*DESKTOP is somewhat in the middle between MS-Windows and Norton Commander...*

Does anyone here recall the intuitive nature of Norton Commander, especially in terms of file operations? This may be reaching back about three decades, so my recollection might be a bit hazy. As I recall, it was a viable alternative to Windows Explorer even during the era of Windows 3.1.

One particular aspect that stands out to me was the dual-pane interface. This allowed for seamless navigation within the directory hierarchy - you could tag files in the pane on one side, then initiate a move or copy operation to the directory in the other pane, and vice versa.

Given the complexity of today's file operations and UIs, Norton Commander's straightforward approach feels refreshingly simple and efficient in hindsight. I'd be interested to hear other users' reminiscences and thoughts.

Norton-style commanders were huge in xUSSR.

FAR and Dos Navigator were among the most popular, and in the end FAR won it (as it was windows app and got rich ecosystem of plugins). They were good not only due dual panel interface (newer versions were actually multi-panel, where you cold go as many 2 panel "workspaces" as you want), but they enabled extremely efficient keyboard only workflows. Windows couldn't get it even now.

Far is still alive: https://www.farmanager.com/

Also I don't use it, but I install midnight commander on every my linux setup just for memories.

Far 2 has a Linux (as well as macOS and BSD) port that is quite active: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l. Far Manager was what I switched to from Norton Commander. These days I prefer Double Commander, a cross-platform Total Commander workalike: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/.