Who are these for? People who use the terminal but don’t like running shell commands?
OK sorry for throwing shade. If you use one of these, honestly, what features do you use that make it worthwhile?
It’s really annoying navigating a filesystem in the shell.
Either you remember exactly where a file is located, have a reference, or you’re going to be doing a lot of “ls, cd, ls, cd”.
That’s not necessarily true. There are programs/plugins like scd in zshell which make your life easier.
https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/plugins/scd/README.md
Most systems I interface with are remote or headless. Forwarding X is annoying as fuck and to be avoided at all cost, so the more I can do though the terminal, the better.
PS: I’m also old enough to have been a regular user of Norton Commander, the application MC (Midnight Commander) is based on (inspired by).
EDIT: Norton Commander was a DOS app and so useful that it prompted Midnight Commander, one of the earliest applications developed for Linux. So MC kind of pre-dates Linux in a way.
They are faster and more efficient for most basic file operations.
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.
