4.2.5 Editor in MC

The internal editor has an interesting cut-and-paste scheme. Pressing F3 marks the start of a selection, a second F3 marks the end of selection and highlights the selection. Then you can move your cursor. If you press F6, the selected area will be moved to the cursor location. If you press F5, the selected area will be copied and inserted at the cursor location. F2 will save the file. F10 will get you out. Most cursor keys work intuitively.

This editor can be directly started on a file:

     $ mc -e filename_to_edit
     $ mcedit filename_to_edit

This is not a multi-window editor, but one can use multiple Linux consoles to achieve the same effect. To copy between windows, use Alt-Fn keys to switch virtual consoles and use "File->Insert file" or "File->Copy to file" to move a portion of a file to another file.

This internal editor can be replaced with any external editor of choice.

Also, many programs use environment variables EDITOR or VISUAL to decide which editor to use. If you are uncomfortable with vim, set these to mcedit by adding these lines to ~/.bashrc:

     ...
     export EDITOR=mcedit
     export VISUAL=mcedit
     ...

I do recommend setting these to vim if possible. Getting used to vim commands is the right thing to do, since Vi-editor is always there in the Linux/Unix world. [ 15]