Tracker is the finest, most intuitive file manager around – I have to grit my teeth every time I have to use
Here I have a complain… the lack of a “tree viiew” for the file system tree… makes Tracker end up losing a bunch of points in “2024’s usability” (heck, it made it lose points 20+ years ago already) 
Edit: just in case, please,spare me the mentions of alternative file managers,. I DO use them.
Seems my edit was not enough
Isn’t this what you want?
That’s clearly not a treeview?
I don’t understand complaining about lack of other OS’ paradigms in Haiku. Haiku has drill-down menu. macOS has column view as above. Haiku has spatial file manager (the best). You don’t like it? Okay, change the settings, or use another operating system or another file manager. We have Dolphin ported, very capable and feature rich.
Sorry if this sounds too harsh, but it really feels like people are trying hard to impose of their view of what an operating system should be. Haiku did not lose anything by not implementing these 20 years ago, it is just the way it is. Otherwise we shall just use systems that are the carbon copies of other systems.
Again, I do not mean any disrespect, but I don’t see the point of complaining on these matters.
When other systems have good ideas, we should consider implementing them. Otherwise, we will just be an old and quirky operating system from the 1990s that no one wants to use.
Certainly a tree view of the filesystem is useful in some cases. And Tracker does have a “single window mode” that is seriously neglected and would really benefit from such features. Note that this wouldn’t impact the spatial mode, at all, it is completely independant.
Tracker is indeed the best spatial mode file manager out there, but why couldn’t it also be the best single-window file manager as well? We know that these two paradigms exist, that they are useful, and all OS in the 1990s all came to that conclusion as well. Tracker got a single window mode, and Windows 95 had two entirely independant apps to navigate the filesystem:
Surely it would be great to have something like this in Tracker or as a separate builtin app like Windows 95 did it. And as you can see in Windows 95, it doesn’t get in the way of the spatial mode at all (they made it as a separate app there).
like this? =)
@Andrea: Exactly it!
Last time I used NaviTracker (looong ago), it had a few rough spots, but it was shaping up amazingly!
But apparently, suggesting its revival makes me an heretic to parts of our community
Enabling “Single window navigation” / “Show Navigator” are among the first settings I change in every new Haiku install, go figure! /me goes to slaughter some goat, or something 
Maybe someone could implement a tree view in Tracker, and then maybe there could be a way to open a folder from said view in another window, tiled to the tree view window. At least to me, that feels like the Be/Haiku way, if at least mixed with a little bit of suckless.
To me, the beauty of Haiku is that it can enable very simple solutions to complex problems.
I actually loved the “Windows Explorer” application on my first ever Windows 95 computer. It felt very tidy. However, it was still a separate application, and the usual explorer was very lean and nice. Starting with 98 it got flashy and space inefficient on those small screen resolutions.
It’s just that, the current opinionated lean Tracker is very true to its roots, and the file manager is the main core system identity to my eyes. There’s nothing bad in shipping a separate application, but the beauty and timelessness of Haiku is in its defaults IMO.
Same here, I don’t like dozens of windows cluttering the desktop. But you can do it, without too much trouble and you only have to do it once. From there, I open any new ones I need by right-clicking on the hidden button in the bottom-left corner (where the number of items is printed),
Yes, that should not go away of course. But there is merit to the idea that “filesystem browsing” (what Tracker currently does) and “file management” (deleting old files, moving things into directories, …) are two different activities, maybe sufficiently different that they deserve two separate apps, or maybe two separate modes in an application.
Besides the explorer with file tree from Windows 95, there is also the two-panel way (Norton Commander, Directory Opus, and their derivatives). And, of course, the terminal with its cd, ls, mv, and various other commands.
All these solutions are not necessarily exclusive. On the contrary, good integration between them all can be very useful. This can be as simple as the OpenTerminal add-on and the way you can use “open .” in Terminal to jump between Terminal and Tracker. Surely, the other options would also benefit from being at least as well integrated into the OS?
I wonder why NaviTracker hasn’t made it to Haiku yet (unless I have yet to discover it)? The developer of that app is quite active in the Haiku community right?
Of course I’m a fan of spatial file management and navigation and use Tracker in that mode. I guess my old habits from MacOS classic and Finder carried over 
The biggest issue I have with Tracker right now is not being able to set preferences for certain directories, which is a regression IMHO.
I think everyone welcomes more and more integration between user space applications! That’s one of the things that makes Haiku so intuitive after all. I’m all for it, and I wish more and more native applications have been maintained and offered…
There are cases where a panel on the left hand side that can be shown or hidden when necessary would be the best solution. For example, for browsing emails while keeping a view on the selected folder on the right showing all the attributes.
It could be done with different apps, of course. But the lack of a tile API (as in Stack&Tile) could hamper the user experience, IMHO.
I used to love NaviTracker in the old BeOS days…
There was an app called “dog whistle”, it claimed to use scripting to open and bring a tracker’s window close to its window
http://web.archive.org/web/20030323223907/http://www.frabjous.org/misc/dogwhistle/
It seems there are not sources out there
Ditto, almost the first thing I do. And I’ve seen reviewers really confused by new windows opening every time they open another directory, and I want to be able to tell them: There’s a single window mode in preferences!
I’d also welcome a tree view. I used to like midnight commander on linux and the windows 3.1 file manager with the two panes side by side to mimic nc/mc.
Today in Linux I just do everything on the command line if I can, and it seems a chore to have to reach for the mouse and open a file manager to drag a file to a chat application or a web browser . But using the mouse has honestly never bothered me on haiku, and perhaps that says something about haiku usability: Doing this stuff is actually enjoyable, even.
Drill down can be a nice and usefull tool, except that if you move the mouse outside the menu or in a wrong position, you loose your (hard reached) path, forcing you to research/recompose the correct path. That’s very annoying.
For example it would be nice if a subfolder can be “fixed” (kept open) with a right button so if your mouse goes out from that subfolder you don’t loose that partial path
