I'm surprised nobody in the comments mentioned Norton Commander, and its editor. It was mostly enough for file editing. And navigating folders in DOS with NC was very convenient, that at the time you didn't even understand why people needed windows.

Today, it has successors: Midnight Commander (TUI on Linux), FAR Manager (TUI for Windows), Windows Commander (graphical UI, Windows).

Although MC is good tool, I notice something rubs me the wrong way in it, and I rarely use it -- probably, it's the conflict of focuses between a panel and the shell. E.g. you typed something, then tried to move to another folder, hit enter -> MC decides you run the command, hides the panels, lets the system yell at you "no such executable".

Far Manager isn't just for Windows anymore:

https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

Debian even has it in the official repos. It's also on Homebrew.

I just opened mc and mcedit yesterday for the first time. Mcedit was sorta interesting but I'm already too vim-brained. How would you change mc to make it more intuitive?