I just don't have enough pain points with Git to move to something new. I don't have a problem remembering the ~5 commands I need most on any given workday. Between stashes, branches, temporary commits I later rebase, and recently worktrees, I don't lack for anything in my usage. It's universally used across both my public and corporate life, and neither does anyone need to learn a new tool to interact with my code base, nor do I need to deal with possible inconsistencies by using a different frontend on my end.
It's cool that it exists, and it's impressive that it is built on top of git itself. If you (like the author) want to use it, then more power to you. But I have yet to be convinced by any of these articles that it is worth my time to try it since nearly all of them start from a point of "if you hate Git like me, then try this thing".
If anyone has a link to an article written from the point of view of "I love or at least tolerate git and have no real issues with it, here's why I like JJ," then I'd be glad to read it.
The best thing that could come out of jujitsu is git itself adopting the change-id system (which I believe I read somewhere is being considered). If you actually take time to learn your tools and how they're intended to be used, there's really not reason to learn jj IMO
I don't hate git, I like it fine and, until recently, used it exclusively on all my projects (I still use it non-exclusively). Here's an article that's written from that viewpoint:
Idk man, the first two paragraphs
of the article very much make it sound like you hate git.
> Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing people rave about Jujutsu, and I always wanted to try it, but it never seemed worth the trouble, even though I hate git.
Yeah I definitely hated Subversion, which helped push me to try Git back in the day. Actually, back then I was an `hg` guy. That battle was lost long ago though.
I think you linked to the same post as OP, though?
I wrote the post, so that's a post from the perspective of someone who doesn't hate git :P
I used bzr after SVN, but my larger point is that it's all fine, the question was whether you want to go through some short-term learning for long-term gain, or if you want to keep using what you know. Either is fine, I'm still using vim as my editor, for example.
SVN was not fine. Branching took forever (all the copying). And the space that required ... In fact, lots of things took forever on large-ish repos. Remember that everything required the server and network and disk speeds were slower back then. And just a commit could destroy your work if you got stuck in a conflict resolution. So you'd have to copy all the files you changed to a backup just in case, then delete them if the resolution went OK etc.
Was it better than CVS in some way? Sure.
But git is just better in so many ways. Back in the day I used git exclusively with git-svn at a place that was still stuck with SVN and I had a blast, while everyone else didn't. I just never had any of the problems they did.
I'm not entirely sure what pain people speak of with git. I found the transition very natural. And don't come talking to me about the "weird command syntax". Some of that was specifically to be compatible / "intuitive" / what they were used to for people coming from tools like SVN.
Sure you gotta learn about "the index", understand that everything is local and that you have an origin and local copy of all the labels (also sometimes called branches or tags) you can attach to commits. That's about it for the normal and regular use that someone would've had with SVN.
> Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve been using it for years knowing what a few commands do, and [...]
> If you don't like Jujutsu, you're wrong
It would be much more convincing if they had any idea of git that they were comparing it to.
Always the same starting point: "I don't understand how git works".
If you can't understand git, one of the most used tool in the whole industry, this is a *you* problem. You MUST take the time to understand how it works properly. Every job you'll get and every projects you'll work on will use a Version Control (at least I hope).
Abstracting this knowledge by using a tool that does things quite differently won't help you at all on the long run.
I use a gui for 90% of my workflows. Another 9 percent points are hitting back in my console history to rerun commands, never mind if git or jj or POSIX that affect my working dir or index state.
What am I supposed to do, use the UI plus jj, and prompt an LLM to use which: git, or jj, in case I am too lazy to think of the right command in the remaining one percent of cases?
But in general, I like the "less states and DVCS features than git" approach, but would not switch back to mercurial just to avoid the whole "should we rebase or create merge-commits" discussions in our teams due to having a single default that might not be optimal for everyone, but just works.
What is there not to _get_, honestly? And why is jj so easier to get?
The author seems to focus on how great it is to make changes to your commit history locally, and that you shouldn't worry because it's not pushed yet.
The thing is, I don't want automatic. Automatic sucks. The point of version control is that I am able to curate my changes. The guards and rails of git is what makes me feel safe.
I am still failing to see why JJ is superior to git, or whatever.
