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.
If ur making an appeal on a forum like this u could have gone with ur favorite feature, or anything else really.
It's just that although Git was created by Linus Torvalds it is not perfect and could be more beginner friendly. But efforts to improve this should be concerted, not individual efforts.
And it does not have to be jj. I just think there is room for improvement, and not to alienate old farts it could be called GitNext, GitStep, GitFlow or similar to emphasize that is still is just Git, only with an improved front end.
Maybe Linus Torvalds himself should start the initiative.
How we got git was cvs was totally terrible[1], so Linus refused to use it. Larry McEvoy persuaded Linus to use Bitkeeper for the Linux kernel development effort. After trying Bitkeeper for a while, Linus did the thing of writing v0 of git in a weekend in a response to what he saw as the shortcomings of Bitkeeper for his workflow.[2]
But the point is there had already been vcs that saw wide adoption, serious attempts to address shortcomings in those (perforce and bitkeeper in particular) and then git was created to address specific shortcomings in those systems.
It wasn't born out of just a general "I wish there was something easier than rebase" whine or a desire to create the next thing. I haven't seen anything that comes close to being compelling in that respect. jj comes into that bucket for me. It looks "fine". Like if I was forced to use it I wouldn't complain. It doesn't look materially better than git in any way whatsoever though, and articles like this which say "it has no index" make me respond with "Like ok whatever bro". It really makes no practical difference to me whether the VCS has an index.
[1] I speak as someone who maintained a CVS repo with nearly 700 active developers and >20mm lines of code. When someone made a mistake and you had to go in and edit the repo files in binary format it was genuinely terrifying.
[2] In a cave. From a box of scraps. You get the idea.
It gained tons of popularity mainly because of Linus being behind it; similar projects already existed when it was released.
Too sad it didnt win the VCS wars.
hg was slow though I don't know how bzr compared as I was using it pretty light-weight.
GitHub is an abomination.
Git was not the first DVCS, there were better ones even when it was made. But Linus pushed git and people followed like sheep.
(I'm using git, both because everyone else is, and also because github exists - turns out nobody even wants a DVCS, they want a central version control system with the warts of SVN fixed).
Git is older than mercurial by 12 days. Bazaar has git beat by about the same amount of time. The major DVCSes all came out within a month of each other.
> But Linus pushed git and people followed like sheep.
I don't think this is true. Until around 2010-2011 or so, projects moving to DVCS seemed to pick up not git but mercurial. The main impetus I think was not Linux choosing git but the collapse of alternate code hosting places other than GitHub, which essentially forced git.
1. git merge ONLY does merges (no fast forward/rebase). git pull ONLY does a fast forward
2. git log by default is git log --first-parent. Just show commits where the parent is the current branch. This makes the merge workflow really easy to understand an linear, because in the end, you only care about commits on the trunk.i do this for example when i want to see a specific edit highlighted in my editor, it's a nice workflow i think
As a git-ist (?), if I'd ever move away from git, it would be to avoid tooling that has idioms like this (like git too has), if `jj` just gonna surface a bunch of new "bad ideas" (together with what seems like really good ideas), kind of makes it feel like it isn't worth picking up unless you don't already know git.
If you have some unfinished changes at the tip and want to temporarily checkout something 2 weeks ago, you `jj new` to there (similar to `git stash; git switch whatever`), and then later `jj edit your-old-tip` to go back (equivalent to `git switch main; git stash pop`; I think `jj edit` being an extended replacement for stash-popping things is a reasonable way to think about it). (and if you don't have any uncommitted changes, you always `jj new`)
jj also has a concept of immutable commits (defaulting to include tagged commits, and trunk at origin, which it'll disallow editing as a layer of defense)
This is the main difference though: in git files can be `staged`, `unstaged` or `committed`, so at any one time there are 3 entire snapshots of the repo "active".
In `jj` there is only one kind of snapshot (a change) and only one is "active" (the current working directory). When you make changes to the working directory you are modifying that "change".
As others have mentioned, the equivalent to `git checkout` would be `jj new`, which ensures a new empty change exists above the one you are checking out, so that any changes you make go into that new change rather than affecting the existing one.
