[TomDavey]

Yes, Directory Opus is outstanding. I'm an Emacs fanboy to an intense degree, but I've never bothered to learn Dired. Directory Opus, although mouse-driven, is simply too powerful.

What is this Windows Explorer of which you speak?

[lordgrenville]

Ha, I'm the opposite - not a hardcore Emacs user but I use dired whenever I can. wdired-mode is such an intuitive way to do bulk renaming.

[opan]

For bulk-renaming, I love ranger's :bulkrename command, which I think calls out to an external program, vidir or something. It opens the list of files in vim where it becomes very fast to do edits to them. Easy copy/paste, flipping between upper and lowercase, etc. You can do the same edits on multiple lines using visual mode. It all works how you'd expect if you know vim.