Frequently Asked Questions

I wanted a name that’s not as boring as project.el and implies that your interaction with projects is going to speed up significantly. :-)

project.el was introduced in Emacs 25.1, released in 2016, and a lot of people have been asking since how do the two packages compare.

Internally they have a lot of differences (e.g. different approach to project discovery and indexing), but from the user standpoint they are probably quite similar these days (circa 2021). Historically, Projectile had a lot more features, but many of them found their way into project.el over the years. If all you need is a way to quickly jump between project files or search/replace inside a project, you can’t go wrong with both.

For me Projectile’s biggest advantage will always be that it’s more community-friendly (e.g. the development happens on GitHub), and it’s not restricted by the FSF contributor agreement, which means that everyone can easily contribute to the project. Of course, this comes with the downside that you have to install Projectile yourselves.

One under-appreciated advantage of Projectile is that it has way more documentation. Okay, that’s only an advantage if you’re one of those rare people who enjoy reading it.

Yeah, it does. I don’t use TRAMP myself, however, so I never paid that much attention to the TRAMP support. It’s mostly community-maintained.

Historically Projectile used to use C-c p as the prefix for all of its commands. I opted for the C-c p prefix fully aware that this violates a very established Emacs convention, mostly because it felt practical and because pressing C-c C-p is not super convenient for many people.

Eventually this was changed in Projectile 2.0. That’s why currently Projectile requires users to select a prefix key for its commands explicitly.

Certainly! In our issue tracker we’ve got plenty of tickets marked with Help Wanted or Good First Issue that you can take a stab at, if you’d like to help out!