Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu

https://ikesau.co/blog/defeating-git-rigour-fatigue-with-jujutsu/

by ikesau • 2 months ago

178 173 2 months ago

y1n06• 2 months ago

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.

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.

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.

Regarding the article, I have no idea what is going on as I'm red-green color deficient.

jolux6• 2 months ago

I assume you mean named branches (bookmarks in jj)? Because anonymous branches in jj are trivial: you just `jj new <parent_change_id>` and you have a new branch.

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?

nine_k2• 2 months ago

Imagine that you use jj, while everyone else who works on the repo along with you uses regular git.

Is it easy?

y1n06• 2 months ago

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.

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.

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?

LoganDark3• 2 months ago

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.

I like Jujutsu so much that I've been working on massive refactors to my tooling in order to support it (example: https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done)

y1n06• 2 months ago

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.

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.

stouset8• 2 months ago

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?

y1n06• 2 months ago

I make a commit and the branch doesn't follow it. Bookmark, whatever. That is never a behavior I would want. What purpose does it serve?

throawayonthe• 2 months ago

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

rmwaite• 2 months ago

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.

y1n06• 2 months ago

Yes, that's true, merging. Which is what made branching a reasonable thing to do.

kccqzy7• 2 months ago

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`.

kccqzy7• 2 months ago

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.

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!

y1n06• 2 months ago

Yeah, I don't get it. I'm sure it's because we work differently and that's fine.

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.

dzaima3• 2 months ago

But you probably haven't 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.

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.

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, more important as a result, for separating sequences of changes striving towards a goal, from the sea of smaller experiments.

cpeterso2• 2 months ago

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.

rixed• 2 months ago

  branch names are just a summarization of your commit messages

What kind of dev workflow leads to this surprising opinion?

krackers2• 2 months ago

You don’t need easy named branches.

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.

(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.)

NamlchakKhandro2• 2 months ago

Feel the same way about JJ.

It feels like Apple vs Linux. Apple being different ... just because (it gives them an artificial moat)

kaladin-jasnah• 2 months ago

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.

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).

oscillonoscope• 2 months ago

If I need to move a 'branch bookmark' around a lot, I usually just tie it to an empty commit and then rebase changes before the bookmark.

sakompella• 2 months ago

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.

wocram3• 2 months ago

https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/3549 let's you change this behavior.

I think the idea is that branches/bookmarks aren't as necessary as they are with git.

BeetleB3• 2 months ago

I think much of the problem with this thread is people trying to convince one way is superior/inferior.

There are just multiple different ways of working. Some ways fit some people's mental models better.

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.

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.

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.

You definitely wouldn't advance the bookmark with each commit. Only when you need to push.

And oh man, it's so 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.

If this doesn't appeal to you - that's fine. You're not deficient. But understand, nor are those for whom your workflow sucks.

jaredklewis• 2 months ago

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.

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.

dzaima3• 2 months ago

How different people approach workflows is fascinating.

For example, your "not all that different from looking at all (recent) heads" implies that the number of (recent) heads isn't far off from number of (would-be-)branches (i.e. no random offshoot experiments, stashed-away debug sessions; whereas I make many of such continuously (were stashes on git (with occasional grumbles about not being able to stack stashes), regular commits now on jj (maybe with a special-format description, if I bother)));

and that you (even if subconsciously) try to ensure that the head of a branch is always identifiably-representative of the branch (i.e. don't put some random unrelated change at the tip with the idea of "I'll put this in a more proper place when I get back to this").

Effectively, using the full commit graph not as a place where anything potentially-useful can stay, but rather by itself a complete picture, with things not fitting into it going into.. idk, just being abandoned, to be found by looking through the op log? commit IDs saved in an external file? wading through evolog / scanning through `jj show -r xyz/2` etc?

theamk• 2 months ago

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.

wait what? how does this work?

Many of my stashes are tiny changes that need checked later - effectively, each stash entry is a quick TODO list. At some moment, for example once a major feature is done, I'll go a check every stash'ed entry and decide - maybe it's no longer relevant, maybe I should make a PR out of it, or maybe I should convert them to the branch if it's useful but needs more work. The branches are similar, but on longer scale.

