Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial

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.

> 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.

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?

[0] https://www.sublimemerge.com/

> 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.

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! :-/

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.