Projectile versus project.el

As both projects are moving targets this page might not reflect the differences between them accurately.

Projectile was created at a time when Emacs didn’t feature built-in project navigation functionality. Eventually this changed in Emacs 25 with the introduction of project.el and a lot of people have been asking what are the advantages of using Projectile over the built-in library. This section of the documentation will try to answer this question.

When project.el was originally introduced it’s feature-set was quite spartan, but it has added some new features in every Emacs release and circa 2024 it should cover the needs of most casual users. I’m guessing that Projectile inspired many features in project.el, and Projectile itself was inspired by tools like IntelliJ IDEA.

TLDR;

If the functionality in project.el is good enough for you than you should probably use project.el.

At a glance

As of early 2024. (Projectile 2.8 and project.el in Emacs 29)
Projectile project.el

Created in

2011

2014 [1]

Supported Emacs versions

25+

25+ [2]

Built-in

no

yes

Package Availability

MELPA, MELPA Stable, NonGNU ELPA

GNU ELPA

Indexing Strategies

3 (native, hybrid, alien)

1 (similar to Projectile’s alien strategy)

Native Project Config

Yes (.projectile)

No

Project Cache

Yes

No

Built-in Project Types

60+

n/a

Number of Configuration Options

~90

~20

Number of Commands

80+

30+

Minor Mode

Yes

No

Global Keybindings

Require user setup

Out-of-the-box (C-x p)

Integration with xref

Yes

Yes

Feature-set

Extensive

Essential

Extensions

~20

~10

Contribution Process

Light-weight

Somewhat complicated (standard for Emacs)

Notable Differences

Minor Mode vs Global Keymap

Projectile makes heavy use of projectile-mode, which provides some additional features (e.g. project status in the modeline). You can use Projectile without it, but I guess few people do so. Most of Projectile’s functionality will work fine even if the mode is not active.

project.el on the other hand, just adds its own keymap under the global keymap (using the prefix C-x p). You can do the same for Projectile, of course, if you want to.

Project Indexing Strategies

Projectile has multiple project indexing strategies to cover a wide variety of use cases. project.el has only one, which is more or less the same as Projectile’s alien strategy. Admittedly, that’s probably the most commonly used strategy.

.projectile

Projectile has it’s own project marker/configuration file. It’s a remnant of the early days of the project where a wanted to build a tool that didn’t rely on the third-party applications and it’s significance today is not that big. (it will be completely ignored unless you’re using native or hybrid indexing)

Projectile’s Pros

  • Projectile targets Emacs 25, so you can get all the features even with older Emacs releases

  • Projectile has different project indexing strategies, which offer you a lot of flexibility in different situations

  • Projectile supports a lot of project types out-of-the-box (e.g. ruby, Rails, cabal and dune)

  • Projectile has a lot more features, although one can argue that some of them are rarely needed

    • Projectile’s Commander is pretty cool for project switching!

  • It’s easier to contribute to Projectile

    • Projectile is hosted in GitHub

    • It accepts pull requests

    • You don’t need to sign a contributor agreement

  • Projectile has more extensive documentation

Projectile’s Cons

  • Third-party dependency, developed outside of Emacs. This is both a pro and con depending on one’s perspective, but I know that many people prefer built-in packages, so I’ve put it under "cons".

    • Built-in packages in theory should be maintained better (or at least for longer), as they have the Emacs team behind them.

    • While Projectile has a rich ecosystem of extensions, over a long enough period of time likely project.el will take the lead.

  • Due to its larger size, one can argue that Projectile is more complex than project.el

    • Admittedly I would have done some things differently if were starting Projectile today, but I don’t think Projetile’s core complexity is high.

1. It was introduced in Emacs 25.1.
2. Note that the versions bundled with older Emacsen will miss some of its modern features. project.el is distributed as a package as well, so you can still get some of the newer functionality on older Emacsen.