The Midnight Commander ¹ looks a bit like the old Norton Commander in the ol’ DOS days. I like it.
In order to be able to look at .pdf.gz files, I removed my ~_.mc_bindings file and replaced it with the following:
shell/.pdf.gz Open=(zxpdf %f &) View=%view{ascii} (TMPFILE=`mktemp` || exit 1; gunzip < %f > $TMPFILE; pdftotext $TMPFILE - ) Include /etc/mc/mc.ext
Note how I include the main file, how I deal with the nasty pdftotext which cannot read a PDF file from stdin.