2 panes (both heavily tabbed so more like 10-15 of them representing various projects/activitives, tabbing for some reason works better mentally than bunch of explorer windows) is great concept, you always move from A to B if organizing/copying/moving. When I see people trying to achieve something in explorer, its literally 10x slower, and I speak of people doing it for living in bank, like desktop support guys.

Alt+F7 -> fulltext search, only in given file types, in archives (recursively), limiting for size, date, regexp etc. - way more powerful than any other tool I've ever used.

Viewing and editing files directly in archives (or in archives in archives in archives) without manually unpacking - as mainly java dev I do this very often. Again the speed and convenience is unmatched.

Very good built-in multi-rename tool, with preview of changes, GUI for this is so much better than any command line tool.

Very good file comparison tool - cleaner than anything other products (or dedicated ones) bring.

I don't want to end up listing all features of Total commander, but suffice to say its too my first tool to install (after firefox with ublock origin). Its not as much about how content I am using it, but whenever I see colleagues doing similar actions, they are maddeningly slow, ineffective and sometimes even give up for task that takes me few seconds. But that's full time usage of 2-pane mode since 1993, never saw any appeal in those simple explorer-like windows when I can be super quick with few shortcuts.

Thanks for taking the time to type this out, definitely motivates me to give it a look!

I used extensively Midnight commander on a SunOS workstation for quickly browsing source codebases that spanned thousands of files without launching XEmacs. But for me the killer feature was having special popup menus (configurable per directory!) that could launch scripts on top of the selected files was pretty powerful. For example in the pre-subversion days I could check-in a bunch of files that were changed into the repository using a proprietary tool from my employer with just a couple of keystrokes.

I am not a dev. But I've built dependency on following workflow: Navigating to right file -> taking full path to clipboard (Ctrl + Shift + C) -> switching to work app, e.g. CAD (Alt + Tab) -> Open dialog (Ctrl + O) -> Paste full path (Ctrl+V) and hit Enter. That's the main reason for I can't use GNOME and that awful GTK file dialog. I can navigate really quickly in commanders, because I've used them since I've started using computer - so that makes this workflow legit for me.

I grew up with MS-DOS. After Dosshell i started using Norton Commander. Nowadays i use Total Commander of Double Commander. For me personally the main benefit of commanders is having data in point A and point B simultaneously in a single gui and then do stuff like copying, moving, etc between those points.

Other benefits are i like fast file editing, quickly exploring an archive or zip file and scheduled copy/move tasks.