[kiaulen]

If you only use a file manager for browsing/opening files, a single window makes sense. But as soon as you want to do a copy/cut and paste, you end up having to browse back and forth between two directories anyway. Dual pane is optimized for that workflow.

[tesseract]

The canonical 80s/90s Mac OS answer would be, just open 2 (or 3 or 4 or n) file browser windows next to each other. Arguably the workflow of moving/copying stuff between windows was a key motivator for the creation of windowing systems in the first place. But today that multi-window workflow, while of course still possible, somehow feels less salient... the DOS/MDI-era Windows UI norm of "one window ≈ one application" seems to have taken over culturally as a baseline expectation for how GUIs should work - perhaps reinforced by non-windowed smartphone OSes these days as well.

[userbinator]

I'm mainly a Windows user and I regularly have a dozen or more explorer windows open, all showing directories of interest to my current work. From that perspective, using a file manager with only two effective "windows" feels more constraining.

[jalk]

Two pane FM's are optimized for mouseless operation which your workflow is not. I.e ctrl-c alt-tab ctrl-v compared to just F5 for copying files

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Have you tried Q-Dir? I installed it on my work PC using Chocolatey. I've found a couple instances of Q-Dir superior to a bunch of Windows Explorer windows for most of the things I do on a Windows PC.

[ssijak]

there are tabs/windows in dual pane file managers