There are some convention people follow when working with git to make it safe to use. But those aren't git's features -- they are ways to avoid confusion.
If you don't want automatic, you shouldn't use git. It does too many things automatically, like update your branches' heads whenever you commit, for example.
And if I don't want that I can detach the HEAD. This isn't to much different. The only thing that changes by using branches is that you have a nice name, it prevents the commits from being GCed and it provides a default name on push.
I really loved jujutsu for the few weeks that I used it.
However, I did find all my tools that rely on Git (eg Gitlab CLI that can open merge request from the current branch) breaking because JJ operations result in detached head in Git.
In addition, mixing Git and JJ will result in your repos becoming really slow when you do need to run some Git operation.
I have been trying Jujutsu for a few weeks. It's cool and I like trying new things. I wouldn't say that it's so much better than git, though; there is nothing that I miss in the projects where I use git.
On the other hand, I have issues with Jujutsu, one of which completely prevents me from using it in some projects:
* No support for git submodules. One can dislike submodules as much as they want, if I need to contribute to a repository using them, I can't use Jujutsu.
* The signing support is very annoying with a security key. Even if I configure 'sign-on-push', it will access the security key every time it tries to check the signature, which is pretty much every `jj st` or `jj log` after something has changed locally. I don't need to check my own signatures, IMO they should be checked on fetch and on push.
* There is no way to configure a 'defaultKeyCommand' like in git, which I now rely on (because I have multiple security keys).
I have primarily used git in the terminal for more than a decade. I also used magit when I was primarily working in emacs (magit's great!). I now primarily use lazygit. While I'm not a fan of the whole UI, this is the only git tool that makes me go super fast while creating a near-perfect commit history. I tried using jj but immediately stopped after installation as it required a learning curve that I wasn't ready to commit to yet.
I don't really understand the appeal of jj as someone who uses sublime merge [0].
It has good support for submodules, a lot of the editing commits (messages, squash, move etc...) is really easy and I can also see and edit my stashes directly. Is there any benefit to jj compared to this?
> Jujutsu, in contrast, is more like playing with Play-Doh. You take a lump, cut it into two, shape one piece into something, give it a name, change your mind, give it another name, take a bit of the second piece and stick it on the first piece, and generally go back and forth all around your play area, making changes.
I love this description and it describes how I work with git. When I’m doing things locally I’m constantly committing small wip commits. When I get something the way I like it I’ll interactive rebase/just back it all up, and then create the perfect little boxes. I guess I should try jujutsu since it sounds like it might be even more for me. Although if you can’t get to the perfect boxes at the end I don’t know if I’d like it.
That's how I feel like working with git locally using a combination of basic commands and gitup (https://gitup.co/), that may be why I couldn't really get the selling point of jj when I tried it a couple weeks ago.
The only part that piqued my interest is merges being always successful and conflicts just sitting in the tree, waiting patiently to be resolved... It's the next logical step after being able to commit without synchronizing when we all moved away from SVN.
I have been trying to use jj for a couple months now, but hitting some friction with my company’s GitHub PR workflow. Specifically, after the PR is merged, the next time I fetch I always end up with a ton of conflicts. It gets hard to clean them up, so I often end up abandoning all mutable commits to start fresh.
I feel like I’m doing something wrong, as I haven’t seen this mentioned in any tutorials, but I don’t know what! :-/
I’ve been using jj for a few months now and still love its workflow, but I keep running into the same problem you mentioned. The advantages of jj far outweigh this issue, so I’d really like to figure out a clean way to avoid these conflicts.
for me, squash merges are enforced on github, and usually results in some weird / empty commits if i rebase a local stack after pulling in changes with part of the stack merged.
Until jj supports `git rebase -x "cargo check --deny warnings"`, it's useless to me. jj has primitive support for fixing individual files that changed, but it cannot work on any linter or formatter that depends on other files.
I feel like anyone who spends just a couple of hours learning git will have a much better mental model than the crappy "Assembly line" model from the article.
Your real mental model of git should be an acyclic directed graph where the nodes are commits and the edges are ancestry. Commits represents snapshot of the project's state. Tags and branches are just text pointers to commits in the graph.
