Midnight Commander

Midnight Commander (mc)

The mc Dracula theme comes in two flavors, an 8/16 color option (dracula.ini) and a 256 color option (dracula256.ini). The 8/16 color version is entirely dependent on having installed the relevant dracula theme for your terminal too as it uses the color palette fixed by your terminal.

See iTerm and Gnome Terminal themes for example.

The 256 color version can be used independently of any terminal color scheme but is not as true to the Dracula theme.

Install using Git

If you are a git user, you can install the theme and keep up to date by cloning the repo:

# clone anywhere you like, but adjust paths as needed
mkdir ~/dracula-theme && cd ~/dracula-theme
git clone https://github.com/dracula/midnight-commander.git

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/mc/skins && cd ~/.local/share/mc/skins
ln -s ~/dracula-theme/midnight-commander/skins/dracula.ini
ln -s ~/dracula-theme/midnight-commander/skins/dracula256.ini

Install manually

For 8/16 colors; download the latest raw file and save it as ~/.local/share/mc/skins/dracula.ini

For 256 colors; download the latest raw file and save it as ~/.local/share/mc/skins/dracula256.ini

Activating theme

Update your mc settings..

Option 1: edit ~/.config/mc/ini and add skin=dracula to the [Midnight-Commander] section..

[Midnight-Commander]
# for 8/16 color..
skin=dracula
# for 256 color..
skin=dracula256

Option 2: choose the skin through the mc UI with F9 > Options > Appearance

Option 3 (for version 4.8.11 and below): edit ~/.bashrc and add to the end of file alias mc='mc -S ~/.local/mc/skins/dracula.ini'

# for 8/16 color..
echo "alias mc='mc -S ~/.local/mc/skins/dracula.ini'" >> ~/.bashrc
# for 256 color..
echo "alias mc='mc -S ~/.local/mc/skins/dracula256.ini'" >> ~/.bashrc

Boom! It's working