Midnight commander

midnight commander is a text mode file browser, one of many interrelated clones you can trace back to norton commander.

Very slow start

Possibilities:

• You're starting it in a directory that has a lot of entries

Or the other panel is. In some cases giving it directories that do not have a lot, e.g. mc . ., would help

• Your host lookup setup is flawed (and this isn't the only thing affected)

• It's trying to interact with X

Diagnosis: doing a strace mc will show it hangs after mentioning MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 (or something else X related) until a timeout some seconds later

If you don't care about X, clearing DISPLAY would be a quick fix. I added the following to my bashrc:

alias mc="DISPLAY= mc"

Your own file handlers

https://softpanorama.org/OFM/MC/extension_menu.shtml