Midnight Commander vs Polo

Midnight commander uses the full screen of the terminal in a very efficient way. It displays two panels for files horizontally. On the bottom it has the most useful commands with their corresponding key attached. All of this makes for a very intuitive interface both for beginners and experienced users.

Being a terminal application means that it's suited for people who spend most of their time on the terminal because they don't have to switch windows in order to open their file manager. It also means that they can use it both locally and remotely.

Midnight commander is easy and intuitive to use. The most common commands are displayed in the bottom (move, copy, paste, delete, edit, view, make directory). Files can be selected with the arrow keys which move the cursor through them. The Enter key goes down in a directory. To move the focus between two panels the tab key is used.

and hence easy to install by usually package manager.

Cursor+left to go to parent directory, cursor+right to go into child directory.

Polo wants people to get the file manager they want, but it's not awash with granular layout options that take ages to understand. First select whether you want one, two, or four panes, and then select a format for each pane of either List, Icon, Tiled, or Media. That's it, you're done.

File managers in Linux have a nasty propensity for being closely tied to the distribution family from which they arose. Using Polo allows you to have an identical file management experience when shifting between machines from different branches of the Linux tree.

Quickly mount and unmount devices from the sidebar, including support for locking and unlocking LUKS encrypted devices.

Just paste a YouTube URL into a folder and Polo will download the best quality format of it and save it in that folder.

Browse archive files as those they were just another folder, dragging and dropping files in and out of them at will while the backend uses the appropriate tools to manage the archive file itself. Archive creation includes a rich assortment of controls over compression formats and structure.

Rotate, resize, optimize, convert formats, save for the web and many other handy features all right in the context menu.

Mount ISO files to loop devices with just two clicks, or spin them up as a QEMU KVM instance, and for portability there's also an option to write them to USB flash drives using a GUI dialog.

Perform Merge and Split operations on PDF files without needing another file handler all from the context menu. Rotate and Password Protection settings are also expressed there.

Includes its own rclone macros for adding cloud storage access to the list of browsable locations that just works, a welcome relief in the sea of hacks which provide those features elsewhere in Linux. Currently supported: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive / Amazon S3, Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH), Hubic, Backblaze B2, Yandex Disk

Supports up to four panes, plus a tree-style side panel and tabs.

Built-in terminal pop-up.

Debian-based distributions can leverage the apt package management system to keep Polo updated by adding the approved PPA to their apt sources, simplifying installation as well.

Features a file properties side panel to easily assess and modify permissions.