midnight commander: use default editor

26 Aug, 2025 • 84 words • 1 min • updated 16 Feb, 2026

⚠️ This post is over one year old. It may no longer be up to date or relevant. Opinions may have changed.

When using midnight commander to edit files (with the default F4 keybinding), it defaults to using mcedit(1):

mcedit — Internal file editor of GNU Midnight Commander

This is not great for my muscle memory. I’d rather use my $EDITOR¹.

% GIT_PAGER=cat git show
commit 8ffb7995db8d845ca227a6e5360124bef3680113 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: Thiago Perrotta <{redacted}>
Date:   Tue Aug 26 14:54:48 2025 +0200

    mc: use_internal_edit

diff --git mc/.config/mc/ini mc/.config/mc/ini
index 487267e..13b7643 100644
--- mc/.config/mc/ini
+++ mc/.config/mc/ini
@@ -1,2 +1,3 @@
 [Midnight-Commander]
 skin=modarin256
+use_internal_edit=false

∎

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