The one of these that I've come to adore the most is the ranger file manager. I almost never use any GUI file managers (or command line tools, for that matter) for file management after starting to use ranger seriously. It's so fast and works exactly the way I want it to. I've also hooked my terminal up such that I'm cd'ed into whatever folder I last navigated to in ranger (I use the alias `rd` for this), so I virtually never type `cd` in the terminal anymore. Super slick!
Protip: If you use bash or zsh, you can source the ranger executable for this behavior (so the full command would be ". ranger"). If you're on fish, there is a patch pending for review, that soon will be available on master.
In my experience vifm is noticably snappier than ranger.
But I also use it instead of cd when I want to switch to a "distant" directory - much more comfortable than bothering with the tab completion, and the Vim-like search functionality allows to quickly jump to a specific file in the current (possibly very cluttered) directory.
I use ranger as well, when pared with tmux it makes a very powerful tool. with a nVim socket running. When I press enter on a file, it opens in a new tab in nVim and tmux changes focus to the vim window. If I want to lint or run a file, the appropriate key bind runs the command in the 'debug' or 'lint' pane in tmux with the file as an argument.
That was the key that finally made my tmux/vim editor situation into a full blown IDE.
