It's been a long time ... perhaps 12 or 15 years ... but when I was driving a FreeBSD desktop I would install Konqueror as a file manager and then plug in:

fish://

... addresses and browse SFTP-capable addresses very conveniently.

I have no idea if any of these components (Konqueror ? fish ?) are still in use ?

I thought it was a tremendously convenient workflow and it was nice to not have a different application for file management and SSH file endpoints.

Which leads me to my lament that all these years later you can't just put an sftp:// address into the mac finder. It's an almost comically blatant missing feature.

It still works just as you'd expect in Dolphin (the current KDE file manager), you click in the breadcrumb address bar on top, type in fish:// and the address, and you get a login prompt.

All of the other KIO slaves work as well, certainly SMB/CIFS works great and I use it all the time.

KDE has all these nice convenient little features that just makes everyday tasks a bit easier.

How much KDE Do I need to install just to get dolphin?

That is, if I am using a different window manager such as ion3...

I use dolphin with i3 on arch. It's not nothing (particularly if you install optional deps for features like thumbnailing or search indexing), you have a lot of the foundational modules like kparts and kio required, but it's not like you'll end up installing kdm, kwin, or the desktop apps: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/dolphin/

Depends on how it's packaged you could trivially end up with an extra GB of libraries. I guess it depends on whether that much storage is meaningful.