That said, ranger seems pretty slick for what it is.
Now, that 1:1 identity is broken. You can have multiple windows showing the content of the same directory. Also, you can have multiple icons on screen 'pointing' to the same file.
This may look like a minor change, but the feel of the UI is very different. It feels much less a direct manipulation interface.
Yes, Mac OS already was slightly inconsistent. Open and save dialogs could show directories and Windows that wer visible in the Finder. However, these felt as part of the application, and were very focused on the task at hand. Icons in those dialogs felt as representations of files, not as the files themselves. Also, there were aliases, but being files, they maintained the 1:1 correspondence between icons and files. Altogether, those things never killed that illusion of 'an icon _is_ a file, a window _is_ a directory'.
Because Mac OS X is a multi-user system, I think Mac OS X had to break this rule (network shares were already stretching the metaphor (almost) beyond breaking years before Mac OS X), but even today, it still feels like a loss to me.
[1] An oldie, but a goodie: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder
After using vim movements in a file manager, my finding was that pressing 10j or 5gg etc to go to a file is a slow cumbersome way to move around, when you usually just want to open a file/page it or run an action on it. That's why using hints (as in vimperator) or shortcuts for each file is a much faster way of navigating. Just jump with one keystroke.
Similarly it's cool to have vim bindings like "dG" or "d3gg" etc in your file manager (vimfm and zfm have it) but these are not really features that make a difference. It's the speed of getting 90% of your workflow done, and shortcuts/hints are what get that done fastest.
Re: "The secondary task of ranger is to psychically guess which program you want to use for opening particular files.", you can also do `open somefile' to have that file opened in its default app.
And does anyone know if there is anything for OS X that clones your current directory between a terminal and a Finder window? That would be amazingly useful.
% open .
EDIT: And you can drag the little thumb icon in a Finder window's title over to a Terminal and it'll insert the path corresponding to that window at point.
brew install ranger