MashDark for Midnight Commander

MashDark - finally a good looking mc skin

MashDark provides a modern dark skin for midnight commander - a surprisingly powerfull file manager for commandline that is better than many of visual apps (and you can use it both locally and over ssh on your server). MashDark skin is using couple tricks in comparison with existing mc skins to make it look better (e.g. it styles border lines with different color than the foreground text).
Note: Requires mc version 4.8 or newer. Install with e.g. sudo apt install mc
Note: I hope that mc adds the needed bindings asap so these hacks are not needed in future.

Installation (on Mac and Linux)

Install using GIT

cd ~ ; mkdir -p ~/mashdark
git clone https://github.com/notnout/mashdark.git

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/mc/skins ~/.config/mc
mv ~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini{,.bak}
cp ~/mashdark/mashdark.ini ~/.local/share/mc/skins/mashdark.ini
cp ~/mashdark/filehighlight.ini ~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini

Install Manually

1. Download the latest skin raw file and save it as ~/.local/share/mc/skins/mashdark.ini
2. Download the latest highlight raw file and save it as ~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini

Activate the skin

• Option 1: Choose the skin in the mc UI: Options → Appearance → Skin … and select this skin.
• Option 2: Update your mc settings: edit ~/.config/mc/ini and add skin=mashdark to the [Midnight-Commander] section.

Configure mc for better experience

In your running mc, open Options menu (top of screen) and update following configurations:

Update

cd ~/mashdark
git pull
cp ~/mashdark/mashdark.ini ~/.local/share/mc/skins/mashdark.ini
cp ~/mashdark/filehighlight.ini ~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini

Summary of files

• mashdark.ini
  • This is the skin file.
• filehighlight.ini
  • In this file we add new file type [any] on the bottom. This allows us to style file names differently than the border (I really wish mc would actually provide binding for this), and this then allows us to style the borders with different color than the file names.

Screenshots

References

• see skin viewer/editor https://phplego.github.io/mc/
• colors: https://misc.flogisoft.com/bash/tip_colors_and_formatting
• mc skin params: https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/blob/master/lib/skin/colors.c
• another decent dark skin: https://draculatheme.com/midnight-commander
• tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJOkuaihAek