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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are just multiple different ways of working. Some ways fit some people's mental models better.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You definitely wouldn't advance the bookmark with each commit. Only when you need to push.<p>And oh man, it's <i>so</i> 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.<p>If this doesn't appeal to you - that's fine. You're not deficient. But understand, nor are those for whom your workflow sucks.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>If you force everyone to use git, of course not everyone will be happy.<p>If you force everyone to use jj, of course not everyone will be happy.<p>Thankfully, the whole point is git and jj users can interoperate without needing to care what the other is using. So yes, not only <i>can</i> everyone be happy, but everyone <i>is</i> happy! This isn't a hypothetical - it's a reality. It's the reason so many use jujutsu at work.
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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> branch-push = ["util", "exec", "--", "sh", "-c", """
name="$(jj log --no-graph --no-pager --color=never -r 'fork_point(@ | trunk())+ & fork_point(@ | trunk())..@' -T '"push-" ++ change_id.short()')"
jj bookmark set -r @- "${name}"
jj git push -b "${name}"
"""]
</code></pre>
you could probably write a similar alias that used your workspace name as the branch name to push to.<p>and descriptions are slightly nicer than branch names, since they can be longer.
I assume you mean <i>named</i> branches (bookmarks in jj)? Because anonymous branches in jj are trivial: you just `jj new <parent_change_id>` and you have a new branch.<p>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.<p>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 <i>name</i> of the branch is a clue as to what the heck I was doing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>In jj, it's the opposite. I start with a change, and I often describe it right away. Branches (bookmarks) come at the end.<p>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<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>> 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?<p>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.<p>Is it easy?
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
yeah nobody "has to know", especially if everyone else is also rebasing etc constantly.
I do this all the time at my job, without issue. I think it's honestly easier than using plain git.
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 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’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 like jujutsu simply because (despite my annoyances, which might be because I started using it 2 weeks ago) it's still faster than git.<p>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.<p>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!
But you probably <i>haven't</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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, <i>more</i> 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.<p>Wrong. With jj, I use `jj describe` before I start work. It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.<p>> Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change.<p>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.<p>> Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list.<p>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.<p>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)<p>"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.<p>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.<p>> The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done.<p>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.<p>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.
Yeah, I don't get it. I'm sure it's because we work differently and that's fine.<p>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.<p>> 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<p>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.
<p><pre><code> branch names are just a summarization of your commit messages
</code></pre>
What kind of dev workflow leads to this surprising opinion?
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.
>You don’t need easy named branches.<p>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.<p>(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.)
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`.
Yes, that's true, merging. Which is what made branching a reasonable thing to do.
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 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.<p>I like Jujutsu so much that I've been working on massive refactors to my tooling in order to support it (example: <a href="https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done</a>)
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.<p>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.<p>To me, jj has inherent value because I do a lot of things raw Git makes difficult or impossible. For example, <a href="https://github.com/LoganDark/fabric-template" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LoganDark/fabric-template</a> supports every point release of Minecraft since 1.14, and mods like <a href="https://github.com/LoganDark/debrand" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LoganDark/debrand</a> 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.<p>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
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb</a>
Ah yeah, you're right, that's a misrepresentation on my part - it's based on lines, not the file:<p>> [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.<p>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 allows reviewers to step through your pull request in small bites, with each set of changes scoped to a single aspect of the feature.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I have finally embraced squashing PRs and realized I wasted my youth trying to write Good Commits.
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<p>A checkout is a working space after all, why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?
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.
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.
auto add is nice for universal undo for changes made outside your editor...<p>instead of adding changes to a new commit, i split/squash them into the previous one so the current commit remains dirty
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.<p>> why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?<p>Because that would go completely against how jj changes work.
[flagged]
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.
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.
> Latter commits overwrite work that was done in earlier commits and the story breaks.<p>> Some people prefer this, as it helps git bisect work better. Debuggability versus reviewer convenience is the tradeoff, I guess.<p>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
Force --no-ff merges in git. That's pretty much what you want.
Just squash all the PR commits into one when it gets merged to main or whatever your main branch is.<p>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.
Jj could do that; it stores an evolog of each change, but currently that's kept local
So I'd have an <i>immediate</i> problem with the target sequence of commits here. The thing about just getting a "define types" commit is that it shows me <i>nothing</i> 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.<p>Just give me the PR, don't sweat the individual patches. But maybe also work on not committing your first idea as finished work.
This remind me of [jj megamerge](<a href="https://isaaccorbrey.com/notes/jujutsu-megamerges-for-fun-and-profit" rel="nofollow">https://isaaccorbrey.com/notes/jujutsu-megamerges-for-fun-an...</a>). jj allows concentrating on developing while leaving things for vcs alone, as well as solving vcs things (conflicts) at very beginning (megamerge). Really good.
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.<p>I see there's a similar project for JJ, but it doesn't seem nearly as polished <a href="https://github.com/Cretezy/lazyjj" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Cretezy/lazyjj</a>
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!
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”.<p>`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.<p>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 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
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.<p>I do switch branch for long experiments and touch up on existing PR.<p>It would be great if a PR was about distributing patches and not having those automatically generated from a branch.
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'
`git rebase -i` and `fixup`
I don’t understand. Are there people that try to use git without ever invoking “git rebase -i” ?
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.
I've done both the rebase and the merge flows in different jobs.<p>I just don't see the fuss about rebase. Merging just works fine.<p>Edit: OK, I realized later that I'm not really responding to the usual git rebase -i use case.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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" <i>all</i> the time. Many of them didn't when they used git.<p>The interface matters.<p>[1] If you told me 80%, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
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.
> A downside to this technique is that there's no guarantee that every commit will compile, which might be a dealbreaker.<p>To some of us, that's an essential structural criterion. Passing unit-level self-tests may be as well.
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.
So... git rebase -i?
No, more like:<p><pre><code> git rebase -i
# squash all the commits (e.g. in vim with ctrl-v)
git reset HEAD^
git add -p
# interactively pickup the RED hunks
git ci -m RED
</code></pre>
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])<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765759">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765759</a>
I'd recommend reading the post, it's not that long
git rebase -i kinda sucks once you tried jj.
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.
> For large features, I find this workflow far easier than having to maintain strict git rigour for the lifecycle of the feature's development.<p>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: Squash everything together then pick each component out by squash -i to an empty commit.<p>Seems straightforward, wouldn’t call it special
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This is my take on it too. And I built BetterGit (<a href="https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/</a>) 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.<p>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<p><a href="https://github.com/danverbraganza/jujutsu-skill" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/danverbraganza/jujutsu-skill</a>
I am a really heavy Claude Code user but source control is <i>still</i> 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.