@ramob hmmm, sounds like you might be looking for the ancient forgotten beast called file manager. It's hierarchical and links are usually just plain text (gf in vim to follow path under cursor). Nerdtree is popular one. I use vimfiler + unite.vim, which covers pretty much everything, safe copy/cut/paste, bulk rename, file search, grep in directory, file type associations, and probably a lot more with the new neovim versions (defx.nvim, denite.nvim).
@namark thanks I'll have to look into those. To be honest my vimrc is pretty baren so far.