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I see a future in jj

steveklabnik.com

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Re: I see a future in jj

#221

Post by oefrha »

baq wrote: post #207
oefrha wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people like me who stage/commit often and judiciously Focus on judiciously: mostly (functionally) atomic commits that are not every tiny change, not largely meaningless time-based snapshots, not Gerrit-style single commits for entire features, etc. I’m well aware of the mental leap you’re talking about, it’s neither hard to understand nor the liberation you might think it is. To achieve what we want to achieve…

I’m using jj for almost a year now and I definitely feel much happier whenever I need to rebase a branch or do an octopus merge. It really is liberating in an incremental way that creeps on you in day to day work. Don’t expect a revolution, though. Small commits are the same small commits in jj as in git, you just split instead of add -p.

I mean, if you think git add -p is fine then you’re clearly not in the market of magit. And yes, jj split is about as ergonomic as git add -p, IIRC.

Re: I see a future in jj

#222

Post by 1313ed01 »

arccy wrote: post #111
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want Fossil?

except fossil decided to never allow changing history, vs jj which makes history rewriting so much easier

That's my favourite thing about fossil though. History is what it is, not simplified to look "clean" (i.e. hide what actually happened and when) and you get a lot fewer footguns to ruin everything by accidentally rebasing things to the wrong place without noticing.

Re: I see a future in jj

#223

Post by pm215 »

chrchr wrote: post #164
dcre wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what the magit hunk selection UX consists in. I couldn’t find any videos showing something substantially different from the one built into jj — the videos I found were meant as beginner intros. I’ve never used magit but I used GitUp ( https://gitup.co/ ) for years before jj. I don’t find the jj one super natural, but I feel like that’s mostly a matter of keyboard shortcuts — I need to see if they can be c…

There's more than one way to do it, but the very normal UX is that you can just scroll through the diff file-by-file and stage/stash/drop each hunk individually by placing your cursor over it and issuing the appropriate command. You can do the same with files, staging/stashing/dropping changes to a file by placing the cursor on its name and issuing a command.

As an stgit user, this seems like a weird workflow to me. I never want to have that many uncommitted changes just floating around that will eventually belong to multiple commits. If I'm halfway through something and realise "oh, it would be good to do xyz first" I don't want to have xyz's changes and my half-way-through changes all mixed up -- I want to pop the half-way-through stuff, do the xyz stuff and commit it, then re-push the half-way-through stuff to keep working. If I'm looking at a diff and picking out parts of it then I've done something wrong -- I have a tool for doing it but I only need to use it every couple of months...

I end up with "neatly separated does-one-thing commits" but I get there by building them up as I go along, not by writing a ton of code and then trying to split it up afterwards.

Re: I see a future in jj

#224

Post by pm215 »

1718627440 wrote: post #217
KingMob wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a variety of things that all add up to a very pleasant experience. For starters, git has a poorly-designed UI, whereas jj borrows from Mercurial, which was widely-considered to be better designed from a DX perspective. I can usually guess what commands and flags to use on jj without reading the manual; not so for git. E.g., `jj undo` undoes anything you might have done; For anything esoteric in git, I consult…

> There's no need for staging or stashes in jj. What the JJ developer seam to misunderstand is, that the index and stashes are a feature to improve the users workflow. You can bypass the index with commit -a, giving you JJ behaviour and you can commit just fine instead of using the stash. The stash is like some backlog of temporary commits and also supports saving the index separately. When you don't care about this,…

I would love the git index to not be a thing you had to care about unless you deliberately wanted to use that feature, but in my experience this is not the case...it feels to me like an implementation detail that surfaces into the UI more than it ought to.

Re: I see a future in jj

#225

Post by baq »

oefrha wrote: post #221
baq wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using jj for almost a year now and I definitely feel much happier whenever I need to rebase a branch or do an octopus merge. It really is liberating in an incremental way that creeps on you in day to day work. Don’t expect a revolution, though. Small commits are the same small commits in jj as in git, you just split instead of add -p.

I mean, if you think git add -p is fine then you’re clearly not in the market of magit. And yes, jj split is about as ergonomic as git add -p, IIRC.

I don't mean that, I mean any tool that allows you to selectively stage can use the exact same interface to selectively split.

Re: I see a future in jj

#226

Post by jbstack »

Balinares wrote: post #201
oefrha wrote: post #130

I gave jj two honest tries. While first class conflicts is a cool idea, in practice I deal with staging/committing 30x more than conflict resolution, and coming from magit, using jj’s hunk split & select felt like being thrown into stone age. Plus I rebase a lot and get a lot of jj’s benefits from magit’s various rebase shortcuts already, IIRC first class conflicts was the only truly novel thing I didn’t have. For pe…

If you understand why having a great UX on top of bare git is valuable, you have understood 95% of what's to understand about jj.

But there are dozens of great UXs on top of Git already, so if that's 95% of what jj is about then you seem to be making an argument for jj adding very little value. My understanding is that jj offers more than just UX enhancements.

Re: I see a future in jj

#227

Post by 1718627440 »

pm215 wrote: post #224
1718627440 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no need for staging or stashes in jj. What the JJ developer seam to misunderstand is, that the index and stashes are a feature to improve the users workflow. You can bypass the index with commit -a, giving you JJ behaviour and you can commit just fine instead of using the stash. The stash is like some backlog of temporary commits and also supports saving the index separately. When you don't care about this,…

I would love the git index to not be a thing you had to care about unless you deliberately wanted to use that feature, but in my experience this is not the case...it feels to me like an implementation detail that surfaces into the UI more than it ought to.

But that is the thing, it is not exposed as an implementation detail, it is a skipable part of the user model.

Re: I see a future in jj

#228

Post by 1718627440 »

oefrha wrote: post #221
baq wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using jj for almost a year now and I definitely feel much happier whenever I need to rebase a branch or do an octopus merge. It really is liberating in an incremental way that creeps on you in day to day work. Don’t expect a revolution, though. Small commits are the same small commits in jj as in git, you just split instead of add -p.

I mean, if you think git add -p is fine then you’re clearly not in the market of magit. And yes, jj split is about as ergonomic as git add -p, IIRC.

What does the magit interface for staging look like? I only used GUIs were you select the lines with the cursor or mouse and stage that. Is it like that or more sophisticated? Does it support editing hunks better, because that's a thing I only do on the commandline, because my Git GUI doesn't support that.

Re: I see a future in jj

#230

Post by ahaferburg »

kolme wrote: post #85
kelnos wrote: post #6

At the risk of being unreasonably negative, stuff like this just makes me feel... tired. Git is... fine. I'm sure it doesn't solve every problem for everyone, and oh boy does it still have many rough edges, but it works and (as the article points out), git has won and is widely adopted. I've extensively used CVS and Subversion in the past. I touched Mercurial and Bazaar when I ran into a project that used it. I remem…

I've also worked with CSV (barely) and SVN (more extensively) and I was blown away by Git. You can have real branches! Many of them! You don't have to manually merge them! It's decentralized, you can have multiple origins, it lets you work offline! The list goes on and on. There were many compelling reasons to switch to Git. But for all the articles about jj out there, I've never read any compelling reason to switch…

You don't need to switch from git to jj. You just try out jj on your git project and see if it clicks. If you don't like it, you just don't continue using it.
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