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Jujutsu for busy devs

maddie.wtf

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Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#3

Post by doritosfan84 »

I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to convert my team to jujutsu. I feel like what would be great is a page that really shows some common but complicated operations in git and how much easier they are in jujutsu. Something like the elevator pitch here but expanded on without the depth of Steve’s tutorial.

Maybe what I need to do is do a demo so people can see and ask questions.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#4

Post by RGBCube »

jackblemming wrote: post #2

I must be getting old because I really don’t think git needs a simplified model. But hey, if people find value from this, more power to them. The blog is well written too.

It's not a "simplified model". The jujutsu model is more capable, but also more generic and thus easier to use and re-use. It's just better.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#5

Post by Lyngbakr »

I feel pretty dense, because I still struggle to get my head around automatically adding changes to a revision. Sometimes, I'll make a change locally to a file that I'll use during the development process that I have no intention of committing. With regular git, I never stage that file so there's no danger of accidentally pushing my change to the remote repo, but it seems with jj I'll need to somehow unstage that change or something to prevent this. Perhaps it's just habit, but I feel more comfortable explicitly saying what I want to commit rather that defaulting to everything. Or have I totally misunderstood jj?

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#6

Post by doritosfan84 »

jackblemming wrote: post #2

I must be getting old because I really don’t think git needs a simplified model. But hey, if people find value from this, more power to them. The blog is well written too.

I don’t think simplified model is even the best selling point, but it’s definitely up there. IMO one of the killer features that you absolutely cannot get in git is universal undo. For example, rebases can always be a little tedious and tricky no matter how experienced you are. Not only does jj make that whole process easier and safer to work through, but if you do still manage to get to a state where you just want to go back it’s literally just an undo away.

I’d give [1] a read if you’re interested.

1. https://zerowidth.com/2025/what-ive-learned-from-jj/#commits...

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#7

Post by do_not_redeem »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #5

I feel pretty dense, because I still struggle to get my head around automatically adding changes to a revision. Sometimes, I'll make a change locally to a file that I'll use during the development process that I have no intention of committing. With regular git, I never stage that file so there's no danger of accidentally pushing my change to the remote repo, but it seems with jj I'll need to somehow unstage that cha…

If you want this workflow, you can treat jj's `@` (nominally equivalent to git's HEAD) as the git index, then at commit time, manually squash changes to `@-` just like you would with `git add --patch`.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#8

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #5

I feel pretty dense, because I still struggle to get my head around automatically adding changes to a revision. Sometimes, I'll make a change locally to a file that I'll use during the development process that I have no intention of committing. With regular git, I never stage that file so there's no danger of accidentally pushing my change to the remote repo, but it seems with jj I'll need to somehow unstage that cha…

No that is correct, and also a habit I am trying to break. The reasonable argument is that we should stop running code with untracked state. Either the changes are important and should be committed or not. Otherwise you are recording code versions that never truly existed during development.

Where this gets extra sticky for me is tooling which refuses to distinguish repo wide config vs a local only version. VSCode being a huge offender where there is only a ‘launch.json’ and no ‘launch.local.json’ suitable for per host customization (eg maybe I am already running something on port 8888, so I need to map it to 9000, that does not mean a quirk of my environment should be committed).

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#9

Post by stouset »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #5

I feel pretty dense, because I still struggle to get my head around automatically adding changes to a revision. Sometimes, I'll make a change locally to a file that I'll use during the development process that I have no intention of committing. With regular git, I never stage that file so there's no danger of accidentally pushing my change to the remote repo, but it seems with jj I'll need to somehow unstage that cha…

In jj you tend to use `jj split` to break changes apart. The selected bits become the first revision, the remaining bits become the second revision.

I tend to do a bunch of work then split into small, bite-sized revisions. Often I split something out to a parallel revision (e.g., a separate branch) if it’s an independent thread of work like a bugfix elsewhere or a documentation fix. This is an obvious one-liner in jj but a bunch of annoying branch-switching and stashing in git.

You can also use a `git add`-style workflow. Create a new revision with `jj new`. Do it again. Make your changes, then `jj squash -i/--interactive` to select the bits you want to include. Keep making changes and squashing into the previous commit you’re building up until you’re happy. Conceptually just think of @ (the current revision) and @- (the previous revision) as the working copy and the staged copy, respectively.

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