interesting, ive always thought that spacefm was the better version of pcmanfm. i still use pcmanfm just because it looks nicer (and is not newer.) though i do think this warrants more investigation than just dismissal.
filemanagement guis use commands like cp, mv, rm, rmdir, mkdir, chown, chmod, and refresh ls with options.
no? i mean thats true of many guis that call complex command line software, but far less likely for a file manager. you wouldnt even want to do it that way, generally. if spacefm does that, then that might explain the problem nic is having. gui file managers generally call libraries or other apis, they dont call command line tools unless there are library interfaces (like curl has.)