The idea that you don't need to declutter your old stashes/branches seems absurd to me - it's like getting a huge box labeled "misc", and throwing every single thing in there. Sure, it's quick, but that's how you lose the important things you need to do, and find the useless junk instead of the actual thing you were looking for.

arccy2• 2 months ago

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.

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:

    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}"
    """]

you could probably write a similar alias that used your workspace name as the branch name to push to.

and descriptions are slightly nicer than branch names, since they can be longer.

LtWorf• 2 months ago

I've worked in places where they didn't know about git branches. They only had master.

Review was done by having someone sit next to you and scrolling through the code telling what you had changed.

wocram3• 2 months ago

jujutsu presents the same amount of power with fewer ideas, eg. There is no staging area. It adds new features, like jj undo.

The un-learning curve is steep if you already know git very well.

https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/3549 lets you enable automatically advancing bookmarks.

diath• 2 months ago

So... git rebase -i?

nomel2• 2 months ago

Definitely not. Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits (including into a git repo if you wish [1])

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765759

ahepp• 2 months ago

Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits

In what way is that different from using `git rebase -i` to edit a commit?

ai_slop_hater• 2 months ago

git rebase -i kinda sucks once you tried jj.

9029• 2 months ago

I'd recommend reading the post, it's not that long

raincole• 2 months ago

As someone who doesn't know jj and read this article, it does sound like `git rebase -i` to me. I'm sure that if I actually spent time learning jj I'd know the difference though.

idoubtit• 2 months ago

No, more like:

    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

The main difference to jj is that the RED commit is created later with git.

nine_k2• 2 months ago

But isn't the flow nearly identical with jj, because the key part, the moving of hunks, is interactive (aka manual) anyway?

jonathanyc• 2 months ago

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.

mi_lk• 2 months ago

So: Squash everything together then pick each component out by squash -i to an empty commit.

Seems straightforward, wouldn’t call it special

nomel2• 2 months ago

I think jj will never gain momentum because people only have a git mental model at this point, so won't be able to effectively reason about jj.

incognito124• 2 months ago

I spoke about this before, but jj has the Blub Paradox problem, from the pg's essay Beating the Averages (https://paulgraham.com/avg.html).

Yes, you can do most commit manipulations with git just like with jj. But, users of jj know they're "looking down the power continuum" (to reuse pg's terminology) when they look at git, whereas git users cannot fathom what's exactly the deal with jj. Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind. It's close to impossible to describe it except "it's really neat" and "wow it removes all git's friction I didn't know existed".

And, apparently, there's a pattern of having to try at least two times before it becomes intuitive!

Macha3• 2 months ago

Having been often called by coworkers to assist them with their git problems, I can assure you they don’t have a git mental model.

winterqt• 2 months ago

`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.

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.

[0] https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

jolux6• 2 months ago

Also `sl absorb`.

ikesau• 2 months ago

Ah yeah, you're right, that's a misrepresentation on my part - it's based on lines, not the file:

[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.

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.

oefrha• 2 months ago

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).

mcookly• 2 months ago

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.

einpoklum2• 2 months ago

For large features, I find this workflow far easier than having to maintain strict git rigour for the lifecycle of the feature's development.

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.

einpoklum2• 2 months ago

s/every larger mess/even larger mess/

sorry about that.

fragmede• 2 months ago

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.

hu33• 2 months ago

This. I feel jj is some years too late.

It tries to solve a human problem in an LLM era.

LLMs are destined to overcome humans in code merging and change versioning (already did for me).

There's little point to introducing yet another layer of indirection when LLMs just cut to the chase.

surajrmal4• 2 months ago

A lot of humans don't currently trust agents to touch VCS today. I also find that my agent tends to be much better about dealing with jj than it is with git.

nemo1618• 2 months ago

Good git hygiene is also less important post-LLMs, as the LLM can make sense of even a messy history.

jezzamon3• 2 months ago

You can definitely get stuck in a weird place with git that I haven't run into in the same extent with jj. The ability to undo anything with the one 'jj undo' command is awesome in the agent coding world when it makes a mistake.

xyzsparetimexyz• 2 months ago

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'

nozzlegear• 2 months ago

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.

singiamtel• 2 months ago

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.

I see there's a similar project for JJ, but it doesn't seem nearly as polished https://github.com/Cretezy/lazyjj

nchmy• 2 months ago

Jjui is the best tui for jj

sswatson3• 2 months ago

What does jjui have on lazyjj? Sincere question; I tried it, and I want to get it, and so far I don’t.

stouset8• 2 months ago

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.

