I don't get why people like jujutsu. I tried it for a while but I work with a quite a few people in the same repo and I need easy named branches that keep up with commits. For all the many problems in git, branches are dead easy. That was the big innovation over svn at the time.
Last time I tried jj, branches were an extremely laborious process to keep up to date. I don't see how people that aren't working alone can work with that. I have numerous branches in flight at any given time, and my colleagues do as well. The idea of manually keeping them pointed at the right commit is just nuts.
Maybe they've fixed that astonishing choice since then, and I'd give things another go if they did. But branches and worktrees are how I operate.
Regarding the article, I have no idea what is going on as I'm red-green color deficient.
I think much of the problem with this thread is people trying to convince one way is superior/inferior.
There are just multiple different ways of working. Some ways fit some people's mental models better.
You're not going to get a definitive "jujutsu is better than git" or vice versa. You should accept that some people have no problems with what you've described using jujutsu, and likewise jujutsu users should understand that not everyone can handle jj as well as they can.
Imagine a different thread where jj users take your exact scenario, and complain about solving the problem with git. You wouldn't understand their pain, because it's not painful for you. This thread is the same, just with jj and git reversed.
Personally, I don't see the pain you have. Back when I used git a lot, if I left a branch for a few weeks, I'd forget the name of the branch and would have to list all the branches (and set an alias to sort by and list the last commit dates of each) to discover the appropriate branch name. It's really not all that different from looking at all (recent) heads. Once you get used to this, you stop naming branches - other than to share with others. And when you do share with them, you cannot push (newer) changes because only bookmarked nodes and their parents can be pushed - so just prior to pushing, you advance the bookmark. With the shells I use, it's a few keystrokes before autocomplete/fzf produces the command for me - no mental effort at all.
You definitely wouldn't advance the bookmark with each commit. Only when you need to push.
And oh man, it's so nice not to have to manage all the branches. With git, I'd routinely go and delete old branches to declutter. With jj, there's simply no need to. The same with stashes. It's really nice not having to do that labor, and simultaneously not dealing with long lists.
If this doesn't appeal to you - that's fine. You're not deficient. But understand, nor are those for whom your workflow sucks.
How different people approach workflows is fascinating.
For example, your "not all that different from looking at all (recent) heads" implies that the number of (recent) heads isn't far off from number of (would-be-)branches (i.e. no random offshoot experiments, stashed-away debug sessions; whereas I make many of such continuously (were stashes on git (with occasional grumbles about not being able to stack stashes), regular commits now on jj (maybe with a special-format description, if I bother)));
and that you (even if subconsciously) try to ensure that the head of a branch is always identifiably-representative of the branch (i.e. don't put some random unrelated change at the tip with the idea of "I'll put this in a more proper place when I get back to this").
Effectively, using the full commit graph not as a place where anything potentially-useful can stay, but rather by itself a complete picture, with things not fitting into it going into.. idk, just being abandoned, to be found by looking through the op log? commit IDs saved in an external file? wading through evolog / scanning through `jj show -r xyz/2` etc?
It’s only natural to want to defend one’s preferences with these things. Because unlike with some other preferences, such as what IDE, operating system, or terminal emulator you use, version control systems must be shared.
If it is like you say and different people are just inherently more or less suited to different paradigms, then not everyone can be happy.
This whole thread is about working with git coworkers while using jujutsu, and it was in that context that I wrote my comment: Namely that most who prefer jujutsu happily work with their colleagues who use git in precisely the scenario the OP mentions and don't see why the OP finds it painful. The OP and others should accept that reality.
> If it is like you say and different people are just inherently more or less suited to different paradigms, then not everyone can be happy.
If you force everyone to use git, of course not everyone will be happy.
If you force everyone to use jj, of course not everyone will be happy.
Thankfully, the whole point is git and jj users can interoperate without needing to care what the other is using. So yes, not only can everyone be happy, but everyone is happy! This isn't a hypothetical - it's a reality. It's the reason so many use jujutsu at work.
> With git, I'd routinely go and delete old branches to declutter. With jj, there's simply no need to. The same with stashes. It's really nice not having to do that labor, and simultaneously not dealing with long lists.
wait what? how does this work?
Many of my stashes are tiny changes that need checked later - effectively, each stash entry is a quick TODO list. At some moment, for example once a major feature is done, I'll go a check every stash'ed entry and decide - maybe it's no longer relevant, maybe I should make a PR out of it, or maybe I should convert them to the branch if it's useful but needs more work. The branches are similar, but on longer scale.
The idea that you don't need to declutter your old stashes/branches seems absurd to me - it's like getting a huge box labeled "misc", and throwing every single thing in there. Sure, it's quick, but that's how you lose the important things you need to do, and find the useless junk instead of the actual thing you were looking for.
I assume you mean named branches (bookmarks in jj)? Because anonymous branches in jj are trivial: you just `jj new <parent_change_id>` and you have a new branch.
Bookmarks aren’t that bad either IMO, especially with the recent addition of `jj bookmark advance`. Curious if you can say more about the particular difficulties you found keeping them up to date?
I think I said named branches, but that is definitely what I mean. I find it strange that people want to work on anonymous branches, but to each their own. I don't so that has no appeal to me.
I often work on something and then switch away to something else. it might be a week before i get back to it, and the name of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.
Other people often need to check out a branch I'm working on to help. How does anonymous branching help anyone except a solo developer?
that doesn't make sense because when i am working on a feature, i create a branch, name the branch after the feature and then each commit has a description of what is in that commit. the feature has multiple commits, and while i carefully work out what goes in each commit i don't squash them.
so with jj i could use a bookmark, ok, but having to manually update that bookmark feels wrong.
When I'm working in git, I always start work by creating a new branch with a name. Sometimes the branch becomes something different as I work and then I might rename it or more often just keep a stale name around. But in git commit descriptions come later.
In jj, it's the opposite. I start with a change, and I often describe it right away. Branches (bookmarks) come at the end.
You could, in jj, tag a new empty change with a bookmark as soon as you create it. You don't have to advance the bookmark -- that the first change in a sequence of changes is tagged with a bookmark is probably as much information as you need?
> I think I said named branches, but that is definitely what I mean
I think I misread you, because you were talking about git vs svn in a way that made it sound like jj was a step backward from git as regards branching, and I got confused.
> I often work on something and then switch away to something else. it might be a week before i get back to it, and the name of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.
Right, but you can still name your branches with bookmarks, you’re just not required to. Personally, I tend to use commit descriptions more than bookmarks to keep track of what I’m working on, but this is a personal choice.
> Other people often need to check out a branch I'm working on to help. How does anonymous branching help anyone except a solo developer?
It’s just nicer as a local workflow, to me at least? I can create throwaway branches without having to come up with a name for them. I end up creating many, many more branches than I did in git as a result, which helps me keep my work better organized and my changes more focused when I submit them for others to review (which at least on GitHub, requires a bookmark of course). This is ultimately psychological because obviously I could just make up a name for the git branch, right? But it makes a big difference for me!
The biggest issue is my git knowledge is atrophying while my coworkers still know me as “the git wrangler” (mostly because most devs have never actually learned git, so any knowledge looks 10x more than theirs). So when a coworker comes to me with a problem like their local main now has 2000 commits that they’ve (or rather Claude Code has…) somehow accidentally re-signed locally and then the 20 commits that actually contain their work, I’m thinking this would be easy to fix with jj rebase but the best advice I can give them for git is to reset their local main to origin/main, create a new branch and then cherry pick their 20 commits to their new branch. Since that’s too time consuming they just checked out the repo again and copied their working copy over, which is the level of avoiding actually using git that the git CLI routinely inspires.
Some later googling revealed `git rebase --onto origin/main theirbranch main` was probably what they needed. Which I’m sure would have come to me quicker if I hadn’t dropped the git cli for jj 2+ years ago.
Are you me? I do feel like I'm starting to forget git as a result of my happy jj use. Thankfully some repos use git submodules, which keeps me at least a little connected
Yes, that describes me at both jobs I’ve had since learning jj. Hence why I asked for specifics: I’m genuinely curious what other people struggle with, partially because I’d like to help them if I can, and partially because it gives me a better understanding of common pitfalls which helps when teaching other people.
I use jj all the time for pull requests, in fact I don't use regular git at all anymore, and it's perfectly easy. Not only can I easily keep all my pull requests properly synced to their base branches, but I can easily and very quickly address review comments, keeping the commit stack clean without having to manually squash or amend or anything of that sort. Honestly it's a lot easier and more efficient than git for me because of how much naturally follows rather than requiring explicit imperative fixups.
I believe this is the most common scenario, yes. If you're used to actively pushing and pulling from the same branche as your colleagues, you need to learn how to manipulate diverging changes and conflicting bookmarks, but other than that all the jj magic is limited to your local activity.
I’ll be honest, as a long-time jj user, I actually haven’t the foggiest what you’re talking about with branches being laborious to keep up to date. Can you elaborate?
Of all the things I was imagining it might be, this was down at the bottom.
Personally I’m a huge fan of this approach. If you aren’t, it’s literally just a one-liner (that is trivially made into an alias) to advance a branch name to the most recent revision. And now there’s a feature to do auto-advancing if you want it.
Why is it this way? Because jj is designed around revisions being constantly mutated.
In git, when I make a commit, I am typically signaling that that a chunk of work is complete. Not always, but usually. In most jj workflows, revisions are mutated constantly during development. A revision being made on the tip of a branch is rarely a signal that that unit of work is finished. It’s even incredibly common to have multiple revisions in a row that are works in progress. Hell, the article we’re all commenting on discusses just such a workflow. If I make five revisions on top of some branch, there is no reason to assume that any of them are ready to be shared, much less all of them.
Because of that difference, it makes sense to have an explicit act to move a branch name forward.
They added auto advance bookmarks a while ago. You configure which revset bookmarks you want to advance or not, and then it just keeps them at the "head" of a branch
I don't try to reimplement the git workflow on top of Jujutsu. I like it because I can let go of a bunch of annoying noise that I needed in Git. I like it because rebases don't have to be synchronous and modal. I like it because I can easily edit history, rearrange the commit graph, change commit descriptions, duplicate, and so much more, and even remotely (without having to checkout first). There's so much to love that I never could've even dreamed of under Git.
That's great that it has things you like. I don't do rebasing, except on MRs where I've come to prefer squashing the branch being committed.
But I don't rewrite history. It's history. While I can understand people have reasons to do it, the reasons have never resonated with me. I'd rather spend my time getting new work done and not polishing work I've already done.
Using jj is easier when your whole team uses jj. When the rest of your team uses Git, it's understandable that the pains of keeping up with Git-isms (e.g. constantly updating branches) start to become quite inconvenient. Though once you get used to jj they're not much of an inconvenience at all, they are still extra steps compared to raw Git. So if jj doesn't have any other inherent value to you it makes sense not to make the jump.
