this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Programming
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This is... unforgivably obnoxious. What's the point of this? That's like saying "Instead of giving every directory a name manually you identify them by inode." The entire point of branches is to have a name that has meaning to me that I can use to refer to work I'm doing.
I create log files of runs, temporary helper scripts, build output, etc. in my working copy all the time. And this thing is going to "save me the burden" of having to add files manually by just adding... everything it sees.
"Simpler" apparently means I get to do a lot more book-keeping than when I use git.
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.