When comparing Caja vs Nemo, the Slant community recommends Nemo for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for UNIX-like systems?” Nemo is ranked 7th while Caja is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Nemo is:
The most stylish among all FMs.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to configure
Pro It has a reasonable set of features, out of the box
Not too much cluttered, but enough customizable.
Pro Caja script extension makes it more useful
Caja script extension adds your script in script menu, then passes the file name as a parameter. This allows you to run operation which is not included in Caja.
Pro Allows you to access remote or local locations
You can click the Files entry in the panel to access a specific location (remote or local), connect to a certain server (FTP, SFTP, SAMBA, etc.), access your bookmarks, open a new window, as well as to change its default functionality.
Pro Open or run as administrator in the right-click-menu of the mouse
Pro It just works
Customizable and clean, this is crushing that garbage nautilus, the overrated p.o.s. gnome destroyed.
Pro Elegant
The most stylish among all FMs.
Pro Extendable
Nemo can be extended to have additional features through third party plugins.
Pro Easily open as root
Option to open folder as root from within the right click menu.
Pro Easily open file location in terminal
Option to open a folder in terminal, which can help executing commands such as bash.
Pro Has dual pane functionality
This functionality was removed in Nautilus and Dolphin at least in Ubuntu-Gnome, but Nemo kept this option, making the obvious functionality of cut, copy and paste much easier.
Pro Double pane and search by name capabilities
Pro Supports bookmarking
You can bookmark folders that you open often, this way you can easily access them from anywhere while using Nemo.
Pro Good networking options
Supports ftp, ssh and samba connections.
Pro Queues file operations
Cons
Con Frequently very slow to transfer multiple small files
Folders move fine, but it chokes on files, where other browsers take seconds.
Con Mostly unconfigurable
There are not many ways to configure Caja to fit your needs. Besides what can be seen in the settings button you can't configure it further.
Con Sort Order / Limited Configuration Options
It ignores special characters when sorting files and folders. Underscore, tilde, bracket, ASCII characters, .... everthing not recognized in numeric/alpha sorting. Also, I found no way to remove the triangle to reveal contents of sub-folders rather than opening... but I did quit looking after several seemly unalterable functionality issues.
Con Very slow to list thousands of files
Unusably so.
Con Changing the background color or font type for customization is not practical
You have to do it with finding and editing the relevant CSS files. No buttons, menus or sliders for such customization.
Con Incomplete mimetypes
Like all nautilus forks it allows you to run svg-files due some incomplete mimetype coverage.
Con Depends on GNOME
Depends on gnome toolkits an libraries.
