I'd say it depends on your usage patterns. When I was a beginner, I liked Norton Commander a lot. Together with Midnight Commander (mc) on Linux, it belongs to

I'd say it depends on your usage patterns. When I was a beginner, I liked Norton Commander a lot. Together with Midnight Commander (mc) on Linux, it belongs to the family of "orthodox" file managers which ranger is derived from. All these come with a visual display of the files in the current directory and are fast to navigate. The command line tools are very fast to type and more powerful than Midnight Commander, if you took the time to learn them. I do really not think it is a issue that one needs to look up flags which one uses very rarely. But, they might need more time for discovery of files. But the latter is only a issue if you do not work mostly on files you know well. For many software developers, this does not happen that often. Also, the CLI tools will be present right away on all systems you work on, which us very useful if you often log in to servers or embedded systems. Also, if you need to explore unknown directory trees, there are alternatives. For example, in certain cases, I am using Emacs dired a lot, especially when editing Makefiles, because then I have the exact file names already in my kill ring. Now, ranger is more powerful than Midnight Commander, for example it can do a correct "copy/paste" operation with pasting symlinks, or hard links. And it can do that with a set of files which were hand-picked from different directories. That is nice, but again it is something which one might not use very often. It is a bit similar like tmux having some, let's say, 150 key bindings but you only remember the ten or twelve you actually use often. And this is where I run into a problem, or more neutrally said, into a region of diminishing returns: I could put energy and time into not only learning tools like ranger, but also use and deliberately practise them. But this needs time and effort. And this kind of time is a scarce resource, after all, I could learn more of emacs, say, magit (which is a truly fantastic git front end), or stumpwm key bindings (a window manager which works much like emacs), or learn whether "lz" is really better than "bzip2", or of one hundred other things. And my reasoning so far is that if I forgot such efforts after using them some time, they are actually not that useful for me. Because the human mind has the convenient feature of only remembering things which are either important, or used very often. And in the specific case of ranger, this might be totally different if for the next week I have the task of tidying up and cleaning out a folder tree with 1000 folders and 10,000 files, for my successor on a project. Or, to sum it all up with some XKCD reference: Is it worth the time? https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/