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.

3eb7988a1663• 2 months ago

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.

surajrmal4• 2 months ago

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.

stouset8• 2 months ago

It’s really not.

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.

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.

EFLKumo• 2 months ago

This remind me of [jj megamerge](https://isaaccorbrey.com/notes/jujutsu-megamerges-for-fun-an...). jj allows concentrating on developing while leaving things for vcs alone, as well as solving vcs things (conflicts) at very beginning (megamerge). Really good.

drdrey• 2 months ago

I have finally embraced squashing PRs and realized I wasted my youth trying to write Good Commits.

vermilingua• 2 months ago

These Good Commits are for the review’s benefit, not necessarily trunk history.

wocram3• 2 months ago

PRs very frequently contain more than 1 logical change.

nextaccountic• 2 months ago

Latter commits overwrite work that was done in earlier commits and the story breaks.
Some people prefer this, as it helps git bisect work better. Debuggability versus reviewer convenience is the tradeoff, I guess.

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

bschwindHN• 2 months ago

Just squash all the PR commits into one when it gets merged to main or whatever your main branch is.

You can revisit the original PR to see the individual commits if you really want.

paradox4602• 2 months ago

Jj could do that; it stores an evolog of each change, but currently that's kept local

gmueckl2• 2 months ago

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.

riwsky2• 2 months ago

That’s, uh, exactly how jj works!

Izkata• 2 months ago

Force --no-ff merges in git. That's pretty much what you want.

BobbyTables2• 2 months ago

I don’t understand. Are there people that try to use git without ever invoking “git rebase -i” ?

christophilus• 2 months ago

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.

NamlchakKhandro2• 2 months ago

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.

Yokohiii2• 2 months ago

TIL I am a minority.

BeetleB3• 2 months ago

I've done both the rebase and the merge flows in different jobs.

I just don't see the fuss about rebase. Merging just works fine.

Edit: OK, I realized later that I'm not really responding to the usual git rebase -i use case.

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?

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.

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" all the time. Many of them didn't when they used git.

The interface matters.

[1] If you told me 80%, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

jadar• 2 months ago

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.

ninkendo• 2 months ago

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”.

`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.

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.

789-ha• 2 months ago

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

skydhash5• 2 months ago

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.

I do switch branch for long experiments and touch up on existing PR.

It would be great if a PR was about distributing patches and not having those automatically generated from a branch.

everybodyknows• 2 months ago

A downside to this technique is that there's no guarantee that every commit will compile, which might be a dealbreaker.

To some of us, that's an essential structural criterion. Passing unit-level self-tests may be as well.

nvgrw• 2 months ago

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!

gertburger• 2 months ago

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

A checkout is a working space after all, why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?

maleldil• 2 months ago

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.

why can't it be (temporarily) dirty whilst you work?

Because that would go completely against how jj changes work.

silon42• 2 months ago

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.

arccy2• 2 months ago

auto add is nice for universal undo for changes made outside your editor...

instead of adding changes to a new commit, i split/squash them into the previous one so the current commit remains dirty

JimDabell• 2 months ago

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.

jezzamon3• 2 months ago

If you do want to solve this, here's two thoughts on how you can deal with it. First: don't try to edit jj changes. Always work on a new change and then squash that in to the parent. You think of that top level change as your working space.

From there, the simplest way is to just always use 'jj commit -i' and 'jj squash -i' to create change ids with your work. Then if you want to have your changes move around with you, just rebase your working copy which contains your "uncommitted files" to the new branch.

A different idea is to put those changes in a separate change, and then when you do work, always create your working space change as a merge change like 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <main change id>. Then you should be able to do 'jj absorb' instead of 'jj squash' to put changes into the right change. Switching to a different branch is 'jj new <uncommitted file change id> <other change id>.

As in typing this, I'm thinking for myself and what I actually do in practice... I find moving / rebasing jj commits very easy (I have a UI tool that literally lets you drag and drop them) so I usually just commit these changes and then drag the commits around so it's not in the chain of when I want to send it out for review

mercenario• 2 months ago

could you tell which UI tool is that where you can drag commits visually?

simonmic2• 2 months ago

https://joyful.com/jj#Do+I+have+to+let+jj+auto-track+files+i...

a10c• 2 months ago

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.

oncallthrow• 2 months ago

`git rebase -i` and `fixup`

regularfry• 2 months ago

So I'd have an immediate problem with the target sequence of commits here. The thing about just getting a "define types" commit is that it shows me nothing 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.