To me, jj has inherent value because I do a lot of things raw Git makes difficult or impossible. For example, https://github.com/LoganDark/fabric-template supports every point release of Minecraft since 1.14, and mods like https://github.com/LoganDark/debrand derive from it. I often rewrite the history of the template with configuration improvements and then rebase the histories of each mod on top of it.
This keeps my project setup consistent throughout versions, and consistent between mods, and allows all my mods, across all supported versions, to benefit trivially from all improvements I make to my global template. This workflow is either not possible with git or would require slow, ugly and fragile scripts.
I'm excited for your delayed comment. I'm sure going to take note that you delayed it and come back later to read it because I'm super interested in what it is that you've delayed. You know, you can just write the comment instead of holding your place in line
I like jujutsu simply because (despite my annoyances, which might be because I started using it 2 weeks ago) it's still faster than git.
I dislike this as well. I find it easier to keep track of branches with bookmarks, but my workflow still makes things cumbersome. I am usually working with the "megamerge" branches, and I usually want to add commits to my current branch instead of squashing my edits. However, adding commits means I have to add my commit, move my bookmark up to the branch tip (jj tug?), and then rebase the megamerge branch, versus doing nothing for squashing. I also find that when I mess up, I don't really love using `jj op log` to fix it. I want to not be in an environment where it's this easy to destroy history (I feel like git was on the other end of it).
You don’t need easy named branches. Naming branches is a chore: since you already spend time writing commit messages, branch names are just a summarization of your commit messages but with more character restrictions.
That’s why I always use jj’s automatic commit identifiers. They are short and I don’t waste brain cycles naming things that are ephemeral. When I push, I let jj automatically creates, updates, and deletes remote git branches (`jj git push -c` for creation, plain `jj git push` for updates, `jj git push --deleted` for deletions). I do not ever have to think about branch names and it is great!
Yeah, I don't get it. I'm sure it's because we work differently and that's fine.
But when I'm picking up something someone on the team has left behind because they got pulled on to something else, or are sick, or 5 million other reasons, having a branch, with a ticket in the name, explaining what the purpose of the branch is, why it exists, what it's current state is, that all matters. I can't help but think that everyone that likes JJ isn't really doing collaboration.
When its MR time I use jj push -c and I’ve set my config to auto generate a branch name from the commit message by extracting the ticket ID from the commit message since we have a standard format into something like PROJ-1234-nzytopmn . Since the company I work at enforces squash merge since many coworkers would otherwise have 20 merge, fixup, lint or ci fix commits per MR, auto advancing isn’t relevant. Addressing comments is just squash into that change and repush. We don’t really do long lived branches so the ticket number is enough to find the branch and the commit message explains the change if I need to hand over work.
I collaborate a whole lot. In fact for solo development I use git because jj is overkill for it. Also by default jj prevents you from overwriting commits that exists on the main branch on the remote, but this is what I often do on solo projects.
> having a branch, with a ticket in the name, explaining what the purpose of the branch is, why it exists, what it's current state is, that all matters
In my view, all the above information exists not in the branch name, but either in the ticket, or in the commit message. The branch name is purely a superfluous thing that does not convey any information. Many of my colleagues already use a tool to automatically name their branches from the first line of their commit messages, and jj just makes this awkward process straightforward.
But you probably haven't spent time writing commit messages before a branch is finished. Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change; replacing a chore with a much bigger chore.
Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list. And easier to recognize a short identifier from a list of the 2-3 most recent branches, than scanning through 50 commits, when trying to remember where some work last was, and which is the proper end-point instead of some failed attempt or unrelated change.
Unnamed branches are quite neat - I certainly have a lot more of such than named ones in jj - but as such named branches are, if anything, more important as a result, for separating sequences of changes striving towards a goal, from the sea of smaller experiments.
> But you probably haven't spent time writing commit messages before a branch is finished.
Wrong. With jj, I use `jj describe` before I start work. It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
> Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change.
Rewriting it is not wasted time. It is an opportunity to look at what I have written in the plan and check whether I have really executed them, and then rephrase things to be more easily understandable.
> Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list.
The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done. And you can use actual English instead of trying to awkwardly avoid spaces in your words.
> It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
I usually don't have a plan for the end; certainly not what any specific commit would be; sure, I could make one (and either make my future self have to do extra work to figure out what commits with lies in their descriptions actually do, or continuously update the commit message marking what actually exists), but as I said that's basically a waste of time. (if you like comparing with past thoughts, sure, but that's definitely not a necessity for a workflow to be reasonable)
"is/isn't an ancestor of the bookmark" is also just a pretty damn good short-hand for denoting a separation between what's been considered the best attempt at the goal, vs things with known problems or just unrelated to the task.
At the core, this if all of course just a question of workflow; if you go into a thing with a plan, meaningful outlook of a non-vague destination, and without expecting continuous switching back&forth between a dozen other things over the time span the branch is alive, caring less about branches or branch names can perhaps work.
> The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done.
But you can't (sanely) use it to reference the branch in a revset, can't find it anywhere other than the full log (that's interleaved and mixed with a bunch of other things that you won't ever need to search for), and actual English just gets in the way for finding it, remembering it, and identifying it in a list.
This alone means that, even if I found interest in massively-ahead-of-time-describing commits, having a sane branch reference is still simply just necessary.
Ah but then I reword the commit message as I make changes to the commit. If the commit message does not tell the whole story, I change the commit message. It's much more convenient to change a commit message in git than to rename branches, so branch names tend to be more out of date than commit messages.
You can't possibly see a use-case for long-lived branches? Say what you will of git, at least it exposes enough knobs that it can mostly accomodate every workflow (possibly with a heavy porcelain layer to hide the plumbing). JJ seems to swing too far in the other direction, great for a "live on head" mentality but less ideal for other setups.
(The fact that all edits are automatically recorded is my personal peeve with JJ. I'm ok with lack of staging area like in Mercurial, but mercurial doesn't try to automatically amend the commit with my pending changes. Sure I can pretend that "@" is my staging commit then squash as needed, but then I also need to remember that checking out a commit is "jj new" which feels like absurd mental gymnastics to me.)
Oh and one more thing I forgot: in git a lot of operations require you to have a clean checkout. Otherwise you have to stash your changes first before doing that operation. With jujutsu’s model, there is no stashing. Every edit is already part of a commit. Therefore you can totally do rebases even when you are in the middle of some other unrelated change.
i had this exact friction trying to use jj this weekend. can't fathom for the life of me why i have to run another command that updates the branch to the next commit.
i too work with worktrees (jj workspaces) and prs (requires branches). it's easier if you give up choosing the name of your branch, and instead rely on finding things by description or your workspace name.
for prs, I usually start with a single commit, so `jj git push -c` will auto create a named branch based on the change id.
And i have template like the following to push to the same branch if i decided to stack commits rather than rewrite:
I remember being the big innovation over svn being merging. There were others things, obviously, but the distributed model + easy merges is what I remember.
If the big innovation over svn is merging for git, then the big innovation here is conflicts. I hate the fact that git requires you to stop everything and fix the merge conflict when you merge. I especially hate the fact that when rebasing in git sometimes it requires you to solve conflicts one by one. The big innovation here is jj does not require you to resolve merge conflicts in a timely manner; it simply records the fact that there are conflicts in the file and you go about your ways. You don't ever have to abort like `git rebase --abort` or `git merge --abort`.
tbh i never actually learned git, but peope working on the same repos with git seem to be ahme ones struggling with named branches... i just do jj rebase and it just works idk
> `absorb` assigns the changes based on whichever previous commit most recently touched those files, which sometimes doesn't actually correspond to which commit should own these particular changes.
I’m pretty sure `jj absorb` (and its predecessors, `git-absorb` [0] and `hg absorb`) are smarter than this, instead looking at the actual diffs.
Ah yeah, you're right, that's a misrepresentation on my part - it's based on lines, not the file:
> [absorb] splits changes in the source revision and moves each change to the closest mutable ancestor where the corresponding lines were modified last. If the destination revision cannot be determined unambiguously, the change will be left in the source revision.
I use absorb fairly often, fwiw. It's great for when I want to make a patch to a commit that will easily absorb into its right place. And I also, sometimes, prefer the more intentional approach where I decide exactly where each hunk will go.
Yeah it’s smarter than that, but as a daily user of git absorb it still gets things wrong fairly often though—like a couple times a week often for me. Plus the changes it can’t absorb automatically (e.g. a lone doc change it can’t find peers for).
This seems like a lot more effort than the (to me) more natural jj workflow of maintaining the idealized series of commits plus a working commit on top. As you make tweaks and fixes you just squash the relevant parts into the already-clean history.
Basically, if you don’t get into that sort of situation with commits containing parts they shouldn’t in the first place, you don’t need to do any extra work to clean them up. The tip of your branch should be the only “messy” part.
That is a lot of discipline up front. I am sure there are problems which are nicely bucketed, but I usually have to go with the flow and make changes as I see them. I want to keep working with the code, not babysitting version control as I focus on getting the initial version to work.
I start a new branch and begin work. When I’m ready to start organizing that work into a consistent narrative (or when bits are “finished”), I split it out into independent commits. As I keep making fixes and tweaks, I continue squashing bits from my working commit into the parent commits they belong on.
I don’t bother making any independent commits until pieces of what I’m working on are becoming fully-formed. Until then, my working commit just has everything.
I think it comes down to your ability to plan and understand how the work can be broken down before you try solving it. I often know what every commit will look like before I ever touch the code. I do sometimes learn things and change my mind as I make changes but it doesn't often change my commit structure. I tend to work on a codebase I have 8+ years experience in though. I'm sure it doesn't work in a variety of situations though.
As a git rebase enjoyer, I've completely switched over to jujutsu. The whole experience is more ergonomic in my opinion, and the default workflow which I use (using `jj new` to create a new change that clearly delineates work on a different "thing" before I start working on it) fits my mental model much better than the traditional write-then-commit workflow we all grew up with.
I'd like to give jj another go but I found the "all files must be tracked/committed" approach to really break my workflow.
I have a lot of temporary uncommitted files, which are not ignored or excluded. Some may eventually be committed but most won't.
Being then forced to commit these (but only some due to file size) just gets in the way and impedes things like cross branch debugging
A checkout is a working space after all, why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?
If you do want to solve this, here's two thoughts on how you can deal with it. First: don't try to edit jj changes. Always work on a new change and then squash that in to the parent. You think of that top level change as your working space.
From there, the simplest way is to just always use 'jj commit -i' and 'jj squash -i' to create change ids with your work. Then if you want to have your changes move around with you, just rebase your working copy which contains your "uncommitted files" to the new branch.