If you use this mental model, suddenly things like git rebase or git reset become far less mysterious and arcane since they are just simple graph operations. Like `git reset --hard X` means "Make current branch's text pointer point to X"
I understand git at a pretty deep level. I still very much prefer jujutsu. Its rebase is just so much more powerful than git. I regularly work on top of octopus merges in jj of all my in-review parallel PRs and when I want to rebase them all and the octopus merge and the various anonymous branches on top it takes 1 command. It’s so much more powerful than git it’s crazy.
I think the author is one of those folks who were able to fully grasp the beauty of the Git data model for the first time by switching to Jujutsu. It makes it easier to see the “DAG of commits” vision than Git with its index and stashes and confusingly named commands with fifty flags.
Totally agree on the DAG point of view, but I would argue that for different people you need different analogies/models to make it click. I would argue that pointing towards graph theory might help people that have a formal CS or maths education, but not necessarily folks that went through bootcamps, switched from design roles, have a biology background (e.g. bioinformatics) or do statistics (e.g. in medicine or psychology)
"Git is too hard" is never a good argument to promote the use of a different tool.
I use git on the terminal exclusively, never had an issue amending a commit or rebasing a branch, or even dealing with conflict resolution most of the time I just use one of the automatic strategies.
I just don't have enough pain points with Git to move to something new. I don't have a problem remembering the ~5 commands I need most on any given workday. Between stashes, branches, temporary commits I later rebase, and recently worktrees, I don't lack for anything in my usage. It's universally used across both my public and corporate life, and neither does anyone need to learn a new tool to interact with my code base, nor do I need to deal with possible inconsistencies by using a different frontend on my end.
It's cool that it exists, and it's impressive that it is built on top of git itself. If you (like the author) want to use it, then more power to you. But I have yet to be convinced by any of these articles that it is worth my time to try it since nearly all of them start from a point of "if you hate Git like me, then try this thing".
If anyone has a link to an article written from the point of view of "I love or at least tolerate git and have no real issues with it, here's why I like JJ," then I'd be glad to read it.
The best thing that could come out of jujitsu is git itself adopting the change-id system (which I believe I read somewhere is being considered). If you actually take time to learn your tools and how they're intended to be used, there's really not reason to learn jj IMO
I don't hate git, I like it fine and, until recently, used it exclusively on all my projects (I still use it non-exclusively). Here's an article that's written from that viewpoint:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/switch-to-jujutsu-already-a-tut...
That having been said, I didn't hate Subversion either. It was fine.
> I don't hate git
Idk man, the first two paragraphs of the article very much make it sound like you hate git.
> Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing people rave about Jujutsu, and I always wanted to try it, but it never seemed worth the trouble, even though I hate git.
Also:
> I don't hate git
but
> I have my trusty alias, fuckgit
Someone who doesn't hate git would have named this alias quite differently...
Fair enough, I'll clarify what I actually hate.
Yeah I definitely hated Subversion, which helped push me to try Git back in the day. Actually, back then I was an `hg` guy. That battle was lost long ago though.
I think you linked to the same post as OP, though?
I wonder if there's a parallel universe where people are writing posts about Sapling and getting mercurial users to migrate to it.
I wrote the post, so that's a post from the perspective of someone who doesn't hate git :P
I used bzr after SVN, but my larger point is that it's all fine, the question was whether you want to go through some short-term learning for long-term gain, or if you want to keep using what you know. Either is fine, I'm still using vim as my editor, for example.
SVN was not fine. Branching took forever (all the copying). And the space that required ... In fact, lots of things took forever on large-ish repos. Remember that everything required the server and network and disk speeds were slower back then. And just a commit could destroy your work if you got stuck in a conflict resolution. So you'd have to copy all the files you changed to a backup just in case, then delete them if the resolution went OK etc.
Was it better than CVS in some way? Sure.
But git is just better in so many ways. Back in the day I used git exclusively with git-svn at a place that was still stuck with SVN and I had a blast, while everyone else didn't. I just never had any of the problems they did.
I'm not entirely sure what pain people speak of with git. I found the transition very natural. And don't come talking to me about the "weird command syntax". Some of that was specifically to be compatible / "intuitive" / what they were used to for people coming from tools like SVN.
Sure you gotta learn about "the index", understand that everything is local and that you have an origin and local copy of all the labels (also sometimes called branches or tags) you can attach to commits. That's about it for the normal and regular use that someone would've had with SVN.