I found when using jj it worked best for me when I stopped thinking in commits (which jj treats as very cheap “snapshots” of your code) and instead focus on the “changes”. Felt weird for me at first, but I realized when I was rebasing with git that’s how I viewed the logical changes I made anyway, jj just makes it explicit.
jj auto-rebasing doesn’t matter until you push changes, and once you do it marks them immutable, preventing you from accidentally rebasing changes that have been shared.
Honestly, this is only because `git checkout` is so convoluted that we've collectively changed our expectations around the UX. "checkout" can mean switching to another branch (and creating it if you specify a flag but erroring if you don't), looking at a commit (in which case you have "detached HEAD" and can't actually make changes until you make a branch) or resetting a file to the current state of HEAD (and mercy on your soul if you happen to name a branch the same as one of your files). Instead of having potentially wildly different behavior based on the "type" of the thing you pass to it, `jj edit` only accepts one type: the commit you want to edit. A branch (or "bookmark", as jj seems to call it now) is another way of specifying the commit you want to edit, but it's still saying "edit the commit" and not "edit the bookmark". Unfortunately, the expectation for a lot of people seems to be that "edit" should have the same convoluted behavior as git, and I'm not sure how to bridge that gap without giving up part of what makes jj nice in the first place.
I think this ruins it for me then. I push my in-progress work, to my in-progress branches. It makes switching between (lab) computers, dead or not, trivial.
Is there some "live remote" feature that could work for me, that just constantly force pushes to enabled branches?
Most models don't have a 100% correct CLI usage and either hallucinate or use some deprecated patterns.
However `jj undo` and the jj architecture generally make it difficult for agents to screw something up in a way that cannot be recovered.
I find it reasonably good with lots of tweaking over time. (With any agent - ask it to do a retrospective on the tool use and find ways to avoid pain points when you hit problems and add that to your skill/local agents.md).
I expect git has a lot more historical information about how to fix random problems with source control errors. JJ is better at the actual tasks, but the models don't have as much in their training data.
To work around this I stopped moving revs (squash/rebase) after review starts, which creates awkward local graphs if I have to merge from main for merge conflicts. Graphite works but it's $$$, and phabricator/reviewable/gerritt all have significant onboarding hurdles.
When reviewing, you can also mark individual files as reviewed (useful in larger reviews where you're incrementally reviewing files). If you do this, only files that are changed will be expanded when you come back to the review.
what I want is something like graphite/gerritt/google's critique where after each force push, the review page shows only the true delta between the two shas (similar to the "compare" button in github, bu as a reviewable unit).
poked around on github, doesn't look like the stacked PR feature has affected this "changes since your last review" selector yet :(
have a longer write up here: https://blog.tangled.org/stacking but we have "interdiffs", to view a delta from previous review. pull-requests advance in the form of immutable rounds much like the patch workflow on email.
we have been interdiffing and stacking for a while on to dogfood, sample PR: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/pulls/1265/round/1?diff...
I would like more uniformity in the way jjui handles commands when you are viewing changes vs when you are viewing files within a single change.
Often I just make my changes and leave it there without `new`, as I am not sure which file should go in a single commit. I just leave it there and I interactively commit later.
For me to use `new` more, I would like the ability to also simply be able to get a tree view of all changes, which contains file which contains file changes, so I could can have marks that span multiple changes and then either `split` or `commit` or `squash` the change, idk if there is a good word for it. Right now I can only mark within a single change, and I lose it once I navigate up.
They’re branching out, too. We had one in our neighborhood in Houston before moving back here to Illinois.
jj git init --git-repo my-repo
I think (but CANNOT PROMISE) that just removing the .jj folder will bring you back, but definitely take a backup of .git before you try this in case I’m wrong.
If you are _not_ in colocate mode, the .git folder is located _inside_ the .jj folder. So worth checking!
I also often end up with in a dirty repo state with multiple changes belonging to separate features or abstractions. I usually just pick the changes I want to group into a commit and clean up the state.
Since it's git compatible, it feels like it must work to add files and keep files uncommitted, but just by reading this tutorial I'm unsure.
`jj new` simply means "create a new commit [ontop of <location>]" - you don't have to describe it immediately. I never do.