A different idea is to put those changes in a separate change, and then when you do work, always create your working space change as a merge change like 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <main change id>. Then you should be able to do 'jj absorb' instead of 'jj squash' to put changes into the right change. Switching to a different branch is 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <other change id>.
As in typing this, I'm thinking for myself and what I actually do in practice... I find moving / rebasing jj commits very easy (I have a UI tool that literally lets you drag and drop them) so I usually just commit these changes and then drag the commits around so it's not in the chain of when I want to send it out for review
Why not add them to gitignore? If you don't want to change the project's ignore, there's also a repository local ignore file, .git/info/exclude, which jj will respect.
> why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?
Because that would go completely against how jj changes work.
Same here, auto-adding is a non-starter for me. Thankfully there's an option to not do it, not sure how well it works, but I'll have it enabled for the future when I try jj again.
When you are ready to record a change, split your current working changeset and pick the things you want to commit. It’s equivalent to staging then committing with Git.
Jujutsu's approach to treating the working copy as a commit solves so many common friction points with Git rebase workflows. Great to see it gaining more adoption.
It’s mostly the same. But if you realize you forgot to add something to the dirst commit while you’re putting stuff in the second commit then this avoids having to create a fixup commit and then rebasing that afterwards.
> Latter commits overwrite work that was done in earlier commits and the story breaks.
> Some people prefer this, as it helps git bisect work better. Debuggability versus reviewer convenience is the tradeoff, I guess.
Ideally we would have a VCS that made ergonomic to store both history-as-it-happened for some purposes, and the cleaned up, squashed and rebased history for other purposes, ensuring they match
I think that version control has reached a point where the next major evolutionary steps will be based on making history totally shared and immutable with history edits themselves being non-destructive versioned operations that can be browsed as higher order history.
I never absorbed that fact until now. Now, if it supported huge repositories with large files and binary files well, it could actually become a superstar.
> if it supported huge repositories with large files and binary files well,
In the open source context, it's limited by git here. But you can use jj with Google's monorepo, and so it itself is able to handle at least huge repositories (I don't know how big the largest files and binary files are in it, but I'm assuming that it has some of those too) well. That of course doesn't help you directly if you're not at Google, but the pathway is there.
The only thing that stops me from switching to jujutsu is that lazygit already paves through all these paper cuts pretty well, and I'd miss their custom patches feature.
I've done both the rebase and the merge flows in different jobs.
I just don't see the fuss about rebase. Merging just works fine.
Edit: OK, I realized later that I'm not really responding to the usual git rebase -i use case.
Have you heard people say that because of magit they started using more "advanced" git workflows, and how they emphasize having a better UI makes a difference?
It's the same idea with jujutsu. I'm much more likely to use git's power via jujutsu than directly with git. It's because jujutsu lets you do it all with a much simpler interface - fewer commands, and fewer concepts. And knowing that "jj undo" has your back.
As a sibling commenter said: Likely 99% of git users don't do "git rebase -i". But the percentage who do similar with jujutsu is high - perhaps over half[1] of jujutsu users do the equivalent of "git rebase -i" all the time. Many of them didn't when they used git.
The interface matters.
[1] If you told me 80%, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
I like how jj allows me to essentially use the same workflow in my personal projects (jj on git) as with my work stuff (jj on piper). That alone is really neat!
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-history - git got the remaining piece of the puzzle to make massaging history relatively easy. "git history split", interactive rebase and fixup/auto squash allow you to do anything in a more systematic way than resetting/selectively staging/committing again and again.
This remind me of [jj megamerge](https://isaaccorbrey.com/notes/jujutsu-megamerges-for-fun-an...). jj allows concentrating on developing while leaving things for vcs alone, as well as solving vcs things (conflicts) at very beginning (megamerge). Really good.
> For large features, I find this workflow far easier than having to maintain strict git rigour for the lifecycle of the feature's development.
I don't know about all that. All sorts of ex-post-facto automated cut-up-and-splice commits sounds to me like a recipe for an every larger mess. I say maintain git rigor, always. Now, you could say "You only say that because you know git rather than jujutsu" or "if you use git absorb more you'll get it", and theoretically you might be right, but... meh, I kind of doubt it.
So I'd have an immediate problem with the target sequence of commits here. The thing about just getting a "define types" commit is that it shows me nothing about why those types were chosen. I need to flit backwards and forwards in history to see how they hook into the later code. I lose the history of "this type was enough to get us to point A, we needed this other thing to get to point B". But flitting back and forth is exactly what we're trying to avoid here. It feels like we're trying to optimise to One True Clean History, when that can't possibly exist because no two people's idea of "clean" actually matches.
Just give me the PR, don't sweat the individual patches. But maybe also work on not committing your first idea as finished work.
I would imagine why the types were chosen could easily be explained in the commit message. The goal presumably (at least how I do it) is so that if I'm touching quite a lot of the code base, the reviewer has the _option_ of being taken through the narrative of the change like they might explain if they were talking to you. If you don't want to be told what the changes are and how they tie together, then just click on review changes and review it all at once. It's not about the clean history, it's about making the reviewer's life easier with larger features.
The commits might get squashed anyways so the history on main won't necessarily match what's on the feature branch.
You can commit before you raise a pull request, I don't quite understand that point but I might just be missing something about your workflow that's different to mine.
I work via tickets so I don’t take care of the commits in my branch (if I would there would only be one commit). So what I expect the reviewer to do is review the whole diff. I help by commenting the changes to explain the design and the implementation.
Commits on a PR branch are usually my thinking outline, not for someone else to step through.
That's fair enough! I think the flow will be more universally beneficial if things like this become more mainstream. https://github.github.com/gh-stack/ because then big prs aren't necessary if they can be reviewed incrementally so long as they can stand on their own.
The elephant in the room is that I haven't had to do something complicated and manual in git by hand in a long while. I'm using AI to generate code, and further, having it commit to git and pushing and pulling and managing branches and merging for me. So for people new to software development, they can also just ask AI to deal with git, which papers over the harder parts of its UX.
A lot of humans don't currently trust agents to touch VCS today. I also find that my agent tends to be much better about dealing with jj than it is with git.
And it's much easier for a professional to be forced to use LLMs than jj when it comes to versioning assist (not even comparable in mindshare but the obvious needs to be said sometimes).
So unfortunately I'm afraid jj is not going to achieve critical mass before 99.99% of merges are done by AI which don't need jj.
jj is in the training data for at least Gemini these days. My experience is it uses less tokens to do similar workflows with jj vs git because they are simpler.
Also, remember that humans aren't going away. The touch points are changing but they still exist. The VCS is a common touch point for many and my preferred one. For others I'm sure it's online code review tools. If an agent is operating under my name in my workspace I want to manage it within the confines of my workspace. Once it becomes more agentic and operates as it's own entity I'm sure I'll change my mind but that's not the case today.
I'm one of those people. I don't really use jj, but want to give it another try. Think I'd feel more comfortable letting ai mess with jj because of its excellent ability to undo/redo (op log).
You can definitely get stuck in a weird place with git that I haven't run into in the same extent with jj. The ability to undo anything with the one 'jj undo' command is awesome in the agent coding world when it makes a mistake.
I always tell people I use a “git reset” based workflow. I rarely “checkout” branches, I just stay on main, reset hard when switching topics, reset soft when squashing, and I only name my branches on the remote end via “git push origin HEAD:some-branch”.
`git branch` is basically my bookmark tool. I commit for a while, then when I want to remember where I am for later, `git branch wip/topic-a-finally-compiles` or whatever. I can reset hard to it when I want to revert back, or any other topic I need. If I forget to name a branch for a commit, the reflog is right there. Nothing’s lost.
And yeah, a soft reset is basically the ideal way to just say “pretend all my changes weren’t committed yet, starting from $ref” and then I make my single commit for my PR. Easy peasy.
I follow something similar, especially with the PR process and squash-merge on remote. I do the first ticket push using explicit ref, then just continue on the next one, while I wait for the review process. When the first PR is merged, I rebase on top of the remote branch and do the same for the second PR.
I do switch branch for long experiments and touch up on existing PR.
It would be great if a PR was about distributing patches and not having those automatically generated from a branch.
I can’t tell if this is satire. The fact that we have to memorize soft and hard resets was a thing I and everyone else just have to do. But that goes away if you only have commits, so no staging area vs staged changes vs changes on disk, it’s just all a commit and we have a myriad of tools that already know how to deal with commits. Honestly, your workflow as described sounds incredibly compatible with jujutsu, I’d really recommend giving it a shot / another go
This is roughly how I’ve found myself using jj naturally. I find it hard to “tell the story” of a change ahead of time, because the design often only becomes clear after some exploration. It’s much easier to land at an implementation I’m happy with, then work backwards and shape the commits into the story I wish I’d taken.
> This allows reviewers to step through your pull request in small bites, with each set of changes scoped to a single aspect of the feature.
Is that a frequent way of reviewing? On GitHub you get shown all changes together in the review tab. You can select individual commits for closer inspection, but where is the benefit?
I suspect there is some weird habit that some people even like to overengineer their git history. Maybe it improves the pixel fame ratio or something.
For me it's satire. There are reasons for varying effort in creating PRs or patches, but attempts like this never seem to reason about reality. If I have to review, I want to see the code, not a clever story hidden in the commit history.
You can literally jump into a commit and edit its contents directly, and everything is auto-rebased on top.
There are no modal “sorry rebase failed, best of luck” gotchas. There are no “oops I put the wrong thing in the wrong part of the rebase and now I have to abort and start all over” gotchas.
It’s rebase, but without all the extra work, mental overhead, failure cases, and effort.
How does it just auto-rebase everything without failing though? If you edit something later commits depend on, then you get merge conflicts. Are you implying that jj just automatically handles all this?
I see. It doesn't deal with the conflict, it just proceeds regardless. I'm curious about how it works internally. Does it do something like commit the conflict and soft reset later?
The conflict markers are a first-class citizen in the repo. jj tells you when a commit has a conflict, and you can go edit it at your leisure. It also does prevent you from doing some things with branches in a conflicted state, like pushing them.
You might not think this is that big a deal, but this also means you don’t have to resolve the entire thing in one go. Plenty of times with complicated rebases in git, I’ve not been 100% certain about the path towards resolving it. But jumping around to view various commits when you’re in the rebase-conflict state is painful. In jj you can just switch to an earlier commit, tweak it there, jump to a later commit, see how it looks, etc. It removes 98% of the pain.
It also dovetails nicely with other aspects of jj. Since rebases happen automatically and constantly, they are usually tiny. If there’s a conflict, it’s caught right when you do the thing and not four hours later when that part is no longer fresh in mind. And the op log lets you restore and undo actions atomically, which makes undoing a fuck-up a no-op.