Well you can either have a viewpoint of "the current thing I use is fine because I'm used to the warts" or "it's not fine because other things exist".
It can't be that SVN is bad and git is better but also that git is fine even though jj is better.
I worked with SVN and I hated it, merging branches and dealing with conflict resolution on SVN was like getting stepped on the balls
> Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve been using it for years knowing what a few commands do, and [...]
> If you don't like Jujutsu, you're wrong
It would be much more convincing if they had any idea of git that they were comparing it to.
In the past 2 months, I saw 3 articles about JJ.
Always the same starting point: "I don't understand how git works".
If you can't understand git, one of the most used tool in the whole industry, this is a *you* problem. You MUST take the time to understand how it works properly. Every job you'll get and every projects you'll work on will use a Version Control (at least I hope).
Abstracting this knowledge by using a tool that does things quite differently won't help you at all on the long run.
I use a gui for 90% of my workflows. Another 9 percent points are hitting back in my console history to rerun commands, never mind if git or jj or POSIX that affect my working dir or index state.
What am I supposed to do, use the UI plus jj, and prompt an LLM to use which: git, or jj, in case I am too lazy to think of the right command in the remaining one percent of cases?
But in general, I like the "less states and DVCS features than git" approach, but would not switch back to mercurial just to avoid the whole "should we rebase or create merge-commits" discussions in our teams due to having a single default that might not be optimal for everyone, but just works.
Right in the first paragraph.
> Needless to say, I just don’t get git.
What is there not to _get_, honestly? And why is jj so easier to get?
The author seems to focus on how great it is to make changes to your commit history locally, and that you shouldn't worry because it's not pushed yet.
The thing is, I don't want automatic. Automatic sucks. The point of version control is that I am able to curate my changes. The guards and rails of git is what makes me feel safe.
I am still failing to see why JJ is superior to git, or whatever.
Hmm, what guards and rails?
There are some convention people follow when working with git to make it safe to use. But those aren't git's features -- they are ways to avoid confusion.
If you don't want automatic, you shouldn't use git. It does too many things automatically, like update your branches' heads whenever you commit, for example.
And if I don't want that I can detach the HEAD. This isn't to much different. The only thing that changes by using branches is that you have a nice name, it prevents the commits from being GCed and it provides a default name on push.
I really loved jujutsu for the few weeks that I used it. However, I did find all my tools that rely on Git (eg Gitlab CLI that can open merge request from the current branch) breaking because JJ operations result in detached head in Git.
In addition, mixing Git and JJ will result in your repos becoming really slow when you do need to run some Git operation.
Hm, I can't speak to the tools, I imagine you're right. I haven't found any slowness, though. Why would jj slow git down?
I have been trying Jujutsu for a few weeks. It's cool and I like trying new things. I wouldn't say that it's so much better than git, though; there is nothing that I miss in the projects where I use git.
On the other hand, I have issues with Jujutsu, one of which completely prevents me from using it in some projects:
* No support for git submodules. One can dislike submodules as much as they want, if I need to contribute to a repository using them, I can't use Jujutsu.
* The signing support is very annoying with a security key. Even if I configure 'sign-on-push', it will access the security key every time it tries to check the signature, which is pretty much every `jj st` or `jj log` after something has changed locally. I don't need to check my own signatures, IMO they should be checked on fetch and on push.
* There is no way to configure a 'defaultKeyCommand' like in git, which I now rely on (because I have multiple security keys).
Yeah, it sounds like you have specific requirements that don't let you use jj until it gets support for those. That's fair.
I have primarily used git in the terminal for more than a decade. I also used magit when I was primarily working in emacs (magit's great!). I now primarily use lazygit. While I'm not a fan of the whole UI, this is the only git tool that makes me go super fast while creating a near-perfect commit history. I tried using jj but immediately stopped after installation as it required a learning curve that I wasn't ready to commit to yet.
I don't really understand the appeal of jj as someone who uses sublime merge [0]. It has good support for submodules, a lot of the editing commits (messages, squash, move etc...) is really easy and I can also see and edit my stashes directly. Is there any benefit to jj compared to this?
