DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: Is mc a must... or any "Commander" would suffice?



I asked this in the wrong forum and I would like to learn. Search has neither provided a clue.

I just don't use any file manager, but I saw how passionately Midnight Commander was defended in the RC1 forum. I have a personal taste for text based applications over X only apps, a matter of pragmatism in case X doesn't start for whatever the reason.

At the same time, even as it was assured that MC will be in the next release, there was at least an intent of dropping it in favour of emelFM. Googling around (well, "Aptituding") I found deco, Demos Commander.

My question is: is it just a matter of having a text based file manager whatever it is, or is it that MC is badly needed for unique features not reproducible or attainable even in other "Commander" clones?
If we are going to need a text-based file manager (which I will because I break things all the time  :p ) why not just leave MC and emelfm alone? Is deco smaller? I think it's better to stick with stuff we know because that makes life easier for newbs like me. I had never used Linux in my life until I installed DSL a month ago. Have mercy on us!  :;):
Yeah, deco seems significantly smaller (twentyfold smaller?).

But I don't know to what extent mc 5MB figure have been tuned down in DSL compared to deco 250KB figure. Dependencies seems to put deco in an even more favourable position.

That is why I am asking if 5MB are really needed to do the job a tiny deco seems to do.

As there is a great difference in size, I assume mc is plentiful of features that deco has not, but I don't know what are those or if those would be really missed in DSL.
I don't know where you got the 5mb figure for mc....it's grossly inaccurate.  I'm not in DSL at the moment to see what the actual size is for DSL's stripped-down version of mc, but when i compiled the most recent version of mc it came out to be less than 500k without the syntax and extfs files (which i know are not a part of DSL's version)
On the previous DSL version, mc.bin was 432.7KB uncompressed.  Even smaller when compressed into the filesystem.
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