midnight commander: Fn keys
• 130 words • 1 min
It turns out it’s quite inconvenient to use Fn keys (F1, F2, …) in Macbooks and in my mechanical keyboard, because I need to press a key combo to do so (Fn + the corresponding function key).
This makes mc unusable from a practical standpoint.
We could
remap
its keys (~/.config/mc/mc.keymap), but this is not portable. The whole point
of learning how to use an universal application like midnight commander is to
stick to defaults as much as possible.
There’s a workaround though!
Instead of pressing F2 (which is effectively Fn + F2), press Esc followed by
2, emacs style. That’s much more ergonomic, because the key presses need not
be simultaneous.
The most frequent combo I’ll use from now on is Esc + 0 (=F10) to quit mc. ∎