Projectile

Synopsis

Projectile is a project interaction library for Emacs. It provides a powerful set of features operating at the project level, as well as simple heuristics to identify projects.

Here are some of Projectile's essential features:

• jump to a file in a project, ranked by frecency (how recently and often you visit it)
• jump to a project buffer
• jump to a test in a project
• find a file of a given kind and jump between related files (e.g. a Rails model and its controller)
• toggle between files with the same name but different extensions (e.g. .h <-> .c/.cpp, Gemfile <-> Gemfile.lock)
• toggle between code and its test (e.g. main.service.js <-> main.service.spec.js)
• jump to recently visited files in the project
• switch between projects you have worked on
• per-project sessions with tab-bar workspaces (restore each project's window layout and buffers, even across restarts)
• kill (close) all project buffers
• search a project (grep/ripgrep, plus a native reviewable results UI)
• replace in a project, with a reviewable before/after preview
• find references in a project (using xref internally)
• run project commands and custom tasks (build/test/run, make, lein, and your own named tasks)
• run the test at point (tree-sitter, Emacs 29+)
• works with any completing-read-based completion UI (Vertico, Consult, Fido, Ido, etc.)
• automatic project discovery (see projectile-project-search-path)
• integration with the built-in project.el library

There's also a rich ecosystem of third-party Projectile extensions that add even more features.

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I've been developing Projectile for over a decade now (since 2011). While it's a fun project to work on, it still requires a lot of time and energy to maintain.

You can support my work on Projectile via PayPal, Patreon and GitHub Sponsors.

Projectile in Action

Here's a glimpse of Projectile in action (using ivy):

In this short demo you can see:

• finding files in a project
• switching between implementation and test
• switching between projects

Quickstart

The instructions that follow are meant to get you from zero to a running Projectile setup in a minute. Visit the online documentation for (way) more details.

Installation

package.el is the built-in package manager in Emacs.

Projectile is available on all major package.el community maintained repos - NonGNU ELPA, MELPA Stable and MELPA.

You can install Projectile with the following command:

M-x package-install [RET] projectile [RET]

Alternatively, users of Debian 9 or later or Ubuntu 16.04 or later may simply apt-get install elpa-projectile.

Finally add this to your Emacs config:

(projectile-mode +1)
;; Recommended keymap prefix on macOS
(define-key projectile-mode-map (kbd "s-p") 'projectile-command-map)
;; Recommended keymap prefix on Windows/Linux
(define-key projectile-mode-map (kbd "C-c p") 'projectile-command-map)

Those keymap prefixes are just a suggestion. Feel free to put there whatever works best for you.

Basic Usage

Enable projectile-mode, open a file in one of your projects and type a command such as C-c p f.

See the online documentation for more details.

Projectile reads through Emacs's built-in completing-read, so it works with whatever minibuffer completion UI you use. It's fine with the stock completion, but to get the most out of it you're encouraged to enable (and, if needed, install) a modern completion setup such as vertico (paired with consult, marginalia, and orderless) or the built-in fido-vertical-mode. See this section of the documentation for more details.

Note

As of Projectile 3.0 the dedicated ido/ivy/helm completion systems (and the old projectile-completion-system values) were removed in favor of completing-read. Existing setups keep working via your completion UI; helm-projectile and counsel-projectile are unaffected.

Design Goals

In this section you'll find some notes on Projectile's design goals, that have been upheld since the earliest days of the project.

Portability

Projectile provides a nice set of features operating on a project level without introducing external dependencies (when feasible). For instance - finding project files has a portable implementation written in pure Emacs Lisp without the use of GNU find (but for performance's sake an indexing mechanism backed by external commands exists as well).

Simplicity

This library provides easy project management and navigation. The concept of a project is pretty basic - just a folder containing some special file (e.g. a VCS marker or a project descriptor file like pom.xml or Gemfile). Projectile will auto-detect pretty much every popular project type out of the box and you can easily extend it with additional project types.

Easy to Use

The configuration defaults are pretty reasonable and most users will probably never feel a strong need to change them.

All commands are easily discoverable and are unlikely to surprise you with their behavior.

Practicality

Projectile tries to be practical - portability is great, but if some external tools could speed up some task substantially and the tools are available, Projectile will leverage them.

Flexibility

In the classic spirit of Emacs almost every aspect of Projectile's behavior is configurable.

Caveats

• Some operations like search (grep) depend (presently) on external utilities such as find or fd (version 8.3.0+).
  • for older fd version add (setq projectile-generic-command "fd . -0 --type f --color=never") to your init-file
• Commands depending on external utilities might misbehave on the fish shell.
• Using Projectile over TRAMP might be slow in certain cases.
• Some commands might misbehave on complex project setups (e.g. a git project with submodules).
• Projectile was mostly tested on Unix OS-es (e.g. GNU/Linux and macOS), so some functionality might not work well on Windows.
• In Git repositories, deleted files are still shown in projectile-find-file until their deletions are staged, due to a limitation of git ls-files. If you install fd then it is automatically used instead, and does not have this problem. (You can inhibit the use of fd by setting projectile-git-use-fd to nil.)

Known issues

Check out the project's issue list a list of unresolved issues. By the way - feel free to fix any of them and send me a pull request. :-)

Contributors

Here's a list of all the people who have contributed to the development of Projectile (a.k.a. Projectile's Hall of Fame).

Joining this esteemed group of people is only a commit away!

Changelog

A fairly extensive changelog is available here.

License

Copyright © 2011-2026 Bozhidar Batsov and contributors.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3