mc for mac osx! GNU Midnight Commander – mc – is an excellent orthodox text mode file manager.
mc runs in your console, and has mouse support. It also has support for utf-8. It has a builtin editor (though you can configure your own, so you can use vim if you’d like).
Three of its best features are support for browsing inside compressed files (eg .zip or .tar.gz) remote shell support (so you can have one pane browsing local filesystems and another logged in via ssh to a remote system and you can copy files between hosts) and last, but not least, a nice dialog for doing lots of things, like creating .tar.bz archives of the current working directory!
I have used it for at least the last 10 years on linux and windows. Probably every day. You can get mc for mac osx too.
Thank! For MakOS Yosemite, the 3rd method is the simplest.