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.

Starting with Projectile 2.7, Projectile will plug automatically its project discovery functions in project.el. You can find more information on the subject in the "Usage" section of the documentation.

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.

Projectile will work without any external dependencies out of the box. However, if you have various tools installed, they will be automatically used when appropriate to improve performance.

Inside version control repositories, VC tools are used when installed to list files more efficiently. The supported tools include git, hg, fossil, bzr, darcs, pijul, svn, sapling and jujutsu.

Outside version control repositories, file search tools are used when installed for a faster search than pure Elisp. The supported tools include fd and GNU/BSD find.

By default, if fd is installed, it is also used inside Git repositories as an alternative to git ls-files, because git ls-files has the limitation that it also lists deleted files until the deletions are staged, which can be confusing. You can eliminate the use of fd in this circumstance by setting projectile-git-use-fd to nil.

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!