Id actually say, for super basic stuff the shell commands are faster. And super complicated stuff, shell commands are faster.
But it’s that set of things in the middle of the bell curve that are more complicated that moving a single file and less complicated than running a bash script one liner that strings together 8 commands that these terminal browsers really shine.
Way back when DOSLinux existed the dev provided a Midnight Commander with a fully loaded F2 menu as well as setup associations. Could literally do almost anything and everything from within the file manager. I later moved the configs over to Slackware and pretty much lived in MC to get things done. At some point the MC code reduced the number of entries in the F2 menu so I would have to rebuild it to remove the limitation.
No longer use it like that today but MC is used constantly for file management locally and remotely (mostly to a Kodi box).
Using OFMs (Norton/Volkov/Midnight Commanders and FAR) has always been easier and faster to use than Explorer-style GUI FMs for me.
I only use lf in foot to have a preview of a file (image, text, pdf, ssl cert, everything with sixels, cat or the specific command) without opening or searching for that file first. It’s faster to just use lf to search for a file instead of opening every single one. Other than that I find using xdg-open, cp, mv, rm etc. is faster compared to using any file manager, probably because I never learnt lf’s shortcuts properly. All GUI file managers I know are bound to their DE, eg. dolphin and nautilus, which sucks with a WM.
Regular file managers provide an extremely bad, inefficient user experience. I grew up using Total Commander, so it’s more convenient to me to use something like it.
I use Dired mode in Emacs which I guess also counts as one of those. I find it very convenient because it’s integrated into Emacs. Also, I wouldn’t like to use the mouse for file management.
It saves time when you’re dealing with multiple files with different names. Also, MC is a clone of NC and I’ve been using either of them since early 90s. Habits.
Keybindings compared to shell commands are just better imo compared to shell commands. And keybinds to insert filename/path to commandline (like Esc+Enter in mc or %s in ranger) are more useful to me than autocomplete. Also, multiple panels for running shell commands with arguments from different directories.
Well, for schoolwork, I mount my Google Drive storage onto my ~/googledrive directory (where I store all of my schoolwork) and usually use mc to navigate. Although, I am quite comfortable with the terminal. Its just that I have a lot of subfolders and going to a specific subfolder in mc is usually faster than doing “cd ~/googledrive/subfolder-with-long-path”.
Have you looked into Autojump? It works with bash and zsh and is even faster than using a terminal file manager if you’ve already visited the directory before
I still kinda don’t see the point. Like, typing cd /usr/share/xsessions is not that much slower than j xsessions or however it would work. Also, how does it actually work? What if I visit both $HOME/backgrounds and /usr/share/backgrounds very often?
It’s for when you have really nested directories. It happens especially when you’re working in a file space used by others. I used to have a folder I would often reach called /media/nas/documents/personal/school/foo/bar/foobar2001/projectA
I ended up going back to that project so many times, I could just do j projectA and get there from anywhere. “Why not use a symlink?” I hear you say. Well it’s because I often have to go to projectB or another which was in another really nested dir. Or I needed to jump to another directory which was equally as nested, and only had to use it frequently for like a week or so. Making and deleting symlinks all the time wasn’t practical. Not to mention some software doesn’t properly follow symlinks
For the most part, I just use the terminal directly. However, copying and moving is sometimes easier through a GUI/TUI. Although, personally I’d just use a GUI over the TUI anyway if I needed the functionality.
for example, when you need to copy some files and not the other, you can take your time selecting the specific files you need to copy instead of writing the list of files in one command. When you want to check the contents of a lot of files, you can just open file preview. Etc, basically sometimes CLI isn’t as convenient as TUI/GUI
As a Linux newb, it’s easier than opening a SFTP session next to the terminal as I’m learning the file structure so it’s either that or cd then ls for every damn folder because I don’t know where I am or what’s in this folder vs that. Ranger has been nice for me as I learn.
I use mc for sorting stuff on my NAS. These 15 files go here, these 20 pictures into that directory. Let me have a quick look at that text file, okay I can delete it. Look if I got biggest files, this downloaded file gets renamed, …
I don’t know of any better way to do it, except write super long ‘mv’ commands and have 3 ssh connections open.
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