mc works well within the gui, you can use the mouse to navigate around and double click things to open/run them.
I also like xterm and have a undecorated desktop window for that also. Ctrl-leftmousepress (and hold) opens up the xterm menu where you can switch it to full screen
I set mc and xterm to be below other windows, so they serve somewhat like a wallpaper. Set mc to open the left pane in your ~/bin folder (executable scripts) and the right pane to open your ~/Documents folder and you can mouse/click to open things from the get-go.

For xterm (and other things) my ~/.Xresources contains
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Xft.dpi: 124
! for xterm ctrl left mouse click menu font size
XTerm*SimpleMenu*font: -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
xterm.termName: xterm-256color
xterm*scrollBar: false
xterm*rightScrollBar: true
xterm*loginshell: true
xterm*cursorBlink: true
xterm*background: black
xterm*foreground: white
xterm.borderLess: true
xterm.cursorBlink: true
xterm*colorUL: red
xterm*colorBD: red
xterm*colorULMode: false
xterm*colorBDMode: false
!fix alt key input
xterm*eightBitInput: false
xterm*altSendsEscape: true
!print color and bold/underline attributes
xterm*printAttributes: 2
xterm*printerCommand: cat > ~/xtermdump
!mouse selecting to copy, ctrl-v to paste
!Ctrl p to print screen content to file
XTerm*VT100.Translations: #override \
Ctrl <KeyPress> Y: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD,PRIMARY,CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
<BtnUp>: select-end(CLIPBOARD,PRIMARY,CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
Ctrl <KeyPress> P: print() \n
!font and locale
! Default and menu font
xterm*locale: true
xterm.utf8: true
xterm*utf8Title: true
xterm*fontMenu*fontdefault*Label: Default
!xterm*faceName: Monaco:antialias=True:pixelsize=15
xterm*faceName: DejaVu Sans:pixelsize=16:antialias=True
!xterm*faceName: monofur:antialias=True:pixelsize=20
!xterm*boldFont: DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Bold:pixelsize=15
xterm*faceNameDoublesize: wenquanyi microhei:pixelsize=16:antialias=True
xterm*xftAntialias: true
xterm*cjkWidth:false
xterm*inputMethod:fcitx
!-- Tango color scheme
*xterm*color0: #2e3436
*xterm*color1: #cc0000
*xterm*color2: #4e9a06
*xterm*color3: #c4a000
*xterm*color4: #3465a4
*xterm*color5: #75507b
*xterm*color6: #0b939b
*xterm*color7: #d3d7cf
*xterm*color8: #555753
*xterm*color9: #ef2929
*xterm*color10: #8ae234
*xterm*color11: #fce94f
*xterm*color12: #729fcf
*xterm*color13: #ad7fa8
*xterm*color14: #00f5e9
*xterm*color15: #eeeeec
I launch the two (top xterm that is running htop in the image above, and lower xterm that runs mc) using
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#!/bin/sh
xterm -geometry 90x8+0+0 -fa DejaVu:size=10:bold &
xterm -geometry 85x24+0+176 -fa DejaVu:size=12 -e "mc /mnt/sda2/home/ff/bin /mnt/sda2/home/ff/Documents" &
If you have curl installed, then create a script called weather with content
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#!/bin/sh
CITY=sw19 # << change to your city/postcode/zipcode
xterm -T "Weather" -geometry 136x44+0+0 -fa DejaVu:size=9 -e "curl wttr.in/~$CITY; read -s -n 1 -p 'Press any key to close . . .'"
Make it executable and you can get a quick multi-day snapshot of your local weather forecast within a terminal window (above geometry is refined for my screen resolution)

xpaint is another old-school but good program. I launch mine using
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#!/bin/sh
xpaint -menufont "Liberation-14:matrix=0.85 0 0 0.9"
as otherwise the default fonts were way too small for my liking
I have radiotray added to my tray and I just scanned around for my favourite radio stations url's and added those to it.
Osmo for calendar, notes, tasks ...etc.
Libreoffice with tray quickstarter for office tools (word processing, drawing, spreadsheet ...etc).
Masterpdf editor (not in repositories and my only non Debian MAIN exception) for PDF editing.
And firefox-ESR
... mostly caters for my needs (I also have Openshot, Blender, Inkscape and Audacity installed for video editing, together with recordmydesktop).
My preferred wm and panel is provided by jwm and pcmanf --desktop (pcmanfm also serves as the filemanager), however currently I'm running LXDE so openbox after having upgraded to Stretch only to discover its still not quite there yet for me, so I reverted back to Jessie.