Norton Commander (and its clones, such as Volkov Commander, DOS Navigator) was very popular in ex-USSR — almost every computer running DOS (the majority of PCs in ex-USSR back then) had nc running as the main user interface to the PC, and was introduced in most computer education courses in the 90's.

I always found it amusing that in Chasm: The Rift (a midlate-90s FPS for DOS made by Action Forms, a Ukrainian game developer), the computer monitors had Norton Commander running:

https://i.imgur.com/63dPueK.png

For me it was Xtree, that was my favorite file manager ever.

In fact NC was so ubiquitous that it had jokes about it printed in computer magazines and circulating on the Fido network.

In general what is it that people love about dual pane file managers? I love alternate UIs but I've never understood this one.

If you only use a file manager for browsing/opening files, a single window makes sense. But as soon as you want to do a copy/cut and paste, you end up having to browse back and forth between two directories anyway. Dual pane is optimized for that workflow.

The canonical 80s/90s Mac OS answer would be, just open 2 (or 3 or 4 or n) file browser windows next to each other. Arguably the workflow of moving/copying stuff between windows was a key motivator for the creation of windowing systems in the first place. But today that multi-window workflow, while of course still possible, somehow feels less salient... the DOS/MDI-era Windows UI norm of "one window ≈ one application" seems to have taken over culturally as a baseline expectation for how GUIs should work - perhaps reinforced by non-windowed smartphone OSes these days as well.

I'm mainly a Windows user and I regularly have a dozen or more explorer windows open, all showing directories of interest to my current work. From that perspective, using a file manager with only two effective "windows" feels more constraining.

Two pane FM's are optimized for mouseless operation which your workflow is not. I.e ctrl-c alt-tab ctrl-v compared to just F5 for copying files

Have you tried Q-Dir? I installed it on my work PC using Chocolatey. I've found a couple instances of Q-Dir superior to a bunch of Windows Explorer windows for most of the things I do on a Windows PC.

there are tabs/windows in dual pane file managers

I pretty much write, compile & run a large chunk of my C, C++, Python and other code in FAR every day.

I use it because I can do so many things in FAR so much faster than any other alternative (or my colleagues). I can view/navigate file/folder structure. View/Edit/Copy/Move/Archive files. And search recursively. Either by file name/extension or in contents. Also run command-line stuff (make, python, git). Inspect output from commands, quickly select text - copy&paste between contents of file, command-line and output of command. And much more. All that with just a few of keyboard shortcuts. No mouse.

And when I'm showing/explaining something to my colleague, I often hear "wait, what just happened?" or "how did you do that so fast?"

// not russian, but using FAR every day (started with Norton Commander, then used Volkov Commander, then Dos Navigator for a long time)

FAR is fascinating. It may look like a Norton Commander, but it's fully integrated in Windows and the extension system goes beyond most Norton Commander clones. It may be a small thing since the API in windows is fairly simple, but what got me is the fact that you double click an item and you get a copy of windows explorers right click + FAR extensions.

But yes, I agree I've asked myself the same question.

Would you imagine that instead of browsing records in a shop or even listening to radio all you and your friends have is the same mixtape copied over and over again? Sounds weird, but that's how software distributed from 80s well into mid-00s in Russia.

You didn't get particular products, you got a disk with "all the good bits" according to someone. Somehow Norton Commander ended up in the list at some point, so it instantly became a default and nobody knew anything better. Every DOS computer in 90s Russia booted right into NC, or its Russian clone VC.

VC was too lightweight. Dos Navigator, written in Turbo Vision by developers from Moldova, was much better and replaced Norton Commander very quickly.

VC was written in asm.

I don't know, is it? That's kinda how stuff was distributed in Germany back in the days. At least I think, I don't quite remember in detail what was on those disks. Although I don't remember any computer booting straight into nc

Was it that much different in the US?

I'm Russian and I have no idea! But I can confirm that it's very popular amongst old Russian developers.

Norton Commander as well. Russians favour brutal simplicity.