I think the mental model is like C vs python.
Git gives you a forensic trace back in time. jj gives you a story with chapters. Look under the hood you'll still see forensic map of state transitions, but this not what we want to navigate most of the time. Sometimes we need to rewrite an early chapter to make the latest chapter make more sense.
jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
221–230 of 517 posts
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you constantly switch between the two, you're going to have a hard time, but you can take a git repo, try jj for a while, and if you decide to go back, you don't lose anything.
Right, but that’s different from working in a team environment where everyone else continues using git.
fwiw I don't use it personally but some people on my team use it while the others use git, and nobody complains.
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specific commands don't really showcase the appeal of jj. If anything they might scare someone at first glance. It's the fact that the workflows are intuitive and you never find yourself reaching for help to get something done. You really need to try it to understand it.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. All other things are learned. I feel very comfortable using git. Maybe jj is better, but not seeing is not believing.
> but not seeing is not believing.
Classic denying the antecedent :-)
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#224I'm still struggling most with the fact that my day-to-day work involves a git first platform like GitHub. Although jj as a vcs system, it does feel better, working with git through it still feels like a chore, but to be fair I only gave it a day before going back to git. Does anyone have any good resources on how to augment a git flow through the lens of a git hosting platform to work smoothly and still reap the ben…
I'm not sure what the hangup is, TBH. I use `jj` with GitHub and ADO every day, and it works great. What specific challenges are you running into that make it feel like a chore?
Hmm, it was a while back so now I'm struggling to recall, but I remember feeling like I'm going against the grain of easily using GitHub. I followed this exact tutorial at the time and it looks like there are now sections on how to work with GitHub.
Perhaps I need to force myself to commit for longer...
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#225"It's more powerful and easier" is a great claim, but I need examples in this opening page to convince me of the pain I could save myself or the awesome things I'm living without.
A couple things off the top of my head: - You aren't forced to resolve rebase/merge conflicts immediately. You can switch branches halfway through resolving conflicts and then come back later and pick up where you left off. You can also just ignore the conflicts and continue editing files on the conflicted branch and then resolve the conflicts later. - Manipulating commits is super easy (especially with jjui). I reor…
All of these features sound like the recipe for a confusing nightmare!
"You can switch branches halfway through resolving conflicts and then come back later and pick up where you left off. You can also just ignore the conflicts and continue editing files on the conflicted branch and then resolve the conflicts later."
"Similar to stashes, but each "stash" is just a normal branch that can have multiple commits. If I want to test something but I have current changes, I just `jj new`. And if I want to go back, I just make a new commit off of the previous one. And all these commits stick around, so I can go back to something I tried before."
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I'm glad we have many of them! Not everyone is going to resonate with my writing style.
Yes, but it's a sad state of affairs that the official jj docs point to your tutorial, which is incomplete (and IIRC, more incomplete than in the past - I think you took down some topics).
Nope, I haven't taken anything down. I have merged in some contributions from others though, it's actually grown (Manish, iirc, contributed the Gerrit section).
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#227One of the things that makes jj worth trying out is simply the fact that it is different than git, and having exposure to more than one way of doing things is a good thing.
Even if you don't adopt it (and I didn't), it's easy to think that "this way is the only way", and seeing how systems other than your own preferred one manage workflows and issues is very useful for perspective.
That doesn't mean you should try everything regardless (we all only have so much time), but part of being a good engineer is understanding the options and tradeoffs, even of well loved and totally functional workflows.
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar thought: there surely are lots of young folks who will be all excited with this (I was back in the CVS/SVN days when git appeared). But nowadays I'm extremely lazy to attempt to learn this new thing. Git works, I kind of know it and I understand its flow.
I was 38 or 39 when I found jj.
See? You weren’t even over 50! Young whippersnappers…
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you constantly switch between the two, you're going to have a hard time, but you can take a git repo, try jj for a while, and if you decide to go back, you don't lose anything.
Right, but that’s different from working in a team environment where everyone else continues using git.
No?
What problems, exactly, are you suggesting exist? I have used jj extensively on git teams and it has been seamless. The only people who have noticed or cared are the coworkers I’ve gotten to join me.
Re: jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
#230>You can request to not use the pager by using jj st --no-pager, or if you hate the pager and want to turn it off, you can configure that with $ jj config set --user ui.paginate never In one feature they can’t help themselves from calling it two different things already. Why do this? Why can’t the very clearly smart people making things step 1/2 step outside themselves and think about it like they are the users they…
1. Pagination with a pager is a reasonable default. See `git log`. 2. The native format would be `jj init`. For precedent, see how uv dealt with its pip compatibility: `uv pip install` was obsoleted by `uv add`.
1. No one with good vision would give a single feature two names. It’s dumb. Here is our pager feature. Cool, how do I access it? Oh you set the ui.paginate options of course!!
2. It’s almost like we have some established ways to denote arguments that are pretty popular… ‘jj init —-git’ for example? By using ‘jj git init’ I would expect all of the git compatible commands to be be ‘jj git xxx’ because that is a reasonable expectation.
This is a problem with the voodoo. These obscure nonsense commands only makes sense when you are accustomed to them. If there’s no reasonable expectation that you could just figure it out on your own. Go on vacation and come back and be surprised when you forget the voodoo. Not to mention that every tool has to have its own unique voodoo.
Almost like the professional world has figured out that made by software engineers for software engineers will never be popular. And then engineers don’t understand the effects of why you might want tool to be intuitive and popular.