Another point for projectile - 3 main features: 1. Open project. Projectile uses source control files eg. .git to establish the project root, and remembers it

Another point for projectile - 3 main features: 1. Open project. Projectile uses source control files eg. .git to establish the project root, and remembers it. It's very smart about it, in my experience. No configuration required. 2. Open file in project. With the project root established, open any file that's part of the project. Notably this excludes files that are eg. ignored by .gitignore. Again, very smart behavior. If you know generally what you are looking for, you should be able to find it in a few keystrokes. 3. Grep in project. If I'm working in something that doesn't play too nice with looking up references, or generally just can't find it, this is the next best thing. It's just grep, but within the scope of your project, and a nice interactive list of files to be searched or perused at your leisure. I also use ibuffer, but I guess you would probably have the same issues with it as with dired. Both are just emacs buffers and can be searched, etc. just as any other buffer. Mostly I use iBuffer to make sure buffers are saved and close them en masse.