Searching for a good file manager

Question

I'm searching for a good file manager. Konqueror 3.5 is quite good, dolphin 4.1 and konqueror 4.1 are not. Since konqueror 3.5 is going to die due to lack of support in the future, I kind of need to find a new good file manager...
Do there exist file managers with the following features?
Many of these features are things I thought were quite logical to be in a file manager, but seem to be missing in most "modern" ones...
-independent of any desktop (gnome or KDE), just a standalone program
-preferably not being both a web browser and file manager in once, at least not in an annoying way. Konqueror 3.5 shows that being that combination is possible without being annoying.
-ability to have a tree view of the folders on one side and list view showing the files and subfolders of the folder currently selected in the tree on the other side
-detailed list view showing at least filename, type, date and size, and the ability to sort according to any of these properties
-a non-detailed view showing image contents would also be nice, to browse folders of photos or other images
-ability to open files in certain programs if you doubleclick the file, NOT open it by singleclicking, singleclicking may only select it
-ability to select multiple files by dragging box around files or using keys like "ctrl" and "shift"
-ability to do "open terminal here" or type terminal commands in the current open directory
-must have ability to drag files from one folder to another, from list view to tree view and vica versa, to move or copy them
-and must have ability to use "ctrl+c" and "ctrl+v" to copy files and foldes from here to there
-multiple tabs is a huge plus
-favorites (to local folder paths) is also a huge plus
-preview of files when hovering the mouse over them is nice
-must have ability to zip and unzip (or other compression formats) folders by just right clicking them and choosing a zip/unzip command there
-in addition to that, must also have ability to browse through a zip file as you would through a normal directory, and drag files from the insides of the zip file to the tree view to automatically unzip those files there, and of course "ctrl+c"/"ctrl+v" should also work to copy a file from the inside of the zip file, to some other folder on your disk
-no horizontal autoscrolling in the tree view, that is an invention straight from the abyss...

Answer 1

I know exactly how you feel about KDE 4 vs. 3 -- Konqueror was the best part of KDE for me (pretty much the only part I ever used, actually; my window manager is a slightly modified version of WMII and I generally loathe "desktop environments"). KDE 4 ruined it, completely and utterly.
I submitted about 20 different bug reports about Konqeuror 4, mostly features that they'd deleted or mangled; some of them are starting to be addressed now. I don't think they'll ever fix the speed issues though, because those are dependent on the underlying KDE 4 libraries as far as I can tell -- it's as if KDE 4 were purposely and deliberately designed to be slower than KDE 3. Even if they fix all of its deficiencies, that'll probably keep me from using it...
Right now there's KDEmod, which will hopefully maintain its KDE 3 branch for a while longer. It's starting to show some problems, though; I haven't been able to get kdemod konqueror 3 to work fully out of the box (the settings pages are all blank). On my main machine, I somehow managed to hack together some of the KDEmod3 packages so that I have a functional konqueror 3 running alongside the Arch repository's version of KDE4. I'm afraid to pacman -Syu now, though, because it will probably break horribly :P
I don't remember exactly how I got konqueror 3 going like that, as I did it in my initial fit of rage after I did the pacman -Syu that got me KDE4 (a decision I have regretted ever since), but it was something like this:
1. move /opt to /opt.kde4
2. make a new /opt
3. download several KDE 3 packages from the KDEmod3 repositories manually
4. extract those packages into the new /opt with tar -xzf (NOT pacman!)
5. try /opt/kde/bin/konqueror
6. read reams of error messages about missing libraries, segfaults, etc.
7. try to supply the missing libraries by downloading other kdemod3 packages and manually extracting them
8. goto 5
Then, when everything worked (sort of), I renamed some stuff so that 'konqueror' is konqueror 4 (I think having it konqueror 3 broke something else, but I don't remember what), and konqueror 3 is called 'k3nqueror'.
If KDEmod3 ever goes away and there's no other good replacement file manager by then, I'll probably take the source code of KDE3 and try to make a standalone version of konqueror out of it. (Which will probably be quite a project because of how interdependent all the KDE components are.)
Some features I "need" in a file manager, besides the ones you mentioned:
- Konqueror's tree view (where you can expand folder branches in the file list)
- Infinite view splitting -- I frequently have my konqueror windows split into 4, sometimes as many as 6 or 7 view panes. Very useful for sorting out files.
- Selection rectangles are sensitive only over files -- I find full-row-select really annoying, because there are no guaranteed "blank" areas that you can click on to clear a selection. I also use this behaviour to grab long-named files that are interspersed with short ones, because they hilight first when the rectangle touches them (you wouldn't think this very useful, but surprisingly often you do want to do something to all the long-named files...)
- Right-clicking on a folder and clicking "Paste" pastes into that folder, not the current one -- you'd be amazed at how many file managers get this wrong. I shouldn't have to cd into a folder just to paste some files there.