mc over ssh -- how to make the Return keypress work for pictures, videos and pdfs?

[emk2203]

I am using Midnight Commander over ssh for maintenance and cleanup of my home servers. Since it's a ssh connection, the automatic opening of images, videos and pdfs to examine these files doesn't work.

I can open the three filetypes over ssh without problems when using timg image, video and pdf TUI viewer. I am using KDE's Konsole, which supports sixel- and kitty v2 graphics.

When I try to combine timg and mc, I can't get it to work. Pressing ⏎ on a highlighted file does nothing. What would be the recommended way to do this?

[ossilator]

you need to enable x11 forwarding in ssh.

[emk2203]

I use Wayland. Also, I want to do this in the terminal. Using timg standalone is painless and a huge step over ssh forwarding. Using GUI apps here shouldn't be the solution. This should be strictly a terminal-centric workflow.

[ossilator]

fair enough.

does the automatic opening of these file types work on the desktop you ssh from?

[emk2203]

Is there some guide or example available on how to replace these file types without breaking the logic of the shell scripts in /usr/lib/mc/ext.d, like image.sh? I also don't want to edit files in /usr/lib directly; is there a precedence so I can put this somewhere in /home/$USER or /usr/local/lib?

It's easy to edit the entries from the menu in the mc.ext.ini file, but difficult to see what changes to make in there without breaking anything. There's quite a lot of interdependencies in there (the shell scripts act for whole groups of files). When I google 'edit midnight commander extension file', I only get links on how to use the mc editor or how to edit files with mc.

A link to some examples would be great.

[ossilator]

i don't have good answers, but the questions certainly remind me of #2118.

[olegturzhanskii]

I do this from the other direction, which sidesteps the graphics problem entirely.

Run mc on your own machine and open the server in a panel with cd sftp://user@host/path.

Pressing Enter or F3 on a file then runs your local viewer against it, so timg is drawing in the Konsole it is already running in and sixel works normally.

The server needs nothing beyond SSH for this, which also means timg and the graphics support only have to exist on one machine.

One thing to expect: the file is fetched before the viewer opens, so it is quick for images and PDFs and noticeable for a large video.

Also worth checking that your build has sftp support, since it is a compile-time option — mc --version lists libssh2 when it does.