As someone trying to move to a completely keyboard-controlled desktop, thanks for posting this. The file manager is one of the few things I have left that I'm using the mouse for. I've also considered vifm (http://vifm.sourceforge.net/). Do people have other mouseless file managers they're using?

Emacs. I came to Unix from an MS-DOS background, where I used Norton Commander (of which Midnight Commander is a key-for-key clone), but I ended up not using MC. It turns out you just don’t use Unix the same way as MS-DOS. When I need to manipulate files in any quantity, I use Emacs and its dired-mode.

See especially the “wdired-change-to-wdired-mode” command – it’s magical.

If you're looking for ones with a GUI, there's Krusader [1] (if you're using KDE) or Gnome Commander [2] (for Gnome, duh).

Good luck with your keyboard-controlled desktop. I try to use mouse as little as possible too, so I've been using awesome [3] for a long time now and really enjoy its keyboard-friendly approach. My main usage of the mouse (actually, a trackball) comes from web browsing. I've tried uzbl [4], but it didn't feel right to me.

[1]: http://www.krusader.org/

[2]: http://gcmd.github.io/

[3]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[4]: http://www.uzbl.org/

mouseless browsing is a solved problem, see vimium or vimperator.

If I am using a file manager, I'm using ranger. It also supports image previews.

Would you mind describing how your keyboard-controlled desktop looks like?

I use Openbox window manager, though with many keybindings copied from or inspired by i3. I don't like using i3 directly as I think it wastes space and doesn't offer enough "freedom of movement". I keep most windows maximised and switch between windows with Alt+Tab, and between workspaces with Ctrl+Alt+arrows. I launch most of my applications with keyboard shortcuts, gmrun, or dmenu. I have disabled minimising windows as this just wastes time.

I use Firefox to browse. Admittedly there's still a lot of the web which requires a mouse, including webapps I need for work. I have tried Vimperator and Pentadactyl extensions, but didn't really like them. Firefox has some keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn to switch tabs, and ' to search for link text and Enter to follow it.

The "It's All Text" extension allows you to dump text fields into the text editor of your choice.

I use Gmail for mail, it has good keyboard shortcuts. I've tried mutt but couldn't find a config I liked. I use Vim to text edit, Vimcasts.org was fantastic for improving past "i" and ":wq". I use Weechat for IRC which has good default keybindings and lets you make more, it also has fantastic plugins.

My work is largely in webapps (which require mouse), IRC, and commandline. Managing files in the commandline is tedious. The file manager is one of the last major mouse-driven things I have in my workflow.

I do not know about suprjami, but I am using herbstluftwm[0] and vimperator[1] which covers most of the stuff I have to use a mouse for.

[0] http://www.herbstluftwm.org/

[1] http://www.vimperator.org/

i3 could be a start [1]. There are more tiling window managers around though.

https://i3wm.org

For those that used Norton Commander in MS-DOS, MC is basically a clone with the same keyboard shortcuts and similar actions.

I use MC occasionally when copying or moving large numbers of files around where repeated `mv` commands would be tedious.

It's a good tool to have around even if you don't need it often. On OS X you can run `brew install mc`.

This brings me fond memories of using XTreeGold back in the DOS days...