30.2 Working with Projects

A project is a collection of files used for producing one or more programs. Files that belong to a project are typically stored in a hierarchy of directories; the top-level directory of the hierarchy is known as the project root.

Whether a given directory is a root of some project is determined by the project-specific infrastructure, known as project backend. Emacs currently supports two such backends: VC-aware (see Version Control), whereby a VCS repository is considered a project; and EDE (see EDE). This is expected to be extended in the future to support additional types of projects.

Which files do or don’t belong to a project is also determined by the project backend. For example, the VC-aware backend doesn’t consider “ignored” files (see VC Ignore) to be part of the project. See its entry below for description and related options.

User Option: project-mode-line

If this user option is non-nil, Emacs displays the name of the current project (if any) on the mode line; clicking mouse-1 on the project name pops up the menu with the project-related commands. The default value is nil. If the value is non-remote, Emacs will show the name of the project only for local files; this comes in handy when updating the mode line for projects on remote systems is slow due to network latencies.