The portage system lists MC as having xfree as a dependancy, however, it is possible to compile MC as a console based file-explorer and editor without X. I just downloaded the source independently of the ebuild, and compiled it myself, without the large xfree package installed. Im not familiar with it, but I think MC is also a Gnome-based file-explorer, which is where this dependance came from. If i try to compile the mc ebuild and ignore the dependancy, i get an error "libSM.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" by downloading and installing mc on my own, it works just fine.
taken from the mc ebuild: X? ( virtual/x11 )" use X && myconf="${myconf} --with-tm-x-support" use X || myconf="${myconf} --without-tm-x-support" so just: export USE="-X" emerge gnome-extra/mc
