this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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“Jujutsu (jj) is a version control system with a significantly simplified mental model and command-line interface compared to Git, without sacrificing expressibility or power (in fact, you could argue Jujutsu is more powerful). Stacked-diff workflows, seamless rebases, and ephemeral revisions are all natural with jj [...]”

Part 2 of the series is out and is here.

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (26 children)

Jujutsu does not use branches much because you are focused on the nodes in the commit graph. And instead of giving every of them manually a name, they are identified with change IDs.

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.

As soon as you edit a file, the changes will be included in whatever revision you're currently editing—there's no separate staging area in Jujutsu.

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.

You'll have noticed that at no point so far did we ever think about creating a branch. That's because Jujutsu's relationship to branches is a bit different to Git's—they're just pointers that you move around so they point to whichever revision you want them to at a given time.

"Simpler" apparently means I get to do a lot more book-keeping than when I use git.

[–] naonintendois@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (18 children)

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.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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 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.

[–] naonintendois@programming.dev 1 points 15 hours ago

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.

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