Midnight Commander and Cursor Beyond End of Line
Two weeks ago I had a short glance at the Midnight Commander’s Roadmap and found that 4.7.0-pre2 was to be relased end of August. Looking through the tickets what do I see? Cursor beyond end of line in the built-in editor.
I’ve just arrived from the world of those glassed openings on walls, which should illuminate the inside of buildings during the working hours. In this world, I was obviously the victim of evil (and rude) monopolies, that should not be named in polite company. But even these despotic dictatorships have advantages. The oppressed subordinates may enjoy the cursor going beyond the end of line in all text-editors that are worth mentioning (step forward, Far-manager).
Having arrived in the free world, I received one nasty shock after another every time I wanted to go up two lines to the same position in text-editors. If the line in between was shorter or empty, the cursor endeavoured to jump back and stay there. Just like… erm… I have to say it, Notepad.
Gedit is like that. Emacs is like that. Midnight Commander’s editor is like that. Or has been, until now.
Having returned from a week long cycling trip from the Italian Alps, my life has become completely meaningless, at least in the eye of the Master Programmer, as in the absence of computers I had to abstain from programming for more than the official limit of 3 days. To restore my form, the first thing was to download mc-4.7.0-pre2.
Binaries are not provided, only sources, so I had to configure the makefile and compile it. The configure script disliked my Ubuntu-installation in a marked manner. It raised its eyebrows, pursed its lips and refused to produce any usable makefile. Some obscure gmodule-2.0 was missing. But after a considerable amount of googling, synaptic-package-managing and trying I had a running MC with the editor allowing the cursor to go beyond the end of line.
For the benefit of the general public I now kindly publish the major milestones that helped me achieve this majestic goal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev sudo apt-get install libslang2-dev sudo apt-get install gettext sudo apt-get install libtool ./autogen.sh ./configure --with-samba make sudo make install
I was wondering what good is to be had from going beyond ends of line?
But now you know