So, is Bash the text editor as apposed to Vi or should it be added here (and there) instead of MC or mv, cp, df, mkdir,,, etc..?

I voted mc. About bash: I agree but
1) bash - required
2) bash scripting - required
2) all *utils stuff - required
3) emacs or vi - required (minimal ed but..)
on top one can put dialog, to have "graphical" file manager. Look at this
$ man ksh | wc -l
2846
$ man bash | wc -l
4884

I'm torn. What I want out of a file manager: I want to easily browse my file system, I want to see graphical icons and perhaps image previews if I enable it, and I want to search my file system and extra partitions easily. Oh yeah, it should also be fast. Wickedly fast.

Gnome's "Files" aka "Nautilus" v3.10 does 80% of what I need. I can live with it being slow. I can't live with how the search functionality leaves you hanging. Did it actually search? Is it still searching? Who knows.

Edit: The intermittent 'spinner' seems to be a bug according to the mailing list. Not sure that makes me feel better or not.

Dolphin is just as good as Files except it loads slower than Files: I've never noticed it being slow after that, ever: /usr/bin/ displays immediately. The search looks like it works and provides some nifty options, but looks like it needs more KDE pieces than I want to install to make it work.

Surprisingly, Midnight Commander does great at everything except having graphics. I haven't used it much in the past and in the 10 minutes I've tried it out it's clear that's a mistake.

True, see this at the end `man bash`:

I only use bash as an interactive shell, it has a number of useful features. For scripting only sh. You don't need to rewrite your scripts when you want to run them on other *nix systems when you use sh. It is also more simple and more readable than bash.

Same behavior here in GNOME in Debian Wheezy. But you can add kdeinit to your startup applications to speed that up somewhat. Well, these days I guess it's /usr/bin/kdeinit4.

I'm hoping he comes back, too! SpaceFM and Dolphin are my favorite file managers...

Alas, the SystemD take over of Linux drove them to other lands.... SpaceFM still works though, and is my file manager of choice on the rare occassions I use one.

muCommander looks pretty slick, but who in their right mind wants to fire up a java app to manage files? Oh, wait, maybe actually faster than the bid DE bloatware managers of late? Hmm...

Enlightenment's file manager is really slick. But I stopped using Enlightenment this year and switched over to StumpWM.

Well... I hate wm's !!!

Xfe is good, and doesn't require gtk/qt libraries.

Favorite file manager? coreutils... mv, cp, cd, etc.

There are no good Linux file managers. There was at one time but, alas, no longer.

Wow no bright side hu Ubuntu I I mean Mac,,, whoops, Gregladen?

Jamison20Ke: That's my opinion! Though I can't actually parse your message ("hu Ubuntu I I mean Mac,,, whoops" ... is that a perl script or something? )

In my opinion, Nautilus was great before it got changed to not being so great. Since you mention, I think, Mac, Path Finder on a Mac is great; I wish there was something like that for Linux.

That is along list of free to tries )or change( and only the tip of the iceberg. Best wishes and have fun.

Last year it was Dolphin,, This year it is Midnight Commander,, but i gonna try for vifm in a few weeks since i am getting used to vi!

I prefer GNOME Commander at work - I really love the blue background, but most of all its functionality meets all my needs regarding files management.

At home, however, I'm okay with the default on Ubuntu 14.04.