Extensibility

Can their out-of-the-box functionality be augmented?

Since it’s KDE’S flagship file manager, Dolphin is meant to do everything it needs to without modification. Still, you can find various service menus in the KDE store, which are easy enough to install. Common applications will integrate nicely anyway, and lots of what the store extension services do would be better done from the servicing application. Still, each to their own. Likewise, there are a few add-ons for Krusader in the store, but most of them seemed to be rather old.

Midnight Commander doesn’t have much in the way of easy extensions. But you can program your own macros using variables and even prompt for user input. There’s a so-called extension file, which you can customise in the .config/mc directory, but its purpose is to define custom applications for specific file types. If you really want to, you can add the relevant Python tools (Boto) and have Midnight Commander connect to Amazon’s S3 storage service. You could also write your own scripts for external filesystems. There’s a directory full of examples, but again, some of them are a bit antiquated. 4Pane enables you to write your own scriptlets to add to the Tools menu, but not much else. Ranger is written in Python, and can be extended by whatever Python scripting you can conjure up. There are loads of examples to get you started, including deep search (it’s missing by design, which hurts its score below). You could remedy its inability to talk to network shares by adding a script which calls, for example, sshfs or smbclient . There’s a reference file showing the Python source for its built-in commands, which you can use to inspire your own custom efforts (which go in a different file).