When I first started using PhpStorm (my current IDE) I noticed that I was applying a number of the same project-specific settings during each new project. Being a good (i.e. properly lazy) programmer, I figured that this should be automatable, so I dug into the project metadata that PhpStorm keeps in each project's .idea directory (at least on OS X). I found that with a few string substitutions I could create a template project with all the settings the way I like them, and then clone that metadata directory into each new project I created. You'll find a sanitized version of the script I use in this Github repo. Hope it saves someone out there some time.