I've been working on mk-project.el, my Emacs project library. I wanted to write up the changes I've made.

Bug Fix: Kill TAGS buffer on project-unload

When the project is unloaded, reset the variables use by the tags facility as well as deleting the buffer associated with the project's tags file.

New Feature: Save/restore open files on project-unload/load

When a project is unloaded, store the names of the open project files in a cache file. When loading the project, create buffers for the files listed in the cache file. To enable the feature, specify a cache file with 'open-files-cache' in the project's definition. For example:

(project-def "my-proj"
      '((basedir          "/home/me/my-proj/")
        (src-patterns     ("*.java" "*.jsp"))
        (ignore-patterns  ("*.class" "*.wsdl"))
        (tags-file        "/home/me/my-proj/TAGS")
        (file-list-cache  "/home/me/.my-proj-files")
        (open-files-cache "/home/me/.my-proj-open-files")
        (vcs              git)
        (compile-cmd      "ant")
        (startup-hook     myproj-startup-hook)
        (shutdown-hook    nil)))

New Feature: Version tags in the source

Given that I've already published several versions of this library, I'm a late in adding this. But now the elisp source includes a variable holding the version of the library. The version corresponds to tags in my git repo. I'm calling this version 1.0.1.

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I've posted a new project handling library to the Emacs Wiki: mk-project.el. A "project" in this sense is a directory of source files. You define a named project and provide settings for it: base directory, source file patterns, file patterns to ignore, the TAGS file, the compile command, etc.

Features:

• Quickly switch between projects, optionally closing the files in the old project.
• Use the new project's TAGS file -- and be able to rebuild the TAGS file based on project settings.
• Run find-grep from the new project's base directory, ignoring certain files or directories based on project settings.
• Run compile with the project's preferred compile command.
• Open any file in the project quickly based on regex matches.
• Quickly open dired on the project's base directory.
• Define per-project startup and shutdown hooks -- useful for opening often-used files.

Perhaps the feature I'm happiest with is project-find-file. The library maintains a list of all the files under the project's base directory in a special buffer, *file-list*. Project-find-file ask for a regular expression representing part of a file's path or name and either 1) opens the file if there is only one match in *file-list*, or 2) allows selecting among the matching files with Emacs' built-in completion mechanism. Also, it sometimes comes in handy to search buffer *file-list* directly when you want an overview of the entire project. I often work with projects having thousands of files in deep folder hierarchies so project-find-file is very convenient.

After writing my library, I discovered a similar library, ProjMan by David Shilvock. The project operations we offer are similar - we even recommend similar keybindings! ProjMan is perhaps more complete, but I don't feel my time was wasted writing mk-project.el -- elisp is pleasure to code in.

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