+1 to Dolphin. I use it all the time, especially in gnome. Why? i like the little plus symbols for highlighting files when they're not all in a nice neat square. I also like how when you drag and drop a file in Dolphin, you get the option to, copy, move, or create a symlink. Konqueror also has these features and i personally like it better as a file manager, but i think konqueror as a web browser is horrible, and as a gnome user, i'd rather bring in just a file manager then, a swis army knife file manger web browser combo. And for these reason, i use Dolphin.

A additional note that's just come to mind, i also like how Dolphin doesn't try to take over the desktop in xfce, like bloody Nautilus does. I hate Nautilus.

Nautilus

Nautilus and it's forks are excellent, so is Dolphin. But I need a icon based fm with instant access to command line where I can see output on stdout/stderr. And I need a fm which actually uses the extra cores on my box for something useful. And I don't need extra crap on my fm apart from icons (like bookmarks, menus, trees and the like): I want to be distracted the least from my work, which is darn more important. And I never want to be treated like a moron: if I want bookmarks, I will define them, I do not need a filemanager to create bookmarks and directories and tell me tha't where I should keep my "videos", "music" or whatever.

That's why I use Rodent.

Granted, Rodent is still missing things like transparent access to mobile phones, ftp servers, ssh/sftp hosts and smb servers, but that stuff is in the oven and will soon be available to the general public.

This is by far the best file manager that I have found to date. My favorite feature is the custom actions. I will warn you though, the custom actions will make you lazy.

I do like Thunar, if i'm not using Dolphin, it'll be Thunar. I've never looked into the the Thunar extensions. I should, and if i'm happy, maybe i can replace Dolphin and have a more native file manager to my gtk environment.

Thunar

Anyway, I really like the small and fast file managers. For X, I like PCmanFM. At the command line, MC rules. However, I find that even in X, I still open a terminal and use MC a lot.

I wanted to pick caja, because nautilus in gnome 3 is...lacking. Oh, well.

Nautilus

bash, mv, cp ...

Midnight Commander. Not just because I can hit F3 and instantly see the contents of a file but also because browsing through large and complex directory trees cannot be done any faster.

Dolphin is ok for me.

nautilus is good.

Nautilus its simple, good and basic.

I wish I could vote for vfu. Really the best I have seen.

Midnight Commander comes close, so it gets my vote. :-(

PCManFM seems nice at first, but then it is too buggy. Yuk!