I've come to the opinion that conflicts should be committed and merge fixes should be in another commit afterwards. Arguably even if the merge fix is trivial.
A merge conflict means that some automated tool couldn’t figure it out. But all a merge is is a commit with two parents and an accompanying diff that shows the process of combining them. A merge conflict isn’t really in any way special. It just means whatever algorithm was used couldn’t do it unambiguously without human help.
As someone who doesn't know jj and read this article, it does sound like `git rebase -i` to me. I'm sure that if I actually spent time learning jj I'd know the difference though.
I spoke about this before, but jj has the Blub Paradox problem, from the pg's essay Beating the Averages (https://paulgraham.com/avg.html).
Yes, you can do most commit manipulations with git just like with jj. But, users of jj know they're "looking down the power continuum" (to reuse pg's terminology) when they look at git, whereas git users cannot fathom what's exactly the deal with jj. Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind. It's close to impossible to describe it except "it's really neat" and "wow it removes all git's friction I didn't know existed".
And, apparently, there's a pattern of having to try at least two times before it becomes intuitive!
> I spoke about this before, but jj has the Blub Paradox problem
It's not relevant. Don't try to convert git users--you don't need to. They're fine doing what they do, and the git backend store is acceptable. People who understand how broken git is will gravitate to jj with the lightest of prodding--give them a light poke and then don't harass them further.
The main difference is that I can teach jj (like I could teach hg) to normal people. And, because jj is based on the git store, they can operate in a Github world.
So, just teach jj to people who haven't yet broken their brain with git. Running on the git backend already gains most of the network effect, so don't proselytize the git people.
The problem with this mindset, that there is zero reason to move away from Git. I can do effortlessly everything with it. There is no incentive. I never said "it would be so good that I would be able to X"... and I didn't find a solution for it quickly. As under this post is obvious as much as under other previous posts, you can do the same things effortlessly with Git. The effort is not that I need to use 2 commands less, but to separate the code (in this specific case), which takes about a 100-1000x more time than typing those 2 extra commands, or really the need to think what kind of commands need to be used in any VCS.
The same problem with vi for example. Which I learned, deeply and for a long time. Maybe I will be break even in a decade or two. And for example, I can code faster than anybody who I know and use vi all the time (or some vi keyset in Emacs or something), not because I type faster, but because I don't need to rewrite my code that many times than them.
The same with jj. I'm happy that it clicks better than Git for some. But I know Git from inside and out. Git was never the bottleneck for me. And really any VCS in the past. If I learn jj, then I don't expect that the effort pays off in a decade or less in the best case. My work's result would be the exact same thing, just with different commands, commands which takes almost no time compared to my other tasks.
> Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind
We do get it. But have you ever thought that git inflexible nature and full control is what some people people like?
Having three different state for your work (working tree, staging, and committed) is nice for reviewing code. Picking lines and chunk give me an additional mental state to think about the design of the code.
And once upon a time, I preferred history log like the one in the article. But this days (mostly inspired by mailing list development style) I wants the commit in my main log to be either features or bug fixes. Everything else is “wip”, which I will squash. It makes it easier when rewriting history, cherry picking, or just browsing the log.
The big differences are that the jj approach gives you a commit message for the staging change, and lets you jump to some other commit without extra steps.
jj has nothing I need, so it would be changes for the sake of changes. I’m not saying it’s bad, but people do need to realize that their struggles are theirs, not the whole world.
Not trying to tell you how to live your life, obviously, but I think “changes for the sake of changes” overstates it. For example, `jj undo` is a pure ergonomics win.
It’s been said a million times but it is really true that jujutsu’s appeal is something you feel (or don’t) after giving it a proper go. It doesn’t survive compression into the feature list.
Actually I think that property is a much bigger obstacle to adoption than what it does or doesn’t offer to the rare true git wizard.
I use magit on a daily basis. And I do use tig occasionally (I don't like lazygit). Most of my magit workflows only requires a handful of keys (most are only two keys). If you've not tried Magit before, it's like vim for a git repo. tig is more barebones, but I could quickly configure it to be able to do most of the magit tricks I need.
Git cli is tedious. But like all cli operations the goal is always to script your workflow or alias the most used commands in something shorter. I'm sure that jj may have an easier learning curve. But some people do know how git works and like the level of control over commits.
I’ve never used magit but my impression is that it’s similar to jj in the sense that it smooths out git’s rough edges in an elegant way and in the sense that it’s hard to properly appreciate without using it.
That being said, I also much prefer a UI layer (lazygit originally, now lazyjj), and personally I find the benefits of jj to be partly complementary to the UI ones.
That is, after getting used to jj, my problems with git are (1) the CLI ergonomics, and (2) the model is actually more complex than it needs to be, in a way that materially diminishes my experience. Only the first is addressed by lazygit (though maybe magit does both; not sure).
One other point: jj doesn’t actually impose a level-of-control tradeoff on the curation of commits. You can mimic the git workflow by modeling the working copy and staging area as commits (changes, in jj parlance), or you can experiment with any number of alternatives. What git gives you is the opinionated support for the working-copy-staging-area-commit approach.
Totally fair :) personally I used to be a git wizard and I am relieved at how much about it I’ve been able to forget since learning jj, but I understand not everyone has the same experience.
This is my take on it too. And I built BetterGit (https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/) before agent capabilities became widespread. A lot of things in Git and existing GUIs are just cumbersome, and my app makes it better to handle the most common tasks and makes them easier. It's really meant for newcomers to Git.
BUT! You can simply ask an agent to commit every meaningful block of work. Or just ask any agent to create a JIRA ticket and start work on that named branch. Or ask it to create work trees and create a PR. Life has gotten much easier without having to fight the command line or confusing GUI UX.
I have been walking some newer programmers through Git recently, so this topic is fresh on my mind. The commands in the blog post do not look friendlier or even different.
Agentic development transforms the scope of work. Once a session is committed to having one topic from the get-go — one move, one service, one abstraction — the diff generated from such a session is atomic by construction. Committing happens at the session level, and the commitment discipline problem solved by Jujutsu does not come into play.
It is also true in reverse. Scopes set too broadly ("dark mode implementation," "auth flow fixes") lead to un-readable diffs no matter what tool you use for version control. Un-readable diff does not stem from commitment discipline; it is a scope problem.
That said, this fact does not diminish the usefulness of Jujutsu. There are valid use cases for the rebase and stacking operations. However, the discussion about commit granularity takes on a whole new context once the constraint of having readable commits is established at the scope setting stage.
I don't get why people like jujutsu. I tried it for a while but I work with a quite a few people in the same repo and I need easy named branches that keep up with commits. For all the many problems in git, branches are dead easy. That was the big innovation over svn at the time.
Last time I tried jj, branches were an extremely laborious process to keep up to date. I don't see how people that aren't working alone can work with that. I have numerous branches in flight at any given time, and my colleagues do as well. The idea of manually keeping them pointed at the right commit is just nuts.
Maybe they've fixed that astonishing choice since then, and I'd give things another go if they did. But branches and worktrees are how I operate.
Regarding the article, I have no idea what is going on as I'm red-green color deficient.
I think much of the problem with this thread is people trying to convince one way is superior/inferior.
There are just multiple different ways of working. Some ways fit some people's mental models better.
You're not going to get a definitive "jujutsu is better than git" or vice versa. You should accept that some people have no problems with what you've described using jujutsu, and likewise jujutsu users should understand that not everyone can handle jj as well as they can.
Imagine a different thread where jj users take your exact scenario, and complain about solving the problem with git. You wouldn't understand their pain, because it's not painful for you. This thread is the same, just with jj and git reversed.
Personally, I don't see the pain you have. Back when I used git a lot, if I left a branch for a few weeks, I'd forget the name of the branch and would have to list all the branches (and set an alias to sort by and list the last commit dates of each) to discover the appropriate branch name. It's really not all that different from looking at all (recent) heads. Once you get used to this, you stop naming branches - other than to share with others. And when you do share with them, you cannot push (newer) changes because only bookmarked nodes and their parents can be pushed - so just prior to pushing, you advance the bookmark. With the shells I use, it's a few keystrokes before autocomplete/fzf produces the command for me - no mental effort at all.
You definitely wouldn't advance the bookmark with each commit. Only when you need to push.
And oh man, it's so nice not to have to manage all the branches. With git, I'd routinely go and delete old branches to declutter. With jj, there's simply no need to. The same with stashes. It's really nice not having to do that labor, and simultaneously not dealing with long lists.
If this doesn't appeal to you - that's fine. You're not deficient. But understand, nor are those for whom your workflow sucks.
How different people approach workflows is fascinating.
For example, your "not all that different from looking at all (recent) heads" implies that the number of (recent) heads isn't far off from number of (would-be-)branches (i.e. no random offshoot experiments, stashed-away debug sessions; whereas I make many of such continuously (were stashes on git (with occasional grumbles about not being able to stack stashes), regular commits now on jj (maybe with a special-format description, if I bother)));
and that you (even if subconsciously) try to ensure that the head of a branch is always identifiably-representative of the branch (i.e. don't put some random unrelated change at the tip with the idea of "I'll put this in a more proper place when I get back to this").
Effectively, using the full commit graph not as a place where anything potentially-useful can stay, but rather by itself a complete picture, with things not fitting into it going into.. idk, just being abandoned, to be found by looking through the op log? commit IDs saved in an external file? wading through evolog / scanning through `jj show -r xyz/2` etc?
It’s only natural to want to defend one’s preferences with these things. Because unlike with some other preferences, such as what IDE, operating system, or terminal emulator you use, version control systems must be shared.
If it is like you say and different people are just inherently more or less suited to different paradigms, then not everyone can be happy.
> version control systems must be shared.
This whole thread is about working with git coworkers while using jujutsu, and it was in that context that I wrote my comment: Namely that most who prefer jujutsu happily work with their colleagues who use git in precisely the scenario the OP mentions and don't see why the OP finds it painful. The OP and others should accept that reality.
> If it is like you say and different people are just inherently more or less suited to different paradigms, then not everyone can be happy.
If you force everyone to use git, of course not everyone will be happy.
If you force everyone to use jj, of course not everyone will be happy.
Thankfully, the whole point is git and jj users can interoperate without needing to care what the other is using. So yes, not only can everyone be happy, but everyone is happy! This isn't a hypothetical - it's a reality. It's the reason so many use jujutsu at work.
> With git, I'd routinely go and delete old branches to declutter. With jj, there's simply no need to. The same with stashes. It's really nice not having to do that labor, and simultaneously not dealing with long lists.
wait what? how does this work?
