The Verdict
These are always tricky comparisons, and so much of this boils down to taste. Casual movers and shakers of files will probably not see what all the fuss is about – after all, their standard desktop file managers serve their cut-and-paste ways perfectly well. However, you can take a lot of the pain out of certain chores with a little specialist knowledge.
Given more time (you’re not getting more time, you still have to write 20 per cent of the magazine – Ed) we’d love to delve deeper into Ranger. But there can be only one winner, and that winner is Dolphin. We were really quite reluctant to include it at first, but so impressed (do I have to stop using Krusader?–ed) were we at how well it worked on Ubuntu (which already has the Qt libraries installed, so the footprint is small), we couldn’t ignore it. It’s intuitive enough that beginners can get to grips with it easily, and powerful enough that power users won’t scoff at it.
That’s not to say that the other candidates don’t all excel in their own ways. Ranger is incredibly fast and ideal if you’re looking to level up your terminal skills or terrify users of other Oses. Anything it lacks is more or less by design. It’s just a shame that some of what’s missing requires a steep learning curve (or ape-ing someone else’s code) to rectify. Krusader (though perhaps it’s not seeing as much developer attention as it used to) is powerful while still looking stylish.
4Pane is perhaps our most left-field entry. It’s a one-person effort, and isn’t included in most distros’ repos. In fact we had to update the Arch User Repository (AUR) package to obtain the latest version. But we do recommend you try it out if you’re into barebones, possibly systemd-free set ups.
The venerable Midnight Commander, based on the old Norton Commander from the MS-DOS days, will always hold a special place in the hearts of many. It’s fun to play around with, and you may feel a warm sense of deja vu when using it. But it’s really not worth newbies learning its slightly clunky syntax or messing with its mysterious macros nowadays. Not when there’s so many other clunky syntaxes they could learn to better effect.