r      : rescan / refresh directory content of the current panel.

Shell Command Line

 * C-o   :Shows you the output of the previous DOS/Shell command.
 * C-Enter, M-Enter :Copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
 * M-p, M-n   :Use these keys to browse through the command history. M-p takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to the next one.
 * M-h   :Displays the history for the current input line.