To be fair this is a terminal file manager… only a certain kind of person will be interested in the first place, and those people are likely to be more inclined to leave a star on GitHub.
Personally I believe the stars were achieved naturally but of course there’s no way to know and it never hurts to be skeptical.
Other people have given great reasons, but I will also mention that as someone who lives inside the terminal it’s often faster and easier to open it right there rather than getting a GUI one going. I do still use one for things that are easier to do with a graphical file manager though, no problem having both
That’s because it works very well, and the main developer is super active (I’ve contributed and made some plugins so have interacted with them a fair bit)
I mainly use it inside neovim actually, in place of the built in file manager or a file tree. Also use it if I want to quickly see the image files in a directory (it shows the images in the terminal), or rename a bunch of files. And then rarely for other file related activities as it makes exploring a directory very smooth
Realised I never responded to this - I’ll hold the L on that reasoning, didn’t think that through. I grant that you may be right about the stars, but I’m still doubtful due to my anecdotal experience of seeing a lot of activity around the repo + discord server from 4k stars to over 10k (while I was following it semi-closely). Entirely possible though, of course.