In the typical style of Emacs, Projectile is extremely configurable. Pretty much every aspect of its behaviour can be tweaked or extended.
In this section we'll go over some of the most common things you might want to fine-tune to make Projectile fit your workflow better.
Project indexing method
Projectile has two modes of operation - one is portable and is
implemented in Emacs Lisp (therefore it's native to Emacs and is known
as the native indexing method
) and the other relies on external
commands like find
, git
, etc to obtain the list of files in a
project.
Since the native indexing mode is much slower, by default the second method is used on all operating systems except Windows. To force the use of native indexing in operating systems other than Windows:
(setq projectile-indexing-method 'native)
To force the use of external indexing in Windows:
(setq projectile-indexing-method 'alien)
This can speed up Projectile in Windows significantly. The disadvantage of this method is that it's not well supported on Windows systems, as it requires setting up some Unix utilities there. If there's problem, you can always use native indexing mode.
Caching
Project files
Since indexing a big project is not exactly quick (especially in Emacs Lisp), Projectile supports caching of the project's files. The caching is enabled by default whenever native indexing is enabled.
To enable caching unconditionally use this snippet of code:
(setq projectile-enable-caching t)
At this point you can try out a Projectile command such as C-c p f (M-x projectile-find-file RET).
Running C-u C-c p f will invalidate the cache prior to prompting you for a file to jump to.
Pressing C-c p z will add the currently visited file to the cache for current project. Generally files created outside Emacs will be added to the cache automatically the first time you open them.
The project cache is persistent and will be preserved during Emacs restarts.
You can purge an individual file from the cache with M-x projectile-purge-file-from-cache
or an
entire directory with M-x projectile-purge-dir-from-cache
.
File exists cache
Projectile does many file existence checks since that is how it identifies a project root. Normally this is fine, however in some situations the file system speed is much slower than usual and can make emacs "freeze" for extended periods of time when opening files and browsing directories.
The most common example would be interfacing with remote systems using TRAMP/ssh. By default all remote file existence checks are cached
To disable remote file exists cache that use this snippet of code:
(setq projectile-file-exists-remote-cache-expire nil)
To change the remote file exists cache expire to 10 minutes use this snippet of code:
(setq projectile-file-exists-remote-cache-expire (* 10 60))
You can also enable the cache for local file systems, that is normally not needed but possible:
(setq projectile-file-exists-local-cache-expire (* 5 60))
Using Projectile everywhere
If you want Projectile to be usable in every directory (even without the presence of project file):
(setq projectile-require-project-root nil)
This might not be a great idea if you start Projectile in your home folder for instance. :-)
Switching projects
When running projectile-switch-project
(C-c p p) Projectile invokes
the command specified in projectile-switch-project-action
(by default it is
projectile-find-file
).
Depending on your personal workflow and habits, you
may prefer to alter the value of projectile-switch-project-action
:
projectile-find-file
This is the default. With this setting, once you have selected your
project via Projectile's completion system (see below), you will
remain in the completion system to select a file to visit. projectile-find-file
is capable of retrieving files in all sub-projects under the project root,
such as Git submodules. Currently, only Git is supported. Support for other VCS
will be added in the future.
projectile-find-file-in-known-projects
Similar to projectile-find-file
but lists all files in all known projects. Since
the total number of files could be huge, it is beneficial to enable caching for subsequent
usages.
projectile-find-file-dwim
If point is on a filepath, Projectile first tries to search for that file in project:
-
If it finds just a file, it switches to that file instantly. This works even if the filename is incomplete, but there's only a single file in the current project that matches the filename at point. For example, if there's only a single file named "projectile/projectile.el" but the current filename is "projectile/proj" (incomplete), projectile-find-file still switches to "projectile/projectile.el" immediately because this is the only filename that matches.
-
If it finds a list of files, the list is displayed for selecting. A list of files is displayed when a filename appears more than one in the project or the filename at point is a prefix of more than two files in a project. For example, if `projectile-find-file' is executed on a filepath like "projectile/", it lists the content of that directory. If it is executed on a partial filename like "projectile/a", a list of files with character 'a' in that directory is presented.
-
If it finds nothing, display a list of all files in project for selecting.
projectile-dired
(setq projectile-switch-project-action #'projectile-dired)
With this setting, once you have selected your project, the top-level directory of the project is immediately opened for you in a dired buffer.
projectile-find-dir
(setq projectile-switch-project-action #'projectile-find-dir)
With this setting, once you have selected your project, you will remain in Projectile's completion system to select a sub-directory of your project, and then that sub-directory is opened for you in a dired buffer. If you use this setting, then you will probably also want to set
(setq projectile-find-dir-includes-top-level t)
in order to allow for the occasions where you want to select the top-level directory.
Completion Options
Ido
By default Projectile uses ido
as its completion system. ido
is
extremely popular and it is built into Emacs.
As already noted above if you're going to use the ido
completion it's
extremely highly recommended that you install the optional
flx-ido package, which provides a much
more powerful alternative to ido
's built-in flex
matching.
Ivy (recommended)
Another completion option is ivy:
(setq projectile-completion-system 'ivy)
Basic (Emacs's default)
If you don't like ido
and ivy
you can use regular completion:
(setq projectile-completion-system 'default)
You might want to combine default completion with icomplete-mode
for optimum results.
