I seem to remember asking about this some time ago, but I can't find the thread for the life of me (and I don't remember the answers), so here we go anyway.

I need a file manager that can handle folders with several thousand files in them. The file manager that comes stock in most distros (Dolphin) works fine for normal folders, but chokes on my music folder, which contains about 5000 files that I like to keep ordered by filename and not in subfolders.

I used to manage the music folder with PCManFM, which didn't scan the files and so opened the folder very quickly, but it seems the later versions have started scanning as well, so it now chokes on it just like Dolphin does.

Is there any other browser I can use for this?

Thanks.

Krusader / MC - old school fm (quite fast)
gnome-open . - gnome fm (it's faster than dolphin)
EasyTag - specialized music related programs

I would second mc or just using your shell directly. ROX-Filer is about the fastest GUI file manager I know and it takes several seconds even on the 3.5K items in /usr/bin though, once loaded and cached, it can close and reload it almost instantly. But a GUI FM isn't a good idea for something like that. (My music is /music/genre/album so I don't have this problem (though I see the advantages to shallower organization) and you might want to look into at least filing them 'A-L' and 'M-Z' or something. )