Just give me the PR, don't sweat the individual patches. But maybe also work on not committing your first idea as finished work.

Zizizizz2• 2 months ago

I would imagine why the types were chosen could easily be explained in the commit message. The goal presumably (at least how I do it) is so that if I'm touching quite a lot of the code base, the reviewer has the _option_ of being taken through the narrative of the change like they might explain if they were talking to you. If you don't want to be told what the changes are and how they tie together, then just click on review changes and review it all at once. It's not about the clean history, it's about making the reviewer's life easier with larger features.

The commits might get squashed anyways so the history on main won't necessarily match what's on the feature branch.

You can commit before you raise a pull request, I don't quite understand that point but I might just be missing something about your workflow that's different to mine.

skydhash5• 2 months ago

I work via tickets so I don’t take care of the commits in my branch (if I would there would only be one commit). So what I expect the reviewer to do is review the whole diff. I help by commenting the changes to explain the design and the implementation.

Commits on a PR branch are usually my thinking outline, not for someone else to step through.

vaylian2• 2 months ago

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.

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?

Balinares3• 2 months ago

A series of piecemeal self-contained changes is much easier to wrap your brain around comprehensively enough to detect logic issues.

I started doing exactly this and it's been invaluable.

vaylian2• 2 months ago

How does this work for you UX-wise? Do you use github? Do you and your collaborators select each commit individually inside a pull request?

jeltz• 2 months ago

Yes, it us common among people who use git and it makes reviews of complex features much easier.

steveklabnik3• 2 months ago

See this gist (and the discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505266

Yokohiii2• 2 months ago

I suspect there is some weird habit that some people even like to overengineer their git history. Maybe it improves the pixel fame ratio or something.

For me it's satire. There are reasons for varying effort in creating PRs or patches, but attempts like this never seem to reason about reality. If I have to review, I want to see the code, not a clever story hidden in the commit history.

luodaint• 2 months ago

Agentic development transforms the scope of work. Once a session is committed to having one topic from the get-go — one move, one service, one abstraction — the diff generated from such a session is atomic by construction. Committing happens at the session level, and the commitment discipline problem solved by Jujutsu does not come into play.

It is also true in reverse. Scopes set too broadly ("dark mode implementation," "auth flow fixes") lead to un-readable diffs no matter what tool you use for version control. Un-readable diff does not stem from commitment discipline; it is a scope problem.

That said, this fact does not diminish the usefulness of Jujutsu. There are valid use cases for the rebase and stacking operations. However, the discussion about commit granularity takes on a whole new context once the constraint of having readable commits is established at the scope setting stage.

danborn26• 2 months ago

Jujutsu's approach to treating the working copy as a commit solves so many common friction points with Git rebase workflows. Great to see it gaining more adoption.

actinium226• 2 months ago

I don't get how this is meaningfully different from doing something like:

1. Squash all your commits in this branch to one

2. Move that commit to the working directory with the appropriate git reset command

3. Commit hunks as appropriate.

jauco• 2 months ago

It’s mostly the same. But if you realize you forgot to add something to the dirst commit while you’re putting stuff in the second commit then this avoids having to create a fixup commit and then rebasing that afterwards.

binarin• 2 months ago

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-history - git got the remaining piece of the puzzle to make massaging history relatively easy. "git history split", interactive rebase and fixup/auto squash allow you to do anything in a more systematic way than resetting/selectively staging/committing again and again.

riwsky2• 2 months ago

git let me make changes to local files without fear, since version control let me undo those changes easily.

jj let me make changes to my git commits without fear, since version control of the git state itself let me undo those changes easily, too.

nextlevelwizard• 2 months ago

New tools are cool, but from what I have seen jj is literally just git with aliases

sharts• 2 months ago

Maybe just not use git? It doesn’t even make sense for like 95% of projects.

sevenseacat• 2 months ago

Every time I've tried to use jujutsu, or even read about jujutsu, it's totally broken my brain.

I'm not a git expert by any means I don't think, but there's 15 years of muscle memory there, and a few years of subversion before that...

Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu

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