How useful is project manager?

[Jared Greathouse]

I don't have a coding question, I'm just curious about if anyone's found a use for the "project" aspect of Stata. I've tinkered around with it before, but I don't see the utility of it since I've never sat around and worked with it. I see how StataCorp advertises it, and that's fine, but are the startup costs of learning it worth it?

If anyone has experience using or, or is a big proponent of using it, could you please talk a little about your experience with it or why I might want to use it? I already break my projects down into Master Do Files and sub files and so on, so does anyone have any thoughts about if project might be useful for serious empirical work?

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Some people like it, some don't, and YMMV depending on what workflow works best for you. The project file is really nothing special, just a zip file container and your organized files inside. I never got started using it in any serious way because I like integrating my workflows (typically) with Git, and Git is perfectly suited to working with raw text files already (and behind the scenes, doing it's thing with compressed versions, etc). If you aren't someone that uses a formal version control system, then this may very well work for you.

[Jared Greathouse]

Leonardo Guizzetti I figured this was about the case.

Git is simply a Stata implementation that allows Stata to work with........ GitHub, right?

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Git is simply a Stata implementation that allows Stata to work with........ GitHub, right?

Not sure if you're making a joke here, but I'll interpret as an earnest question. Git is a formal version control system for your files, principally source code. A popular implementation of Git is Github, which adds many niceties of sharing projects and fostering collaborations with people via the web. The core idea of git is that you check in snapshots of your files as you go along writing, modifying, refactoring, improving and breaking things. In turn, it provides you with a way to preserve that history, fork your timeline to try out new things, merge timelines/features together, etc. The main way that I interface with it is via the command line (using the enhanced shell that comes with the git installation for Windows). There can be a big or little learning curve to this, depending on how advanced you want to be. I admit my use case is quite modest and the learning curve is quite gentle, in large part because I am also the only person working on my projects (typically).

On the Stata front, there's the great package -github- by E.F. Haghish which allows one to fetch packages from Github repositories. I'm not aware of any other integration with git in general, nor Github specifically.

[Jared Greathouse]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 oh no I was quite serious Leonardo Guizzetti.

But it sounds quite useful. Me, I just use Python to open my github and upload my files..... but I guess there's an easier way to do stuff with the right tools.

[Felix Bittmann]

Personally, I use the manager to keep an overview of all my do files. I think its quite neat to have them all in one place. If you have more complex analyses you can also group them together in sub-folders, which can be helpful.

[Attaullah Shah]

I tried the project manager a few times but it did not catch my fancy. I did not find any improvement in my productivity with this tool. I think the two main uses of the project manger are (1) list of files tied together (2) a project explorer.

[Erik Reinbergs]

I think the project manager would be much more useful if it 'live tracked' the root project folder. I understand that some people would want to separate the organization of the real files and the organization of the stata project, but I wonder if that's the minority of use cases. It's strange that if I add or move a file within the root project folder, the stata project basically breaks. The only way to fix it is to remove the root folder from the stata project and add it back. But doing that all the time seems to basically defeat the purpose of a project manager. A project system that is based on the root project folder (like an .rproj) seems more sensible, especially since a lot of stata users have project-level-folder organization systems for the project. Maybe there could be an option to turn on and off 'live tracking' like this so both sets of users could be happy?

[Bert Lloyd]

I like it as a way to keep do-files (and ado, etc) organized and handily available while working in the editor. I do think there is room for improvement, and have made some suggestions in the Wishlist for Stata 19 here:

In the Project pane, if you right-click on a file, there should be options to "Copy filename and filepath to clipboard," "Copy filename only to clipboard," "Copy filepath only to clipboard," "Open file location in File Explorer" (or corresponding for other OS)

If you have two or more Do-file Editor windows open, it should be allowed to open the same Project in more than one editor window. (I can see why it might not make sense to allow editing the same project in different windows at the same time, but I don't see any harm in allowing the user to use the project to open files.)

[Bert Lloyd]

The project file is really nothing special, just a zip file container and your organized files inside.

Wait, does the .stpr file actually contain the files, or just references to their names and locations? I thought it was the latter.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Wait, does the .stpr file actually contain the files, or just references to their names and locations? I thought it was the latter.

Looking at this again I'm mistaken. I'm not sure what I was referring to.

The project file appears to be a Java tree object containing references to files on disk, but not the files themselves.

[George Ford]

I've used it some, and think about it at other times, but usually not.

My flow is DATA, PROGRAMS, ANALYSIS, so it's nice to have it all listed there. If more complex, then I might use it.