I use rox, because I have finally almost figured out how it works, and the drag/drop into roxterm is nice.
And I try to use mc a little, especially to move stuff between machines.

I do not really want to learn spacefm, but it seems to be very capable, I just do not like it, so I try to avoid it...

as an old-time fluxbox user, I've used rox for years and I really dig it, despite some still annoying (to me) non-standard key combinations when deleting files. That said, I've really been digging spacefm lately, especially the keyboard-friendiness of it. But the default layout settings bug me, so I've spent sometime customizing it to match my own shortcomings. Plus there is dropbox plugin that lets you get the public url without dropping to the commandline or going to the webiste, which is nice.

SpaceFM is used quite alot. I can get it to do the things I want easier than the confusion I get from rox. Maybe I just found SpaceFM more intuitive to use

I haven't tried anything in antiX other than Rox. It's easy and intuitive (once I figured out the basic methods), and does what I need. Easily started with root privilege, too, from terminal as su -- necessary for file transfers to/from USB key or making changes in the system folders.

SpaceFM is okay in its class and (no need to say) mc works very well, too. But I prefer a two-pane graphic file manager that is fully custimizable and lightweight at the same time, so my choice is emelFM2. I always begin with installing that to a new distro -- from Ubuntu repository, but so far it worked well on a dozen or so Debian distros. On this 32bit machine it takes only 3 MBs of RAM to start it, less than half the memory the ROX Filer takes, even a bit smaller than the memory footprint of mc! (SpaceFM also takes 3 MBs to start but some parts of that are already started in daemon mode at system startup.) And you can rewrite any command or menu in emelFM, use any Linux command from the file manager and assign an icon to that, etc. What it does not do is to manage desktop icons and thumbnail file previews, but I were not a Fluxbox user it I liked or wanted these things...

Besides emelFM2, Worker is the other file manager that does all this, maybe that is even more flexible a bit, but frankly that looks really ugly while emelFM is nice in its minimalistic way.

Another plus point for emelfm is that it uses the same key combos as mc.

And if you like vi(m), there is vifm.

Double Commander, PCManFM, and SpaceFM. There's enough difference in each one that I find it hard to stick with just one. I rotate use of each one on a weekly basis.

3 years later, & I still use midnight commander, but also a GUI based one. __{{emoticon}}__