alt.hn

4/11/2026 at 11:37:43 PM

Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager

 https://github.com/duguyue100/midnight-captain

by duguyue100

4/12/2026 at 2:14:32 AM

I don't think the level of reliability necessary for a file manager is achievable with vibe coding. This is an area where small bugs can cause immediate and catastrophic data loss.

If you're shopping for a file manager, I recommend avoiding any project that incorporates a significant amount of LLM-generated code. Maybe in theory it could be reviewed as thoroughly as handwritten code; in practice that never happens.

by konmok

4/12/2026 at 5:41:44 AM

It's not the vibe coding, it's the lack of tests

by nprateem

4/12/2026 at 6:46:03 AM

And I think human written tests at that. If the LLM is blind to the failure mode X, does it know to reliably write a test to evaluate the behavior of X?

by alex43578

4/12/2026 at 6:45:20 AM

wow. there are actually no tests here.

by perbu

4/12/2026 at 6:43:49 AM

I think it is interesting that these pieces of software are now being inspired by Midnight Commander and are being built by people who never worked with or experiences the original, Norton Commander.

by perbu

4/12/2026 at 8:19:57 AM

Author here. Haha, thanks for all the feedback! I don't even want to pretend this is production-ready. When I vibe-coded this, the only user I had in mind was me. And I have to live with the consequence of unreliability.

I recently found that writing personal software through a coding agent is a fairly interesting endeavour. It's like I'm paying to get the software I need in the form of tokens.

by duguyue100

4/12/2026 at 2:50:20 AM

“With opencode I can” closes tab

by muppetman

4/12/2026 at 10:10:00 AM

Is anti-AI sentiment somehow exempt from the "shallow dismissals" rule?

by vova_hn2

4/12/2026 at 4:26:26 AM

I was mildly excited clicking the link and then I saw that ... I guess this is the shape of things to come.

by dinkumthinkum

4/12/2026 at 5:15:08 AM

If you're shopping for a file manager, I'd recommend "yazi", which was a new, yet practical experience for me.

by manbash

4/12/2026 at 9:49:36 AM

Tried yazi this week and it indeed feels nice, currently trying to maybe move over from Total Commander to yet to have same file manager across OSes.

Some aspects are still not completely ironed out, though. For example, today I discovered that there's no reliable exit hook and plugins have to override hotkeys and resort to various hacks. I had to patch a session saving extension so it kills mpv-based music preview plugin after yazi quits with "q". Kinda rough experience, but at least manageable with plugins in Lua.

by Klaster_1

4/12/2026 at 7:49:14 AM

yazi is great, I’ve had it around for a while… integrates well with neovim and other shell tools.

by deafpolygon

4/12/2026 at 9:25:38 AM

> Inspired by Midnight Commander

Norton Commander.

Know and respect your elders.

by eps

4/12/2026 at 9:34:15 AM

It's perfectly valid to be second- and further-level inspired and even dislike/reject some aspects of the predecessors.

by ZoomZoomZoom

4/12/2026 at 2:12:42 AM

The AGENTS.md is hilarious! I like the caveman mode and classical mode seems.. interesting!

by daoistmonk

4/12/2026 at 4:00:20 AM

Interesting that in Chinese, classical writing is associated with terseness. That definitely wouldn't work that way in other languages I know.

by comboy

4/12/2026 at 6:42:06 AM

Newspaper headlines?

by rjh29

4/12/2026 at 8:31:51 AM

Just saying, I simply copied from https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Beyond the cost of tokens, I found it's very good at doing more with a limited context window before OpenCode hits context compaction.

by duguyue100

4/12/2026 at 7:20:51 AM

> : opens a command prompt for power-user actions

Vibe coded or not, that's what puts me off from most nc/dn/mc reimplementations.

If you can't reach the command line by just typing the command, what's the point?

At least on this one you don't have to mouse click somewhere...

by nottorp

4/12/2026 at 9:27:18 AM

Isn't this the point if TUI/GUI that you don't have to? Common things should be shortcutted, some accessible from menus for discoverability.

Command entering is just one if the "modes", and not necessarily the default one.

If shortcuts are limited to special keys and combos, this frees plane input for commands, but I personally prefer list filtering by default.

by ZoomZoomZoom

4/12/2026 at 9:39:49 AM

> Isn't this the point if TUI/GUI that you don't have to?

No TUI/GUI can do everything a unix command prompt can do, can they?

I don't know what your usage pattern is, but I keep mc open in a few terminals all the time, and just run commands in mc's shell when I need them. I suppose that if you only run the file manager when you need to manage files, your point of view makes sense.

by nottorp

4/12/2026 at 10:02:45 AM

Yeah, I don't generally live in MC to the same extent I do in DC when I'm on Windows.

I rarely do anything besides the basics (F5/F6) when managing files in MC, and for advanced stuff, like using rsync/rclone for moving files, I mostly use the usermenu.

by ZoomZoomZoom

4/12/2026 at 10:08:48 AM

I am aware of the usermenu's existence, but it feels faster to just type. Most of my use cases are just one file though.

by nottorp

4/12/2026 at 12:20:38 AM

cool let me try it. and 'ill give you my feedback

by alonsovm

4/11/2026 at 11:37:43 PM

Midnight Commander has always been my favorite terminal file manager. It's feature-rich, fast, and actually tries to be a file manager compared to modern alternatives. However, there are quite some features that I never used, and I couldn't configure a Vim bindings that works well for me.

With OpenCode, I can finally make my own terminal file manager. I borrowed the main design concepts from Midnight Commander and some behavior from NVim-Tree file explorer.

I hope you would like it, at least I do. Since this project is entirely vibe-coded, so I'm not going to accept PR from the community, but feel free to open issues and fork it.

by duguyue100

4/12/2026 at 12:47:18 AM

still haven't found anything that replaces mc for me. the 2-pane layout is basically muscle memory at this point. everything modern just feels way too bloated or slow. mc is great but customizing the bindings is a total headache tbh. really like the idea of better vim integration here. curious how it handles performance on large directories with 10k+ files? giving it a spin...

by vovanidze

4/12/2026 at 7:16:19 AM

I'm using fman, which is like a lightweight graphical alternative to mc.

by buster