Man, I remember the first time I came across Far Manager. It was through ConEmu in 2010. I was pretty confused with Far tbh. Couldn’t really figure out who or why you would use it. Then I saw someone actually using it at work.

The Wiki doesn’t go much into the demographic for such file manager. It does say they predate GUI file managers, which is fair I guess, but I always thought you lived by cd/ls/find/cat/etc then. I still do for the most part.

Far is a Norton Commander clone, and the NC was ubiquitous in pre-Windows era. It felt like it was on every single machine that ran DOS. Its dual-panel design is really quite ingenious as it speeds up the majority of routine file operations, especially when working with ad-hoc file sets. Just need to learn the keyboard shortcuts :)

Far is for Windows, where "find" and "cat" are problematic, to say the very least.

In that area, Far is game-changing.

And even today I use Midnight Commander in Linux because I used to Norton/Volkov Commander and then Far. ;)

Far manager now exists on Linux and Mac: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

I got it from nixpkgs, not sure if it's easy to install otherwise.