I use Rox-Filer, because it supports thumbnails. It's quite fast.

Forgot to mention, I'm satisfied with Dolphin. And when I'm posing as a 1337 h4XX0r at runlevel 3 I use Midnight Commander (even during daylight).

xfe. uses gtk2.

All these years and I thought you could not use Midnight Commander in the day light.

MC is a very powerful file manager - almost an OS in its own right. However, when I am using the CLI, I find the BASH tools more useful.

I found that ROX seems to have a bug: If I right-click on a file (to select it) I can't select another file. Also it doesn't preview picture files.

That's why I switched to Thunar.

File name tab completion changed the game iMO. Unless I'm dealing with picture files where the thumbnails are a significant advantage I tend to stick to the CLI for file operations these days.
The rest of the time I use thunar, (not out of any like for it, but simply that it's already installed and good enough)

Not sure what the hate for Dolphin is about though. I don't use KDE4, but when I did try it, Dolphin was one of the few things I liked about it.

I tried Rox a few weeks back when I was playing with tiling window managers and was trying to find something that was very keyboard orientated: I couldn't get on with it at all.

only bash tools + screen, sometimes mc and sometimes gsb nautilus.

I can't replicate that bug. It does have previews / thumbnails for images (options->thumbnails->show image thumbnails), and there's an app (videothumbnail) that also adds video previews.

'thunar' with custom actions and thunar plugins from SBo.
Very intuitive, flexible, stable and works great and integrated perfectly (for me) within my fluxbox WM.
('xfsettingsd &' in my fluxbox startup file)

I like dolphin and konq' but I almost always find my self using thunar.


I actually use my own custom actions for every day tasks such as manipulating files through to specialised scripts/launchers for system admin - all within an easy right-click from thunar.

Also alot easier than making/maintaining dot.desktop files for dolphin/konq' custom actions.

I also add scripts to the 'send to' menu. This way I can send directories to an iso or archive, or combine files titled with .001 .002 .003, etc.

I can replicate the bug but none of the other things you suggested work. Clearly something is missing but as long as I have Thunar, I won't be wasting anymore time with rox.

Xfe uses fox-toolkit.
I use Xfe and Dolphin myself.

Oh yes of course its fox, not sure why I thought it was gtk2, probably because it has the same basic feel to it.

Even though I use gnome, I like dolphin because I like the split button. I like easy.