Midnight Commander Configuration

By default when exiting Midnight Commander bash returns to the directory Midnight Commander was started from, instead of the last open directory. Midnight Commander has a wrapper script which can be used by adding

source /usr/lib/mc/mc.sh

to your

~/.bashrc

Useful Commands are

Copy (to second pane) : F5
Move (to second pane) : F6
Exit Midnight Commander : F10
Tab : Move to second pane
User menu (compress, uncompress) : F8

Midnight Commander Key Bindings

To change the default key bindings for Midnight commander on Arch Linux. From the man pages :

  Redefine hotkey bindings

Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file).  Initially, Mignight    Commander creates key bindings using keymap defined in the source code. Then,  two  files  /usr/share/mc/mc.keymap  and  /etc/mc/mc.keymap are loaded always, sequentially reassigned key bindings defined earlier.  User-defined keymap-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one found):

              1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap>
              2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
              3) Parameter keymap in section [Midnight-Commander] of config file.
              4) File ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap

Thus we can just

$ cp /etc/mc/mc.default.keymap ~/.config/mc/mc.keymap 

Then edit the keymap file as required. Its useful to save the file within a repository such as git when complete.

Ansible Roles variables that differ between OS

Using Ansible roles you may wish to set the package and service name per OS. Within roles we can import them within tasks from the appropriate vars.

tasks/main.yml

- name: Obtain OS Specific Variables
  include_vars: "{{ item }}"
  with_first_found:
    - "../vars/{{ ansible_distribution }}-{{ ansible_distribution_version }}.yml"
    - "../vars/{{ ansible_distribution }}.yml"
    - "../vars/{{ ansible_os_family }}.yml"
    - "../vars/defaults.yml"

Then you can set values within /vars as appropriate e.g. Apache

vars/default.yml

apache_package_name: apache2
apache_service_name: apache2

/vars/RedHat.yml

apache_package_name: httpd
apache_service_name: httpd

/vars/Debian.yml

apache_package_name: apache2
apache_service_name: apache2