A little more than the command line, a lot less than Midnight Commander, and a home-row-based interface (I don't want to say vi-like, but then again, I just did). This is the file mangler I use, and I thought you might like it. Written in Python.
Python Commander (PyCmdr) is an implementation of two-panel file manager in Python/wxPython. It aims to be a multi-platform file manager with consistent user interface while being fast, efficient, and extensible via scripting and plugin support.