Windows Commander (now Total Commander) was/is still good. It was the first piece of shareware I registered, for Windows 3.1. It's still in development today, with an Android version!
Total commander is a great successor I think. Once you get used to 2-pane logic, the efficiency boost with anything file-related is really huge. It is fast and has so many features - tabbed panes, quick recursive file content search, very nice comparison of 2 files, folders synchronization, built-in navigation in archives (I often edit files directly in packages, it recompresses them automatically) and archives within archives, great network/FTP browser and many more... it really packs few tens of great tools into one neat package.
One of many detractors from Linux in the past from me - whenever I tried any equivalent there, it was very slow, featureless, crashing etc. I hope these days the situation is better.
Whenever I look at any other colleague, who use that primitive File explorer or equivalent, how clunky and slow work it is, its sad that people don't do this one-time effort to transition to the tool which is so vastly better.
FYI: Total Commander runs on Linux with Wine fairly well. One notable problem with it (and Wine in general) is that it is not HiDPI-aware, so you get a miniature UI :(
Having said that, I think Krusader comes pretty close with the right settings / keyboard shortcuts.
It has one crucial downside: it does not run in the console. Ability to see image previews right in the app is NOTHING compared to capability run the app remotely.
It's what kills the most new attempts at filemanagers, like fman - for some silly reason they try to do it with GUI.