Custom Completion Function
You can also set projectile-completion-system
to a function:
(setq projectile-completion-system #'my-custom-completion-fn)
(setq projectile-completion-system
(lambda (prompt choices)
;; ...
))
An example of a custom completion function is this one, which only show the file name (not including path) and if the file selected is not unique, another completion with names relative to project root appears.
Regenerate tags
To be able to regenerate a project's tags via
projectile-tags-command
, you should install Exuberant Ctags
(apt-get install exuberant-ctags
) instead of a plain ctags, which
ships with Emacs distribution.
Adding Custom Project Types
If a project you are working on is recognized incorrectly or you want to add your own type of projects you can add following to your Emacs initialization code
(projectile-register-project-type 'npm '("package.json")
:compile "npm install"
:test "npm test"
:run "npm start"
:test-suffix ".spec")
What this does is:
1. add your own type of project, in this case npm
package.
2. add a file in a root of the project that helps to identify the type, in this case it is package.json
.
3. add compile-command, in this case it is npm install
.
4. add test-command, in this case it is npm test
.
5. add run-command, in this case it is npm start
.
6. add test files suffix for toggling between implementation/test files, in this case it is .spec
, so the implementation/test file pair could be service.js
/service.spec.js
for example.
The available options are:
Option | Documentation |
---|---|
:compilation-dir | A path, relative to the project root, from where to run the tests and compilation commands. |
:compile | A command to compile the project. |
:configure | A command to configure the project. %s will be substituted with the project root. |
:run | A command to run the project. |
:src-dir | A path, relative to the project root, where the source code lives. |
:test | A command to test the project. |
:test-dir | A path, relative to the project root, where the test code lives. |
:test-prefix | A prefix to generate test files names. |
:test-suffix | A suffix to generate test files names. |
Customizing project root files
You can set the values of projectile-project-root-files
,
projectile-project-root-files-top-down-recurring
,
projectile-project-root-files-bottom-up
and
projectile-project-root-files-functions
to customize how project roots are
identified.
To customize project root files settings:
M-x customize-group RET projectile RET
File-local project root definitions
If you want to override the projectile project root for a specific
file, you can set the file-local variable projectile-project-root
. This
can be useful if you have files within one project that are related to
a different project (for instance, Org files in one git repo that
correspond to other projects).
Storing project settings
From project to project, some things may differ even in the same
language - coding styles, auto-completion sources, etc. If you need
to set some variables according to the selected project, you can use a
standard Emacs feature called
Per-directory Local Variables.
To use it you must create a file named .dir-locals.el
(as specified
by the constant dir-locals-file
) inside the project directory. This
file should contain something like this:
((nil . ((secret-ftp-password . "secret")
(compile-command . "make target-x")
(eval . (progn
(defun my-project-specific-function ()
;; ...
)))))
(c-mode . ((c-file-style . "BSD"))))
The top-level alist member referenced with the key nil
applies to
the entire project. A key with the name eval
will evaluate its
corresponding value. In the example above, this is used to create a
function. It could also be used to e.g. add such a function to a key
map.
You can also quickly visit or create the dir-locals-file
with
C-c p E (M-x projectile-edit-dir-locals RET).
Here are a few examples of how to use this feature with Projectile.
Configuring Projectile's Behavior
Projectile exposes many variables (via defcustom
) which allow users
to customize its behavior. Directory variables can be used to set
these customizations on a per-project basis.
You could enable caching for a project in this way:
((nil . ((projectile-enable-caching . t))))
If one of your projects had a file that you wanted Projectile to ignore, you would customize Projectile by:
((nil . ((projectile-globally-ignored-files . ("MyBinaryFile")))))
If you wanted to wrap the git command that Projectile uses to list the files in you repository, you could do:
((nil . ((projectile-git-command . "/path/to/other/git ls-files -zco --exclude-standard"))))
If you want to use a different project name than how Projectile named your project, you could customize it with the following:
((nil . ((projectile-project-name . "your-project-name-here"))))
Configure a Project's Compilation, Test and Run commands
There are a few variables that are intended to be customized via .dir-locals.el
.
- for compilation -
projectile-project-compilation-cmd
- for testing -
projectile-project-test-cmd
- for running -
projectile-project-run-cmd
When these variables have their default value of nil
, Projectile
runs the default command for the current project type. You can
override this behavior by setting them to either a string to run an
external command or an Emacs Lisp function:
(setq projectile-test-cmd #'custom-test-function)
Idle Timer
Projectile can be configured to run the hook
projectile-idle-timer-hook
every time Emacs is in a project and has
been idle for projectile-idle-timer-seconds
seconds (default is 30
seconds). To enable this feature, run:
M-x customize-group RET projectile RET
and set projectile-enable-idle-timer
to non-nil. By default,
projectile-idle-timer-hook
runs projectile-regenerate-tags
. Add
additional functions to the hook using add-hook
:
(add-hook 'projectile-idle-timer-hook #'my-projectile-idle-timer-function)
Mode line indicator
By default the minor mode indicator of Projectile appears in the form
" Projectile[ProjectName]". This is configurable via the custom variable
projectile-mode-line
, which expects a sexp like
'(:eval (format " Proj[%s]" (projectile-project-name)))
.
The project name will not appear by default when editing remote files (via TRAMP), as recalculating the project name (this is done on every keystroke) is a fairly slow operation there.
Warning
Be extremely careful about what you put here, as all the code in the lighter gets evaluated on every keystroke!