Many of my stashes are tiny changes that need checked later - effectively, each stash entry is a quick TODO list. At some moment, for example once a major feature is done, I'll go a check every stash'ed entry and decide - maybe it's no longer relevant, maybe I should make a PR out of it, or maybe I should convert them to the branch if it's useful but needs more work. The branches are similar, but on longer scale.
The idea that you don't need to declutter your old stashes/branches seems absurd to me - it's like getting a huge box labeled "misc", and throwing every single thing in there. Sure, it's quick, but that's how you lose the important things you need to do, and find the useless junk instead of the actual thing you were looking for.
I assume you mean named branches (bookmarks in jj)? Because anonymous branches in jj are trivial: you just `jj new <parent_change_id>` and you have a new branch.
Bookmarks aren’t that bad either IMO, especially with the recent addition of `jj bookmark advance`. Curious if you can say more about the particular difficulties you found keeping them up to date?
I think I said named branches, but that is definitely what I mean. I find it strange that people want to work on anonymous branches, but to each their own. I don't so that has no appeal to me.
I often work on something and then switch away to something else. it might be a week before i get back to it, and the name of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.
Other people often need to check out a branch I'm working on to help. How does anonymous branching help anyone except a solo developer?
> it might be a week before i get back to it, and the name of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.
Ah, this is what the description (what git would call the commit message) is for. You can set the description even before you've made any changes.
that doesn't make sense because when i am working on a feature, i create a branch, name the branch after the feature and then each commit has a description of what is in that commit. the feature has multiple commits, and while i carefully work out what goes in each commit i don't squash them.
so with jj i could use a bookmark, ok, but having to manually update that bookmark feels wrong.
When I'm working in git, I always start work by creating a new branch with a name. Sometimes the branch becomes something different as I work and then I might rename it or more often just keep a stale name around. But in git commit descriptions come later.
In jj, it's the opposite. I start with a change, and I often describe it right away. Branches (bookmarks) come at the end.
You could, in jj, tag a new empty change with a bookmark as soon as you create it. You don't have to advance the bookmark -- that the first change in a sequence of changes is tagged with a bookmark is probably as much information as you need?
that the first change in a sequence of changes is tagged with a bookmark is probably as much information as you need?
i was actually wondering about that. it might. i'll have to see it in action...
> I think I said named branches, but that is definitely what I mean
I think I misread you, because you were talking about git vs svn in a way that made it sound like jj was a step backward from git as regards branching, and I got confused.
> I often work on something and then switch away to something else. it might be a week before i get back to it, and the name of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.
Right, but you can still name your branches with bookmarks, you’re just not required to. Personally, I tend to use commit descriptions more than bookmarks to keep track of what I’m working on, but this is a personal choice.
> Other people often need to check out a branch I'm working on to help. How does anonymous branching help anyone except a solo developer?
It’s just nicer as a local workflow, to me at least? I can create throwaway branches without having to come up with a name for them. I end up creating many, many more branches than I did in git as a result, which helps me keep my work better organized and my changes more focused when I submit them for others to review (which at least on GitHub, requires a bookmark of course). This is ultimately psychological because obviously I could just make up a name for the git branch, right? But it makes a big difference for me!
Imagine that you use jj, while everyone else who works on the repo along with you uses regular git.
Is it easy?
The biggest issue is my git knowledge is atrophying while my coworkers still know me as “the git wrangler” (mostly because most devs have never actually learned git, so any knowledge looks 10x more than theirs). So when a coworker comes to me with a problem like their local main now has 2000 commits that they’ve (or rather Claude Code has…) somehow accidentally re-signed locally and then the 20 commits that actually contain their work, I’m thinking this would be easy to fix with jj rebase but the best advice I can give them for git is to reset their local main to origin/main, create a new branch and then cherry pick their 20 commits to their new branch. Since that’s too time consuming they just checked out the repo again and copied their working copy over, which is the level of avoiding actually using git that the git CLI routinely inspires.
Some later googling revealed `git rebase --onto origin/main theirbranch main` was probably what they needed. Which I’m sure would have come to me quicker if I hadn’t dropped the git cli for jj 2+ years ago.
Are you me? I do feel like I'm starting to forget git as a result of my happy jj use. Thankfully some repos use git submodules, which keeps me at least a little connected
Yes, that describes me at both jobs I’ve had since learning jj. Hence why I asked for specifics: I’m genuinely curious what other people struggle with, partially because I’d like to help them if I can, and partially because it gives me a better understanding of common pitfalls which helps when teaching other people.
I use jj all the time for pull requests, in fact I don't use regular git at all anymore, and it's perfectly easy. Not only can I easily keep all my pull requests properly synced to their base branches, but I can easily and very quickly address review comments, keeping the commit stack clean without having to manually squash or amend or anything of that sort. Honestly it's a lot easier and more efficient than git for me because of how much naturally follows rather than requiring explicit imperative fixups.
Yes, that is the case for almost every repo I’ve ever used jj for. It is a complete non-issue. There is virtually zero friction.
I do this all the time at my job, without issue. I think it's honestly easier than using plain git.
yeah nobody "has to know", especially if everyone else is also rebasing etc constantly.
I believe this is the most common scenario, yes. If you're used to actively pushing and pulling from the same branche as your colleagues, you need to learn how to manipulate diverging changes and conflicting bookmarks, but other than that all the jj magic is limited to your local activity.
Yeah, trivial. Only difference my teammates see is that my commits are much tidier and scoped in a way that's easy to review and think about.
I’ll be honest, as a long-time jj user, I actually haven’t the foggiest what you’re talking about with branches being laborious to keep up to date. Can you elaborate?
I make a commit and the branch doesn't follow it. Bookmark, whatever. That is never a behavior I would want. What purpose does it serve?
Of all the things I was imagining it might be, this was down at the bottom.
Personally I’m a huge fan of this approach. If you aren’t, it’s literally just a one-liner (that is trivially made into an alias) to advance a branch name to the most recent revision. And now there’s a feature to do auto-advancing if you want it.
Why is it this way? Because jj is designed around revisions being constantly mutated.
In git, when I make a commit, I am typically signaling that that a chunk of work is complete. Not always, but usually. In most jj workflows, revisions are mutated constantly during development. A revision being made on the tip of a branch is rarely a signal that that unit of work is finished. It’s even incredibly common to have multiple revisions in a row that are works in progress. Hell, the article we’re all commenting on discusses just such a workflow. If I make five revisions on top of some branch, there is no reason to assume that any of them are ready to be shared, much less all of them.
Because of that difference, it makes sense to have an explicit act to move a branch name forward.
They added auto advance bookmarks a while ago. You configure which revset bookmarks you want to advance or not, and then it just keeps them at the "head" of a branch
Having to list all the bookmarks you would list to auto-advance in your jj config.toml is a hassle and easy to forget.
ideally this should be done automatically when you create the bookmark, maybe with a commandline option: jj bookmark create -a/--auto-advance ...
I don't try to reimplement the git workflow on top of Jujutsu. I like it because I can let go of a bunch of annoying noise that I needed in Git. I like it because rebases don't have to be synchronous and modal. I like it because I can easily edit history, rearrange the commit graph, change commit descriptions, duplicate, and so much more, and even remotely (without having to checkout first). There's so much to love that I never could've even dreamed of under Git.
I like Jujutsu so much that I've been working on massive refactors to my tooling in order to support it (example: https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done)
That's great that it has things you like. I don't do rebasing, except on MRs where I've come to prefer squashing the branch being committed.
But I don't rewrite history. It's history. While I can understand people have reasons to do it, the reasons have never resonated with me. I'd rather spend my time getting new work done and not polishing work I've already done.
Using jj is easier when your whole team uses jj. When the rest of your team uses Git, it's understandable that the pains of keeping up with Git-isms (e.g. constantly updating branches) start to become quite inconvenient. Though once you get used to jj they're not much of an inconvenience at all, they are still extra steps compared to raw Git. So if jj doesn't have any other inherent value to you it makes sense not to make the jump.
To me, jj has inherent value because I do a lot of things raw Git makes difficult or impossible. For example, https://github.com/LoganDark/fabric-template supports every point release of Minecraft since 1.14, and mods like https://github.com/LoganDark/debrand derive from it. I often rewrite the history of the template with configuration improvements and then rebase the histories of each mod on top of it.
This keeps my project setup consistent throughout versions, and consistent between mods, and allows all my mods, across all supported versions, to benefit trivially from all improvements I make to my global template. This workflow is either not possible with git or would require slow, ugly and fragile scripts.
I'm excited for your delayed comment. I'm sure going to take note that you delayed it and come back later to read it because I'm super interested in what it is that you've delayed. You know, you can just write the comment instead of holding your place in line
The delay is on HN side, when people reply too quickly.
Oooh, my apologies, then! I misunderstood
I like jujutsu simply because (despite my annoyances, which might be because I started using it 2 weeks ago) it's still faster than git.
I dislike this as well. I find it easier to keep track of branches with bookmarks, but my workflow still makes things cumbersome. I am usually working with the "megamerge" branches, and I usually want to add commits to my current branch instead of squashing my edits. However, adding commits means I have to add my commit, move my bookmark up to the branch tip (jj tug?), and then rebase the megamerge branch, versus doing nothing for squashing. I also find that when I mess up, I don't really love using `jj op log` to fix it. I want to not be in an environment where it's this easy to destroy history (I feel like git was on the other end of it).
If I need to move a 'branch bookmark' around a lot, I usually just tie it to an empty commit and then rebase changes before the bookmark.
You don’t need easy named branches. Naming branches is a chore: since you already spend time writing commit messages, branch names are just a summarization of your commit messages but with more character restrictions.
That’s why I always use jj’s automatic commit identifiers. They are short and I don’t waste brain cycles naming things that are ephemeral. When I push, I let jj automatically creates, updates, and deletes remote git branches (`jj git push -c` for creation, plain `jj git push` for updates, `jj git push --deleted` for deletions). I do not ever have to think about branch names and it is great!
Yeah, I don't get it. I'm sure it's because we work differently and that's fine.
But when I'm picking up something someone on the team has left behind because they got pulled on to something else, or are sick, or 5 million other reasons, having a branch, with a ticket in the name, explaining what the purpose of the branch is, why it exists, what it's current state is, that all matters. I can't help but think that everyone that likes JJ isn't really doing collaboration.
When its MR time I use jj push -c and I’ve set my config to auto generate a branch name from the commit message by extracting the ticket ID from the commit message since we have a standard format into something like PROJ-1234-nzytopmn . Since the company I work at enforces squash merge since many coworkers would otherwise have 20 merge, fixup, lint or ci fix commits per MR, auto advancing isn’t relevant. Addressing comments is just squash into that change and repush. We don’t really do long lived branches so the ticket number is enough to find the branch and the commit message explains the change if I need to hand over work.