I know that the intention was to do that, and I tried forcing the habit, but I too found it counter-productive to invariably end up re-writing the description.
If I end up with multiple features or abstractions in one change (equivalent to the “dirty repo”), jj split works very well as an alternative to the git add/git commit/repeat workflow tidying up one’s working copy.
Like `jj commit -m 'Feature A' file1 file2` then `jj commit -m 'Feature B' file3 file 4`
A good way to think of it is that jj new is an empty git staging area. There's still a `jj commit` command that allows you to desc then jj new.
> I also often end up with in a dirty repo state with multiple changes belonging to separate features or abstractions. I usually just pick the changes I want to group into a commit and clean up the state.
jj split allows you do to this pretty well.
> Since it's git compatible, it feels like it must work to add files and keep files uncommitted, but just by reading this tutorial I'm unsure.
In jj you always have a commit - it's just sometimes empty, sometimes full, has a stable changeid regardless. jj treats the commit as a calculated value based on the contents of your folder etc, rather than the unit of change.
Yes, but this is not backwards, the way you do it in git is backwards. =)
The autosync feature is really nice too, and you can store backup repos in cloud storage folders and auto sync to those as well.
So it felt like the XKCD on "standards": I now have one versioning system, if I learn jj I will have two. What for?
Don't get me wrong: it's nice that jj exists and some people seem to love it. But I don't see a need for myself. Just like people seem to love Meson, but the consequence for me is that instead of dealing with CMake and Autotools, I now have to deal with CMake, Autotools and Meson.
The core issues are: how long did it take you to get there, how many lucky decisions did you have to make to not run into git footguns, and how many other people accidentally made different choices and so have very different experiences from you?
Then, for various reasons, I switched back to git.
By day 2, I was missing jj.
Stuff like "jj undo" really is nice.
1. its different
2. very few user would really care about this difference
people use zsh because apple choose it, and pwsh because microsoft settled on it, on linux i am sure we can do better than bash, but it good enough and nothing justified replacing it (that being said, all 3 OSes should have settled non nushell)
in summary, if we couldnt replace bash on linux, i dont think anyone can replace git, git as an scm tool if far better than bash as a shell
mkdir junk
echo '*' > junk/.gitignore
Also might be relevant for claude, since it wants to put its settings into the repo itself as `.claude/`:
mkdir junk/.claude
bwrap ... --bind "$(pwd)/junk/.claude" "$(pwd)/.claude" ...
# ~/.gitconfig
[core]
excludesFile = ~/gitconf/gitignore_global
# ~/gitconf/gitignore_global
.envrc
.direnv/*What has a change is ast-based version control.
You adding a feature to a function that uses a struct I renamed shouldn't be a conflict. Those actions don't confliuct with each other, unless you treat code as text - rather than a representation of the logic.
Ending merge conflicts might make a new version control 10x better than git, and therefore actually replace it.
I mention it because while the jj command line interface is excellent, there are certain tasks that I find easier to perform with a graphical user interface. For example, I often want to quickly tap on various revisions and see their diffs. GG makes that kind of repository browsing — and certain squash operations — much more efficient for me.
If you’re interested in more information about GG, my co-host and I talked about it in a recent episode of the Abstractions podcast at about the 8:17 mark: https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/052-they-...
It isn't very hard to make a bash script to do it, but I have about six github repos, all of which frequently need to be put on a new machine. that kind of functionality would be cool to have out of the box.
for url in url1 url2 ..; do git clone $url; done
dgb23•2h ago
> There's one other reason you should be interested in giving jj a try: it has a git compatible backend, and so you can use jj on your own, without requiring anyone else you're working with to convert too. This means that there's no real downside to giving it a shot; if it's not for you, you're not giving up all of the history you wrote with it, and can go right back to git with no issues.
eru•1h ago
jeremyjh•53m ago
miyoji•40m ago
maleldil•28m ago
jeremyjh•20m ago
ongy•27m ago
Colocation has its uses bit is a bit finicky. The push/pull compatibility works perfectly fine (with some caveats of github being broken that can be worked around).
asdfasgasdgasdg•18m ago
IshKebab•18m ago