[0] https://www.sublimemerge.com/
committable conflicts give you painless rebases. if you know about rerere, try jj; if you don't, it might not be worth it.
> Jujutsu, in contrast, is more like playing with Play-Doh. You take a lump, cut it into two, shape one piece into something, give it a name, change your mind, give it another name, take a bit of the second piece and stick it on the first piece, and generally go back and forth all around your play area, making changes.
I love this description and it describes how I work with git. When I’m doing things locally I’m constantly committing small wip commits. When I get something the way I like it I’ll interactive rebase/just back it all up, and then create the perfect little boxes. I guess I should try jujutsu since it sounds like it might be even more for me. Although if you can’t get to the perfect boxes at the end I don’t know if I’d like it.
That's how I feel like working with git locally using a combination of basic commands and gitup (https://gitup.co/), that may be why I couldn't really get the selling point of jj when I tried it a couple weeks ago.
The only part that piqued my interest is merges being always successful and conflicts just sitting in the tree, waiting patiently to be resolved... It's the next logical step after being able to commit without synchronizing when we all moved away from SVN.
I'll say that Jujutsu makes the way to get to the perfect boxes really friction-free.
I have been trying to use jj for a couple months now, but hitting some friction with my company’s GitHub PR workflow. Specifically, after the PR is merged, the next time I fetch I always end up with a ton of conflicts. It gets hard to clean them up, so I often end up abandoning all mutable commits to start fresh.
I feel like I’m doing something wrong, as I haven’t seen this mentioned in any tutorials, but I don’t know what! :-/
I’ve been using jj for a few months now and still love its workflow, but I keep running into the same problem you mentioned. The advantages of jj far outweigh this issue, so I’d really like to figure out a clean way to avoid these conflicts.
What does git think of the tree after you pull? Does everything seem fine to git, but jj shows a conflict?
That's really odd, maybe the tree is somehow messed up? I've never had this problem. What's conflicting?
Can you try it on a fresh clone and see if it still happens?
Maybe it’s based on whether the GitHub merge is a squash, rebase, or plain merge? Or do folks usually manually perform the merge with jj?
It shouldn't matter, under the hood the tree is the same for both. I don't know why jj would complain but git wouldn't, hm.
for me, squash merges are enforced on github, and usually results in some weird / empty commits if i rebase a local stack after pulling in changes with part of the stack merged.
Until jj supports `git rebase -x "cargo check --deny warnings"`, it's useless to me. jj has primitive support for fixing individual files that changed, but it cannot work on any linter or formatter that depends on other files.
I feel like anyone who spends just a couple of hours learning git will have a much better mental model than the crappy "Assembly line" model from the article.
Your real mental model of git should be an acyclic directed graph where the nodes are commits and the edges are ancestry. Commits represents snapshot of the project's state. Tags and branches are just text pointers to commits in the graph.
If you use this mental model, suddenly things like git rebase or git reset become far less mysterious and arcane since they are just simple graph operations. Like `git reset --hard X` means "Make current branch's text pointer point to X"
I understand git at a pretty deep level. I still very much prefer jujutsu. Its rebase is just so much more powerful than git. I regularly work on top of octopus merges in jj of all my in-review parallel PRs and when I want to rebase them all and the octopus merge and the various anonymous branches on top it takes 1 command. It’s so much more powerful than git it’s crazy.
I think the author is one of those folks who were able to fully grasp the beauty of the Git data model for the first time by switching to Jujutsu. It makes it easier to see the “DAG of commits” vision than Git with its index and stashes and confusingly named commands with fifty flags.
Totally agree on the DAG point of view, but I would argue that for different people you need different analogies/models to make it click. I would argue that pointing towards graph theory might help people that have a formal CS or maths education, but not necessarily folks that went through bootcamps, switched from design roles, have a biology background (e.g. bioinformatics) or do statistics (e.g. in medicine or psychology)
"Git is too hard" is never a good argument to promote the use of a different tool. I use git on the terminal exclusively, never had an issue amending a commit or rebasing a branch, or even dealing with conflict resolution most of the time I just use one of the automatic strategies.
Weird cultish vibes I'm getting, especially the "i just dont get git" part. Shows that you did no research.
it's hard to take the article seriously when the author relies on a fuckgit alias on a regular basis