this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
28 points (86.8% liked)
Programming
21924 readers
610 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Jj's closest equivalent of branches are bookmarks, but they don't auto update when you pull from a remote. I wish it was more like a git branch in that sense.
However, editing past commits and reorganizing the tree is MUCH easier in jj. It feels like the commands are more in line with what I want to do rather than having to figure out the specific set of git commands to do what I want.
I did find the "adding EVERYTHING" behavior to be annoying initially. My workaround was to create a local folder and add it to git ignore and push all those temp files there.
YMMV but I've found it much easier to manage complex workflows with jj compared to git.
I can see that - but that's a "less frequent" task than me switching between branches. And the auto-commit-everything mixed with "you need to lookup a hash ID for each thing you're working on" workflow is very frequent and obnoxious.
You don't always need the hash id. @ is equivalent to HEAD, there's also @- for HEAD~, @-- for HEAD~2, etc. with jj log the revset can also be a complex expression https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/revsets/. You can also create a bookmark to track a remote git branch that's also updated when you fetch. But you have to move the bookmark when you make changes locally.
My observation is that one happens to edit the commit graph much more often because it is so effortless.
And the analogous thing to switching a branch is:
to get the log. And then, with say "qx" being the abbreviated commit id I want to append the next change to:
and now I am already working at the right series of changes.
Because I like a lot to focus on one single thing, the next thing I do is often
which opens $EDITOR with the commit description and lets me write down what I am going to add or change.
That commit description also shows up in the log command, so I know always what the change is about.
It is no secret that git's interface is a bit too complex - even XKCD has made fun of it.
But what is amusing is that people now have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, and plain refuse to believe there could be something better.
(Perhaps motivated by the long list of half-assed helper interfaces and GUIs which just were hapless trying to hide the sprawling complexity).
Wow - way to just brush away any and all criticism as "that sounds like a you problem".
jujutsu changes a lot of the affordances to manage changes and I understand that many people will be reluctant to use such a changed interface - for one, after they have spent so much time with learning the git CLI, and also because there are dozens of alternative git UIs and VCSes which claim to offer something simpler.
But: jujutsu offers about similar power and flexibility as git, while requiring much less UI complexity. The proof for this is the much, much smaller amount of required documentation as well as practice before one can work productively with it.
All the changed elements give a very orthogonal and cohesive whole, which is very rare for software of that complexity.
Will this work for everyone? Probably not, that happens extremely rarely.
Will many people pick it up on a whim? No, change does not happen that way. In the ideal case, a kind of logistic function but adoption will be very unlikely to be as rapid as git's adoption.
Will experienced git users drop the work they have to do and spend half a day to try a new tool? Some do, and this is good. Some don't, and this is also good.
So, no, I don't have a problem. People have time and decide to look at something or they don't. Both is fine.
You lost all credibility when you just blamed my criticism on "stockholm syndrom". Sorry buddy.
Right but that's mostly because the CLI is a mess, not because the fundamental data model is bad.
Telling people they have Stockholm syndrome is not a good way to convince them to change their behavior. Present the pros, be honest about the cons and let people make their own decisions. The jj workflow isn't for everyone, and sometimes people's git workflows are simple enough that there isn't a benefit to learning a new tool. I like jj because I have to deal with complicated workflows for work and jj makes them much easier. At a different job it was much simpler and I wouldn't have paid too much attention to jj.
I do a lot of complicated stuff with git - what sort of workflow does this solve for you?
git rebase -iandgit squashwork well for combining commits and cleaning up history. I'm not finding anything aboutjjyet that does better? And I'm finding a lot about it that are just deal breakers (auto-commit everything, make me lookup hashes of things).I have to work with Gerrit, which requires amending existing commits after they've been pushed to the remote branch to address comments. I'll frequently have lots of commits I'm working on above the commit in review. Along with a couple other branches. Every commit also has to compile and pass tests. I'll frequently go git rebase -i --autosquash paired with git fixup. I've made mistakes before that are hard to untangle. With jj it's just jj edit .
Or if I want to insert a commit between two others it's just jj new -A to create a new commit after the change id (but BEFORE the previous change that was after the commit). With git I'd need to commit then rebase, put it in the right slot and recompile, rerun tests, re-edit. If I work on a branch I'd need to rebase, possible merge conflicts. jj just puts me on that commit then helps me manage merge conflicts going up. It's fewer commands focused on what I want to do and less on the tree like git.
squashexists but it squashes commits.The rebase command is a bit more flexible but a key difference is handling of conflicts: They represent as regions with conflict markers in the conflicted text regions and all following commits/changes, and they disappear once the conflict has been resolved. No weird interim stated and
git rebase --abort. If you want the old state back, you only need to dojj undoand that's it.