Whatever you use Emacs for, you'll definitely want these packages set up to get blistering fast code and file navigation.

Blistering fast M-x

Install smex and you'll never look back. It makes you so much faster in Emacs as it not only auto completes whatever you do with M-x , but it also remembers what you did previously, listing often used commands at the top.

Out of the box IDO setup for all your project Install

projectile and get automatic setup of IDO for all your projects.

Projectile will also give you other project specialised features such as:

searching for a string inside your project using projectile-grep , I use this all of the time, quite seldom, I venture back to grep-find .

replacing a string in the project

All of this for free. No setup required.

While you're at it, also consider installing these packages for an even better IDO experience:

To see my full IDO & friends setup, check out my settings here:

Find file at point

It's a breeze navigating referenced files in your configuration files using the built-in find-file-at-point .

Word completion

In addition to the built-in dabbrev-expand which will expand any word, I recommend that you install the excellent auto-complete package and turn it on in all modes. It gives you a nice intellisense like menu where you can auto complete any word/method name that you have in a buffer.

Sentence & block completion

The built-in hippie-expand will let you auto complete previously written blocks of code, or indeed sentences.

Summary

With these packages in place, you will dramatically improve the speed with which you fly through your Emacs windows and buffers!