I collaborate a whole lot. In fact for solo development I use git because jj is overkill for it. Also by default jj prevents you from overwriting commits that exists on the main branch on the remote, but this is what I often do on solo projects.
> having a branch, with a ticket in the name, explaining what the purpose of the branch is, why it exists, what it's current state is, that all matters
In my view, all the above information exists not in the branch name, but either in the ticket, or in the commit message. The branch name is purely a superfluous thing that does not convey any information. Many of my colleagues already use a tool to automatically name their branches from the first line of their commit messages, and jj just makes this awkward process straightforward.
But you probably haven't spent time writing commit messages before a branch is finished. Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change; replacing a chore with a much bigger chore.
Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list. And easier to recognize a short identifier from a list of the 2-3 most recent branches, than scanning through 50 commits, when trying to remember where some work last was, and which is the proper end-point instead of some failed attempt or unrelated change.
Unnamed branches are quite neat - I certainly have a lot more of such than named ones in jj - but as such named branches are, if anything, more important as a result, for separating sequences of changes striving towards a goal, from the sea of smaller experiments.
> But you probably haven't spent time writing commit messages before a branch is finished.
Wrong. With jj, I use `jj describe` before I start work. It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
> Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change.
Rewriting it is not wasted time. It is an opportunity to look at what I have written in the plan and check whether I have really executed them, and then rephrase things to be more easily understandable.
> Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list.
The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done. And you can use actual English instead of trying to awkwardly avoid spaces in your words.
> It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
I usually don't have a plan for the end; certainly not what any specific commit would be; sure, I could make one (and either make my future self have to do extra work to figure out what commits with lies in their descriptions actually do, or continuously update the commit message marking what actually exists), but as I said that's basically a waste of time. (if you like comparing with past thoughts, sure, but that's definitely not a necessity for a workflow to be reasonable)
"is/isn't an ancestor of the bookmark" is also just a pretty damn good short-hand for denoting a separation between what's been considered the best attempt at the goal, vs things with known problems or just unrelated to the task.
At the core, this if all of course just a question of workflow; if you go into a thing with a plan, meaningful outlook of a non-vague destination, and without expecting continuous switching back&forth between a dozen other things over the time span the branch is alive, caring less about branches or branch names can perhaps work.
> The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done.
But you can't (sanely) use it to reference the branch in a revset, can't find it anywhere other than the full log (that's interleaved and mixed with a bunch of other things that you won't ever need to search for), and actual English just gets in the way for finding it, remembering it, and identifying it in a list.
This alone means that, even if I found interest in massively-ahead-of-time-describing commits, having a sane branch reference is still simply just necessary.
I name my branches for the overall task. The description of the branch’s head commit in jj status doesn’t tell the whole story.
Ah but then I reword the commit message as I make changes to the commit. If the commit message does not tell the whole story, I change the commit message. It's much more convenient to change a commit message in git than to rename branches, so branch names tend to be more out of date than commit messages.
>You don’t need easy named branches.
You can't possibly see a use-case for long-lived branches? Say what you will of git, at least it exposes enough knobs that it can mostly accomodate every workflow (possibly with a heavy porcelain layer to hide the plumbing). JJ seems to swing too far in the other direction, great for a "live on head" mentality but less ideal for other setups.
(The fact that all edits are automatically recorded is my personal peeve with JJ. I'm ok with lack of staging area like in Mercurial, but mercurial doesn't try to automatically amend the commit with my pending changes. Sure I can pretend that "@" is my staging commit then squash as needed, but then I also need to remember that checking out a commit is "jj new" which feels like absurd mental gymnastics to me.)
You can turn off auto-tracking.
Last i checked that only disables tracking of new files, it doesn't do anything to prevent the "auto-amend" behavior for modified files.
Honestly it took me about two days before I just got used to it. You can change `git checkout blah` into `jj new blah`.
Oh and one more thing I forgot: in git a lot of operations require you to have a clean checkout. Otherwise you have to stash your changes first before doing that operation. With jujutsu’s model, there is no stashing. Every edit is already part of a commit. Therefore you can totally do rebases even when you are in the middle of some other unrelated change.
i had this exact friction trying to use jj this weekend. can't fathom for the life of me why i have to run another command that updates the branch to the next commit.
https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/3549 let's you change this behavior.
I think the idea is that branches/bookmarks aren't as necessary as they are with git.
i too work with worktrees (jj workspaces) and prs (requires branches). it's easier if you give up choosing the name of your branch, and instead rely on finding things by description or your workspace name.
for prs, I usually start with a single commit, so `jj git push -c` will auto create a named branch based on the change id. And i have template like the following to push to the same branch if i decided to stack commits rather than rewrite:
you could probably write a similar alias that used your workspace name as the branch name to push to.and descriptions are slightly nicer than branch names, since they can be longer.
I remember being the big innovation over svn being merging. There were others things, obviously, but the distributed model + easy merges is what I remember.
Yes, that's true, merging. Which is what made branching a reasonable thing to do.
If the big innovation over svn is merging for git, then the big innovation here is conflicts. I hate the fact that git requires you to stop everything and fix the merge conflict when you merge. I especially hate the fact that when rebasing in git sometimes it requires you to solve conflicts one by one. The big innovation here is jj does not require you to resolve merge conflicts in a timely manner; it simply records the fact that there are conflicts in the file and you go about your ways. You don't ever have to abort like `git rebase --abort` or `git merge --abort`.
I've worked in places where they didn't know about git branches. They only had master.
Review was done by having someone sit next to you and scrolling through the code telling what you had changed.
jujutsu presents the same amount of power with fewer ideas, eg. There is no staging area. It adds new features, like jj undo.
The un-learning curve is steep if you already know git very well.
https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/3549 lets you enable automatically advancing bookmarks.
tbh i never actually learned git, but peope working on the same repos with git seem to be ahme ones struggling with named branches... i just do jj rebase and it just works idk
Feel the same way about JJ.
It feels like Apple vs Linux. Apple being different ... just because (it gives them an artificial moat)
> `absorb` assigns the changes based on whichever previous commit most recently touched those files, which sometimes doesn't actually correspond to which commit should own these particular changes.
I’m pretty sure `jj absorb` (and its predecessors, `git-absorb` [0] and `hg absorb`) are smarter than this, instead looking at the actual diffs.
[0]: https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb
Ah yeah, you're right, that's a misrepresentation on my part - it's based on lines, not the file:
> [absorb] splits changes in the source revision and moves each change to the closest mutable ancestor where the corresponding lines were modified last. If the destination revision cannot be determined unambiguously, the change will be left in the source revision.
I use absorb fairly often, fwiw. It's great for when I want to make a patch to a commit that will easily absorb into its right place. And I also, sometimes, prefer the more intentional approach where I decide exactly where each hunk will go.
Yeah it’s smarter than that, but as a daily user of git absorb it still gets things wrong fairly often though—like a couple times a week often for me. Plus the changes it can’t absorb automatically (e.g. a lone doc change it can’t find peers for).
Also `sl absorb`.
This seems like a lot more effort than the (to me) more natural jj workflow of maintaining the idealized series of commits plus a working commit on top. As you make tweaks and fixes you just squash the relevant parts into the already-clean history.
Basically, if you don’t get into that sort of situation with commits containing parts they shouldn’t in the first place, you don’t need to do any extra work to clean them up. The tip of your branch should be the only “messy” part.
That is a lot of discipline up front. I am sure there are problems which are nicely bucketed, but I usually have to go with the flow and make changes as I see them. I want to keep working with the code, not babysitting version control as I focus on getting the initial version to work.
It’s really not.
I start a new branch and begin work. When I’m ready to start organizing that work into a consistent narrative (or when bits are “finished”), I split it out into independent commits. As I keep making fixes and tweaks, I continue squashing bits from my working commit into the parent commits they belong on.
I don’t bother making any independent commits until pieces of what I’m working on are becoming fully-formed. Until then, my working commit just has everything.
I think it comes down to your ability to plan and understand how the work can be broken down before you try solving it. I often know what every commit will look like before I ever touch the code. I do sometimes learn things and change my mind as I make changes but it doesn't often change my commit structure. I tend to work on a codebase I have 8+ years experience in though. I'm sure it doesn't work in a variety of situations though.
As a git rebase enjoyer, I've completely switched over to jujutsu. The whole experience is more ergonomic in my opinion, and the default workflow which I use (using `jj new` to create a new change that clearly delineates work on a different "thing" before I start working on it) fits my mental model much better than the traditional write-then-commit workflow we all grew up with.
I'd like to give jj another go but I found the "all files must be tracked/committed" approach to really break my workflow. I have a lot of temporary uncommitted files, which are not ignored or excluded. Some may eventually be committed but most won't. Being then forced to commit these (but only some due to file size) just gets in the way and impedes things like cross branch debugging
A checkout is a working space after all, why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?
If you do want to solve this, here's two thoughts on how you can deal with it. First: don't try to edit jj changes. Always work on a new change and then squash that in to the parent. You think of that top level change as your working space.
From there, the simplest way is to just always use 'jj commit -i' and 'jj squash -i' to create change ids with your work. Then if you want to have your changes move around with you, just rebase your working copy which contains your "uncommitted files" to the new branch.
A different idea is to put those changes in a separate change, and then when you do work, always create your working space change as a merge change like 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <main change id>. Then you should be able to do 'jj absorb' instead of 'jj squash' to put changes into the right change. Switching to a different branch is 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <other change id>.
As in typing this, I'm thinking for myself and what I actually do in practice... I find moving / rebasing jj commits very easy (I have a UI tool that literally lets you drag and drop them) so I usually just commit these changes and then drag the commits around so it's not in the chain of when I want to send it out for review
could you tell which UI tool is that where you can drag commits visually?
It's internal to my company, unfortunately! Otherwise I would've mentioned it
Why not add them to gitignore? If you don't want to change the project's ignore, there's also a repository local ignore file, .git/info/exclude, which jj will respect.
> why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?
Because that would go completely against how jj changes work.
https://joyful.com/jj#Do+I+have+to+let+jj+auto-track+files+i...
Same here, auto-adding is a non-starter for me. Thankfully there's an option to not do it, not sure how well it works, but I'll have it enabled for the future when I try jj again.
When you are ready to record a change, split your current working changeset and pick the things you want to commit. It’s equivalent to staging then committing with Git.
auto add is nice for universal undo for changes made outside your editor...
instead of adding changes to a new commit, i split/squash them into the previous one so the current commit remains dirty
[flagged]
I have finally embraced squashing PRs and realized I wasted my youth trying to write Good Commits.
These Good Commits are for the review’s benefit, not necessarily trunk history.
PRs very frequently contain more than 1 logical change.
Jujutsu's approach to treating the working copy as a commit solves so many common friction points with Git rebase workflows. Great to see it gaining more adoption.
I don't get how this is meaningfully different from doing something like:
1. Squash all your commits in this branch to one
2. Move that commit to the working directory with the appropriate git reset command
3. Commit hunks as appropriate.
It’s mostly the same. But if you realize you forgot to add something to the dirst commit while you’re putting stuff in the second commit then this avoids having to create a fixup commit and then rebasing that afterwards.
> Latter commits overwrite work that was done in earlier commits and the story breaks.
> Some people prefer this, as it helps git bisect work better. Debuggability versus reviewer convenience is the tradeoff, I guess.
Ideally we would have a VCS that made ergonomic to store both history-as-it-happened for some purposes, and the cleaned up, squashed and rebased history for other purposes, ensuring they match
Just squash all the PR commits into one when it gets merged to main or whatever your main branch is.
You can revisit the original PR to see the individual commits if you really want.
I think that version control has reached a point where the next major evolutionary steps will be based on making history totally shared and immutable with history edits themselves being non-destructive versioned operations that can be browsed as higher order history.
That’s, uh, exactly how jj works!
I never absorbed that fact until now. Now, if it supported huge repositories with large files and binary files well, it could actually become a superstar.
> if it supported huge repositories with large files and binary files well,
In the open source context, it's limited by git here. But you can use jj with Google's monorepo, and so it itself is able to handle at least huge repositories (I don't know how big the largest files and binary files are in it, but I'm assuming that it has some of those too) well. That of course doesn't help you directly if you're not at Google, but the pathway is there.
Jj could do that; it stores an evolog of each change, but currently that's kept local
Force --no-ff merges in git. That's pretty much what you want.
The only thing that stops me from switching to jujutsu is that lazygit already paves through all these paper cuts pretty well, and I'd miss their custom patches feature.
I see there's a similar project for JJ, but it doesn't seem nearly as polished https://github.com/Cretezy/lazyjj
Jjui is the best tui for jj
What does jjui have on lazyjj? Sincere question; I tried it, and I want to get it, and so far I don’t.
I don’t understand. Are there people that try to use git without ever invoking “git rebase -i” ?
I've done both the rebase and the merge flows in different jobs.
I just don't see the fuss about rebase. Merging just works fine.
Edit: OK, I realized later that I'm not really responding to the usual git rebase -i use case.
Have you heard people say that because of magit they started using more "advanced" git workflows, and how they emphasize having a better UI makes a difference?
It's the same idea with jujutsu. I'm much more likely to use git's power via jujutsu than directly with git. It's because jujutsu lets you do it all with a much simpler interface - fewer commands, and fewer concepts. And knowing that "jj undo" has your back.
As a sibling commenter said: Likely 99% of git users don't do "git rebase -i". But the percentage who do similar with jujutsu is high - perhaps over half[1] of jujutsu users do the equivalent of "git rebase -i" all the time. Many of them didn't when they used git.
The interface matters.
[1] If you told me 80%, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Yes. almost the majority of git users do this. i would say that as an expert commenter, 99.9% of people outside of California do this.
TIL I am a minority.
I don't rebase. I just merge and resolve the conflicts. Nowadays, I just have an agent do that for me, and move on with my life.
I like how jj allows me to essentially use the same workflow in my personal projects (jj on git) as with my work stuff (jj on piper). That alone is really neat!
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-history - git got the remaining piece of the puzzle to make massaging history relatively easy. "git history split", interactive rebase and fixup/auto squash allow you to do anything in a more systematic way than resetting/selectively staging/committing again and again.
With jj I mostly just `jj split -B @`. Nice interactive ui for picking the changes I want into a commit. So many times better than 'git add -p'
This remind me of [jj megamerge](https://isaaccorbrey.com/notes/jujutsu-megamerges-for-fun-an...). jj allows concentrating on developing while leaving things for vcs alone, as well as solving vcs things (conflicts) at very beginning (megamerge). Really good.
> A downside to this technique is that there's no guarantee that every commit will compile, which might be a dealbreaker.
To some of us, that's an essential structural criterion. Passing unit-level self-tests may be as well.
> For large features, I find this workflow far easier than having to maintain strict git rigour for the lifecycle of the feature's development.
I don't know about all that. All sorts of ex-post-facto automated cut-up-and-splice commits sounds to me like a recipe for an every larger mess. I say maintain git rigor, always. Now, you could say "You only say that because you know git rather than jujutsu" or "if you use git absorb more you'll get it", and theoretically you might be right, but... meh, I kind of doubt it.
s/every larger mess/even larger mess/
sorry about that.
So I'd have an immediate problem with the target sequence of commits here. The thing about just getting a "define types" commit is that it shows me nothing about why those types were chosen. I need to flit backwards and forwards in history to see how they hook into the later code. I lose the history of "this type was enough to get us to point A, we needed this other thing to get to point B". But flitting back and forth is exactly what we're trying to avoid here. It feels like we're trying to optimise to One True Clean History, when that can't possibly exist because no two people's idea of "clean" actually matches.
Just give me the PR, don't sweat the individual patches. But maybe also work on not committing your first idea as finished work.
I would imagine why the types were chosen could easily be explained in the commit message. The goal presumably (at least how I do it) is so that if I'm touching quite a lot of the code base, the reviewer has the _option_ of being taken through the narrative of the change like they might explain if they were talking to you. If you don't want to be told what the changes are and how they tie together, then just click on review changes and review it all at once. It's not about the clean history, it's about making the reviewer's life easier with larger features.
The commits might get squashed anyways so the history on main won't necessarily match what's on the feature branch.
You can commit before you raise a pull request, I don't quite understand that point but I might just be missing something about your workflow that's different to mine.
I work via tickets so I don’t take care of the commits in my branch (if I would there would only be one commit). So what I expect the reviewer to do is review the whole diff. I help by commenting the changes to explain the design and the implementation.
Commits on a PR branch are usually my thinking outline, not for someone else to step through.
That's fair enough! I think the flow will be more universally beneficial if things like this become more mainstream. https://github.github.com/gh-stack/ because then big prs aren't necessary if they can be reviewed incrementally so long as they can stand on their own.
Every time I've tried to use jujutsu, or even read about jujutsu, it's totally broken my brain.
I'm not a git expert by any means I don't think, but there's 15 years of muscle memory there, and a few years of subversion before that...
The elephant in the room is that I haven't had to do something complicated and manual in git by hand in a long while. I'm using AI to generate code, and further, having it commit to git and pushing and pulling and managing branches and merging for me. So for people new to software development, they can also just ask AI to deal with git, which papers over the harder parts of its UX.
This. I feel jj is some years too late.
It tries to solve a human problem in an LLM era.
LLMs are destined to overcome humans in code merging and change versioning (already did for me).
There's little point to introducing yet another layer of indirection when LLMs just cut to the chase.
A lot of humans don't currently trust agents to touch VCS today. I also find that my agent tends to be much better about dealing with jj than it is with git.
Culture change is hard.
A lot of humans still don't use git too.
Many do only when they are forced.
And it's much easier for a professional to be forced to use LLMs than jj when it comes to versioning assist (not even comparable in mindshare but the obvious needs to be said sometimes).
So unfortunately I'm afraid jj is not going to achieve critical mass before 99.99% of merges are done by AI which don't need jj.
That's the beauty of jj. It doesn't need critical mass. If the community remains small it's fine. If it blows up in adoption that's also fine.
Also there are many ways to use llms. Some people control it at code review, but others control it as the VCS.
Sure just like any non-critical tool. It's optional.
LLMs will do most of the work anyways. And they don't need jj. Like I said, jj helps solving a human problem in an LLM era.
It's hardly worth using more of the precious LLM context with jj instructions when git does the job and is mandatory anyways.
jj is in the training data for at least Gemini these days. My experience is it uses less tokens to do similar workflows with jj vs git because they are simpler.
Also, remember that humans aren't going away. The touch points are changing but they still exist. The VCS is a common touch point for many and my preferred one. For others I'm sure it's online code review tools. If an agent is operating under my name in my workspace I want to manage it within the confines of my workspace. Once it becomes more agentic and operates as it's own entity I'm sure I'll change my mind but that's not the case today.
I'm one of those people. I don't really use jj, but want to give it another try. Think I'd feel more comfortable letting ai mess with jj because of its excellent ability to undo/redo (op log).
Good git hygiene is also less important post-LLMs, as the LLM can make sense of even a messy history.
You can definitely get stuck in a weird place with git that I haven't run into in the same extent with jj. The ability to undo anything with the one 'jj undo' command is awesome in the agent coding world when it makes a mistake.
I tend to just commit whenever I see fit, then at the end I do a `git reset —soft` and write the history that makes sense before pushing.
I always tell people I use a “git reset” based workflow. I rarely “checkout” branches, I just stay on main, reset hard when switching topics, reset soft when squashing, and I only name my branches on the remote end via “git push origin HEAD:some-branch”.
`git branch` is basically my bookmark tool. I commit for a while, then when I want to remember where I am for later, `git branch wip/topic-a-finally-compiles` or whatever. I can reset hard to it when I want to revert back, or any other topic I need. If I forget to name a branch for a commit, the reflog is right there. Nothing’s lost.
And yeah, a soft reset is basically the ideal way to just say “pretend all my changes weren’t committed yet, starting from $ref” and then I make my single commit for my PR. Easy peasy.
I follow something similar, especially with the PR process and squash-merge on remote. I do the first ticket push using explicit ref, then just continue on the next one, while I wait for the review process. When the first PR is merged, I rebase on top of the remote branch and do the same for the second PR.
I do switch branch for long experiments and touch up on existing PR.
It would be great if a PR was about distributing patches and not having those automatically generated from a branch.
I can’t tell if this is satire. The fact that we have to memorize soft and hard resets was a thing I and everyone else just have to do. But that goes away if you only have commits, so no staging area vs staged changes vs changes on disk, it’s just all a commit and we have a myriad of tools that already know how to deal with commits. Honestly, your workflow as described sounds incredibly compatible with jujutsu, I’d really recommend giving it a shot / another go
This is roughly how I’ve found myself using jj naturally. I find it hard to “tell the story” of a change ahead of time, because the design often only becomes clear after some exploration. It’s much easier to land at an implementation I’m happy with, then work backwards and shape the commits into the story I wish I’d taken.
> This allows reviewers to step through your pull request in small bites, with each set of changes scoped to a single aspect of the feature.
Is that a frequent way of reviewing? On GitHub you get shown all changes together in the review tab. You can select individual commits for closer inspection, but where is the benefit?
A series of piecemeal self-contained changes is much easier to wrap your brain around comprehensively enough to detect logic issues.
I started doing exactly this and it's been invaluable.
How does this work for you UX-wise? Do you use github? Do you and your collaborators select each commit individually inside a pull request?
We're a GitLab shop. The GitLab UI lets you read a PR commit by commit.
See this gist (and the discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505266
I suspect there is some weird habit that some people even like to overengineer their git history. Maybe it improves the pixel fame ratio or something.
For me it's satire. There are reasons for varying effort in creating PRs or patches, but attempts like this never seem to reason about reality. If I have to review, I want to see the code, not a clever story hidden in the commit history.
Yes, it us common among people who use git and it makes reviews of complex features much easier.
I'm not an expert in Magit by any means, but I bet there's a way to accomplish this in only a few keystrokes.
git let me make changes to local files without fear, since version control let me undo those changes easily.
jj let me make changes to my git commits without fear, since version control of the git state itself let me undo those changes easily, too.
So... git rebase -i?
No, more like:
The main difference to jj is that the RED commit is created later with git.But isn't the flow nearly identical with jj, because the key part, the moving of hunks, is interactive (aka manual) anyway?
Definitely not. Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits (including into a git repo if you wish [1])
Jj is not git and is not a git tool, it just (thankfully) uses git as a backend, so you can still carry on with the rest of the world.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765759
> Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits
In what way is that different from using `git rebase -i` to edit a commit?
You can literally jump into a commit and edit its contents directly, and everything is auto-rebased on top.
There are no modal “sorry rebase failed, best of luck” gotchas. There are no “oops I put the wrong thing in the wrong part of the rebase and now I have to abort and start all over” gotchas.
It’s rebase, but without all the extra work, mental overhead, failure cases, and effort.
How does it just auto-rebase everything without failing though? If you edit something later commits depend on, then you get merge conflicts. Are you implying that jj just automatically handles all this?
jj allows your commits to stay in a conflicted state until you choose to resolve them. I wrote about this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767292
I see. It doesn't deal with the conflict, it just proceeds regardless. I'm curious about how it works internally. Does it do something like commit the conflict and soft reset later?
The conflict markers are a first-class citizen in the repo. jj tells you when a commit has a conflict, and you can go edit it at your leisure. It also does prevent you from doing some things with branches in a conflicted state, like pushing them.
You might not think this is that big a deal, but this also means you don’t have to resolve the entire thing in one go. Plenty of times with complicated rebases in git, I’ve not been 100% certain about the path towards resolving it. But jumping around to view various commits when you’re in the rebase-conflict state is painful. In jj you can just switch to an earlier commit, tweak it there, jump to a later commit, see how it looks, etc. It removes 98% of the pain.
It also dovetails nicely with other aspects of jj. Since rebases happen automatically and constantly, they are usually tiny. If there’s a conflict, it’s caught right when you do the thing and not four hours later when that part is no longer fresh in mind. And the op log lets you restore and undo actions atomically, which makes undoing a fuck-up a no-op.
I've come to the opinion that conflicts should be committed and merge fixes should be in another commit afterwards. Arguably even if the merge fix is trivial.
That’s almost definitionally what a merge is.
A merge conflict means that some automated tool couldn’t figure it out. But all a merge is is a commit with two parents and an accompanying diff that shows the process of combining them. A merge conflict isn’t really in any way special. It just means whatever algorithm was used couldn’t do it unambiguously without human help.
I'd recommend reading the post, it's not that long
As someone who doesn't know jj and read this article, it does sound like `git rebase -i` to me. I'm sure that if I actually spent time learning jj I'd know the difference though.
git rebase -i kinda sucks once you tried jj.
`git rebase -i` and `fixup`
Maybe just not use git? It doesn’t even make sense for like 95% of projects.
New tools are cool, but from what I have seen jj is literally just git with aliases
So: Squash everything together then pick each component out by squash -i to an empty commit.
Seems straightforward, wouldn’t call it special
I think jj will never gain momentum because people only have a git mental model at this point, so won't be able to effectively reason about jj.
I spoke about this before, but jj has the Blub Paradox problem, from the pg's essay Beating the Averages (https://paulgraham.com/avg.html).
Yes, you can do most commit manipulations with git just like with jj. But, users of jj know they're "looking down the power continuum" (to reuse pg's terminology) when they look at git, whereas git users cannot fathom what's exactly the deal with jj. Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind. It's close to impossible to describe it except "it's really neat" and "wow it removes all git's friction I didn't know existed".
And, apparently, there's a pattern of having to try at least two times before it becomes intuitive!
> I spoke about this before, but jj has the Blub Paradox problem
It's not relevant. Don't try to convert git users--you don't need to. They're fine doing what they do, and the git backend store is acceptable. People who understand how broken git is will gravitate to jj with the lightest of prodding--give them a light poke and then don't harass them further.
The main difference is that I can teach jj (like I could teach hg) to normal people. And, because jj is based on the git store, they can operate in a Github world.
So, just teach jj to people who haven't yet broken their brain with git. Running on the git backend already gains most of the network effect, so don't proselytize the git people.
It's interesting that even clear advantages like `jj undo` are hard to communicate because of this.
The problem with this mindset, that there is zero reason to move away from Git. I can do effortlessly everything with it. There is no incentive. I never said "it would be so good that I would be able to X"... and I didn't find a solution for it quickly. As under this post is obvious as much as under other previous posts, you can do the same things effortlessly with Git. The effort is not that I need to use 2 commands less, but to separate the code (in this specific case), which takes about a 100-1000x more time than typing those 2 extra commands, or really the need to think what kind of commands need to be used in any VCS.
The same problem with vi for example. Which I learned, deeply and for a long time. Maybe I will be break even in a decade or two. And for example, I can code faster than anybody who I know and use vi all the time (or some vi keyset in Emacs or something), not because I type faster, but because I don't need to rewrite my code that many times than them.
The same with jj. I'm happy that it clicks better than Git for some. But I know Git from inside and out. Git was never the bottleneck for me. And really any VCS in the past. If I learn jj, then I don't expect that the effort pays off in a decade or less in the best case. My work's result would be the exact same thing, just with different commands, commands which takes almost no time compared to my other tasks.
> Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind
We do get it. But have you ever thought that git inflexible nature and full control is what some people people like?
Having three different state for your work (working tree, staging, and committed) is nice for reviewing code. Picking lines and chunk give me an additional mental state to think about the design of the code.
And once upon a time, I preferred history log like the one in the article. But this days (mostly inspired by mailing list development style) I wants the commit in my main log to be either features or bug fixes. Everything else is “wip”, which I will squash. It makes it easier when rewriting history, cherry picking, or just browsing the log.
There’s nothing stopping you from using separate changes to emulate the staging area if you want.
That is, in essence, the "squash workflow": https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/real-world-w...
The big differences are that the jj approach gives you a commit message for the staging change, and lets you jump to some other commit without extra steps.
I can, but I don’t need to.
jj has nothing I need, so it would be changes for the sake of changes. I’m not saying it’s bad, but people do need to realize that their struggles are theirs, not the whole world.
Not trying to tell you how to live your life, obviously, but I think “changes for the sake of changes” overstates it. For example, `jj undo` is a pure ergonomics win.
It’s been said a million times but it is really true that jujutsu’s appeal is something you feel (or don’t) after giving it a proper go. It doesn’t survive compression into the feature list.
Actually I think that property is a much bigger obstacle to adoption than what it does or doesn’t offer to the rare true git wizard.
I use magit on a daily basis. And I do use tig occasionally (I don't like lazygit). Most of my magit workflows only requires a handful of keys (most are only two keys). If you've not tried Magit before, it's like vim for a git repo. tig is more barebones, but I could quickly configure it to be able to do most of the magit tricks I need.
Git cli is tedious. But like all cli operations the goal is always to script your workflow or alias the most used commands in something shorter. I'm sure that jj may have an easier learning curve. But some people do know how git works and like the level of control over commits.
I’ve never used magit but my impression is that it’s similar to jj in the sense that it smooths out git’s rough edges in an elegant way and in the sense that it’s hard to properly appreciate without using it.
That being said, I also much prefer a UI layer (lazygit originally, now lazyjj), and personally I find the benefits of jj to be partly complementary to the UI ones.
That is, after getting used to jj, my problems with git are (1) the CLI ergonomics, and (2) the model is actually more complex than it needs to be, in a way that materially diminishes my experience. Only the first is addressed by lazygit (though maybe magit does both; not sure).
One other point: jj doesn’t actually impose a level-of-control tradeoff on the curation of commits. You can mimic the git workflow by modeling the working copy and staging area as commits (changes, in jj parlance), or you can experiment with any number of alternatives. What git gives you is the opinionated support for the working-copy-staging-area-commit approach.
Totally fair :) personally I used to be a git wizard and I am relieved at how much about it I’ve been able to forget since learning jj, but I understand not everyone has the same experience.
Having been often called by coworkers to assist them with their git problems, I can assure you they don’t have a git mental model.
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This is my take on it too. And I built BetterGit (https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/) before agent capabilities became widespread. A lot of things in Git and existing GUIs are just cumbersome, and my app makes it better to handle the most common tasks and makes them easier. It's really meant for newcomers to Git.
BUT! You can simply ask an agent to commit every meaningful block of work. Or just ask any agent to create a JIRA ticket and start work on that named branch. Or ask it to create work trees and create a PR. Life has gotten much easier without having to fight the command line or confusing GUI UX.
JJ is a whole different way to think about source control. The fact that you don’t need to run an agent just to use it is a nice bonus.
You can also have you agent use jj with this skill
https://github.com/danverbraganza/jujutsu-skill
Wow, that's really nice. I'm absolutely stealing that. Thanks!
You can't steal what's freely given!
My only ask--tell me how it sucks so I can make it better.
I am a really heavy Claude Code user but source control is still one area where I have regular bad experiences just using Claude.
I have been walking some newer programmers through Git recently, so this topic is fresh on my mind. The commands in the blog post do not look friendlier or even different.
Agentic development transforms the scope of work. Once a session is committed to having one topic from the get-go — one move, one service, one abstraction — the diff generated from such a session is atomic by construction. Committing happens at the session level, and the commitment discipline problem solved by Jujutsu does not come into play.
It is also true in reverse. Scopes set too broadly ("dark mode implementation," "auth flow fixes") lead to un-readable diffs no matter what tool you use for version control. Un-readable diff does not stem from commitment discipline; it is a scope problem.
That said, this fact does not diminish the usefulness of Jujutsu. There are valid use cases for the rebase and stacking operations. However, the discussion about commit granularity takes on a whole new context once the constraint of having readable commits is established at the scope setting stage.