gmc (GNOME Midnight Commander)
More info
- Creator
- Miguel de Icaza and others
- Released
- Type
- File manager
- License
- GPL
- Successor
- Nautilus
GNOME 1's file manager and desktop icons: the text-mode Midnight Commander with a GTK window bolted on, built in a hurry and replaced as soon as anyone could.
Miguel de Icaza had written Midnight Commander in 1994, a two-pane Norton Commander clone for the terminal, and when he started GNOME in 1997 it was what he had. gmc was the same code base with a graphical GTK shell: icon and list views of directories, one icon per file on the desktop, drag and drop to and from it, and MIME types deciding which program a double-click launched. In GNOME 1.0 in 1999 it was gmc that put anything on the desktop at all; without it GNOME was a panel and a window manager.
Nobody was happy with it, its authors included. The ties to the terminal program made the code hard to move forward, and GNOME's answer was to let Eazel build Nautilus from scratch, which took over in GNOME 1.4 in 2001. gmc then vanished from Midnight Commander's source tree, which carried on as a pure terminal program and is still alive. KDE had kfm in the same role in the same years, with much the same reputation.