Check out sunrise-commander, it is Dired reskinned as a dual-paner. Love how convenient it is to have a powerful integrated file manager.

Is sunrise commander stable these days?

I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?