I never use them but I can see the point. Like when you’re poking around for a log file, not sure what it’s called or where it’s stored and just going on a hunch…but you’re in an SSH session and don’t want to deal with X shenanigans.

It’s a legit PITA to ls, look for files, cat/tail them, etc. sometimes you just want to ls -alR but your corporate build runs tmux on SSH sessions with no configuration so you can’t scroll back since your shortcuts don’t work so you have to pipe everything to more and it just sucks.

I use them for filemanagement on my server over ssh

I use dired in Emacs.

I assume you mean “why use these instead of file-manipulation commands in bash?”

I use both.

There are a handful of tasks that are easier in dired than bash.

• Making small modifications to filenames that aren’t amenable to programmatic changes. You can just toggle the read-only flag on a dired buffer, edit the filenames, and then hit C-c C-c when done.

• Marking a set of files to perform an operation on where that set cannot trivially be expressed using tools in bash. Think, oh, “which movies do I like enough to want to keep around”. This is especially handy when moving a number of files to another directory, which I think is why people often like the two-pane approach of orthodox file managers. Dired is not an OFM, but it can act like that if you have two dired windows open, using the other as the default target for the operation.

• Dealing with filenames containing obnoxious-to-type characters like weird Unicode stuff. If I want to delete the one file in a directory whose name consists of a bunch of kanji, it’s easier to just manually select it in a list.

• Navigating where I usually want to see the contents of each directory. I’ll often navigate around in dired while building up up an emms playlist. Browsing a list of movies to play.

EDIT: It’s also not really a file manager, but I do use ncdu to see what’s taking up space on a disk. I’ll also use du -h|sort -h|less, but ncdu is, like file managers, more convenient when just browsing around the tree and looking at each as one does so, while manually selecting a few items to operate on (deleting).

EDIT2: I’ll also add that virtually all of the people I know in person who love OFMs – I’m in the US – are from Eastern Europe, moved to the US from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, etc. I dunno why that is. Maybe just spreading along language lines. Maybe there are or were issues with switching between Cyrillic and Latin character stuff akin to my above irritation with kanji. But someone from Eastern Europe might have more input to answer your question.

EDIT3: The link I provided above for OFMs has a very long discussion from the author on why he likes OFMs (though not all terminal file managers are OFMs, many, like Midnight Commander, are). Reading it, I’d say that there’s a lot of overlap with how Emacs works with dired+TRAMP+eshell and some other Emacs packages, though they accomplish similar goals in a different way – sort of making integrated functionality that spans network file transfer, file management, text editing, file archive access, console commands, with a common toolset available for all. Would be quicker to learn an OFM than Emacs, though Emacs is gonna provide a considerably-larger set of functionality if you’re willing to spend the time on it.

EDIT4: There are also a number of OFMs in Emacs, like Sunrise Commander, so I guess I shouldn’t really treat it as an either-or matter.

They’re better than

cd something
ls
cd something-else
ls
cd ../..
ls

With some people, it’s just easier and faster to navigate a filesystem structure if you can just see it all laid out in front of you visually instead of “cd-ing” and “ls-ing” every directory you traverse just to see what’s in it and having to “pwd” and remember where you are. Some of us didn’t do too well at the memory game as kids.

They are faster and more efficient for most basic file operations.

Sometimes it helps to have a visual aide for what you’re doing. CLI/TUI apps are often faster, or when accessing remotely, lower bandwidth.

Also, let people enjoy thing.

Most systems I interface with are remote or headless. Forwarding X is annoying as fuck and to be avoided at all cost, so the more I can do though the terminal, the better.

PS: I’m also old enough to have been a regular user of Norton Commander, the application MC (Midnight Commander) is based on (inspired by).

EDIT: Norton Commander was a DOS app and so useful that it prompted Midnight Commander, one of the earliest applications developed for Linux. So MC kind of pre-dates Linux in a way.

for example, when you need to copy some files and not the other, you can take your time selecting the specific files you need to copy instead of writing the list of files in one command. When you want to check the contents of a lot of files, you can just open file preview. Etc, basically sometimes CLI isn’t as convenient as TUI/GUI

Sometimes they are more convenient, than cd ls mv cp everything, when you don’t have access to a file explorer.

Specially if you are working with a server via ssh, or some machine without any Desktop Environment installed.

It’s really annoying navigating a filesystem in the shell.

Either you remember exactly where a file is located, have a reference, or you’re going to be doing a lot of “ls, cd, ls, cd”.

Nostalgia for those 80s and 90s kids who grew up with norton commander ;-)

Eh… for home servers, when you want to take a quick glance at the files (maybe you are running a script that copies files around after some time…?). Then again, I don’t really find em useful when I have ls -al shoved inside my brain. It’s (kind of) “second nature” at this point.

People who can use them effectively tend to be a way faster with the regular admin work. Also, they can do some things which are not that simple on the command line (browse through tarball, browse through remote directories).

One of the first things I install is mc (sometimes ranger). It’s just a really fast way to get around.

CLI is fast, but GUI is (if done right) intuitive. Running mc is both. Very fast way to explore/get around file system.