Using Emacs 79 Project

One of the comments on my last video talked about the new project management support Emacs includes in it's latest version - project.el. I remembered reading about it when it rolled around but then forgot and never checked it out.

Up until recently when working in projects I used Projectile, a great package by Bozhidar Batsov, also known as Bug. I only used it when doing development work - that's when I find myself jumping around within a group of related files. At other times, I'm pretty much in one file, do my thing, then move on.

I wrote a post and did a video on Projectile a while ago - you can check it out [[https://cestlaz.github.io/posts/using-emacs-33-projectile-jump/ ][here]].

As I mentioned in the last video, I decided to rebuild my Emacs config from scratch and I'm trying to be a bit more minimalist so with that reminder I got, I figure it's time to check out the now built in project.el. If it's as good as projectile, or even, good enough, it could be a nice alternative.

At it's core, project.el works similarly to projectile. There's a prefix key an then an action which is restricted to your project. For projectile, it was C-c p and the default for project.el is C-x p. No big difference there. Projectile seems to have many many more options but in general, I find that all I need is

• Switch to a project - C-x p p

• Find or open a file in a project - C-x p f

• Switch buffers in a project - C-x p b

• Delete all the project buffers - C-x p k

• List the project buffers

Project.el has all except listing all the buffers. It also supports a few other features that I think I'll find useful:

• project dired - C-x p d

• project shell (or eshell) C-x p s

• project regex search and variants C-x p g

I'm not sure if projectile has these. It probably does and I could see them being useful. I probable won't use the regex searches much because I'll likely use other tools for those like consult-ripgrep.

So, it certainly seems like project.el has enough coverage for my purposes. Another difference between the two projects is that project.el only supports a couple of project definitions - things that are supported by Emacs' VC system ad things supported by Emacs EDE thing (which I've never really played with). I seem to recall Projectile being more flexible.

In any event, project.el looks like it's a nice simple alternative at least for me. Check out the video for the runthrough: