Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)

Personally, I think the JJ VCS (https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.

One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.

Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.

Right now, [name-redacted] is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.

I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.

It's difficult to go back to a separate VCS app after using IDE git support (specifically VSCode & the 'git graph' extension which is sadly permanently abandoned).

Totally understandable! I'm a solo dev out of LA who's mostly consulted on various apps and sites over the years, and out of my own personal need I began working on the project earlier this year.

The project is indeed closed-source. Personally I've had experiences where I found the project moved forward towards the roadmap much faster - specifically when considering smaller-scale projects that are UI heavy and therefore take in many UI changes in parallel - when I instead implemented feature requests and focused most of my energy on listening to user feedback rather than reviewing code. UI polish can be quite tricky when it comes from many sources :)

That said, nothing is set in stone! If at some point there are enough feature requests to where I am the bottleneck, this is something I would revisit.

I'd be happy to hop on the Discord as well!

VS Code now has an OKish git graph built-in, in case you didn't know. This feature is a few months old.

I haven't managed to try this because the "select repo" does nothing on Ubuntu 24.04. It doesn't seem I can actually perform any action at all.