The soft option perspective (I see plenty of command-line-only solutions here already):
These days, if I’m doing any major navigation, I do it the uncool way and use the GUI file manager bundled with my distro. I have the option enabled to show the “open a terminal at this location” button if I really want to start issuing commands.
If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted. (It was possible to patch Win 9x to behave like earlier Win 3.x so that it stopped at the DOS prompt and didn’t load Windows, which fit my aesthetic at the time.)
These days I prefer my comforts and I sure as heck don’t boot Linux to a command line unless something’s really wrong!
If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted.
Note that this class of file managers (two-pane, Norton Commander-alike) are called “orthodox file managers”.
Ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy.
I use dired in emacs, which does a number of things similarly to an OFM if you have two panes open (though dired is not itself an OFM, and emacs does have Sunrise Commander, which is an OFM).
Generally, I live in bash, but I find that file managers are handy when you want to manually mark a set of files to run an operation on (like, you can’t programmatically identify them).
The soft option perspective (I see plenty of command-line-only solutions here already):
These days, if I’m doing any major navigation, I do it the uncool way and use the GUI file manager bundled with my distro. I have the option enabled to show the “open a terminal at this location” button if I really want to start issuing commands.
If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted. (It was possible to patch Win 9x to behave like earlier Win 3.x so that it stopped at the DOS prompt and didn’t load Windows, which fit my aesthetic at the time.)
These days I prefer my comforts and I sure as heck don’t boot Linux to a command line unless something’s really wrong!
Note that this class of file managers (two-pane, Norton Commander-alike) are called “orthodox file managers”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Orthodox_file_managers
https://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml
My experience is that people out of Eastern Europe in particular seem to have a history of using these.
There are also some non-OFM console file managers, like
ranger, which might appeal to vim-folk:https://github.com/ranger/ranger
I use dired in emacs, which does a number of things similarly to an OFM if you have two panes open (though dired is not itself an OFM, and emacs does have Sunrise Commander, which is an OFM).
Generally, I live in bash, but I find that file managers are handy when you want to manually mark a set of files to run an operation on (like, you can’t programmatically identify them).