Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)
3 comments
·October 20, 2025martinvonz
Thanks for working on this project!
It was mentioned on the JJ Discord server that there doesn't seem to be any information available about who you are. Especially since the project seems to be closed-source, perhaps you could share some information about who you are in order to build trust.
I hope you understand. I think users may hesitate to download and install the application without knowing anything about its publisher.
IshKebab
It's difficult to go back to a separate VCS app after using IDE git support (specifically VSCode & the 'git graph' extension which is sadly permanently abandoned).
harryyking
Awesome would love to follow this journey
Personally, I think the JJ VCS (https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.
One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.
Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.
Right now, Judo for JJ is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.
I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.