On Building Git for Lawyers

A while ago I remember reading about this new VCS project Jujutsu (jj) that claimed to be both simpler and more powerful than git. A bold claim! Didn't really think much of it at the time beyond well this is interesting.

But later, about 9 months ago, Chris Krycho published this lovely blog post[1] about jj and a thread about it was quite popular on HN. Again, really interesting, but not something I was going to dig into.

Finally, I come across this post today and it occurs to me that designing a project like this for lawyers is probably pretty challenging with git as the backend and I'm sure Jordan could use whatever the state of the art in VCS is. I hope they take a look at jj and consider it as an alternative backend. It seems there's an entire team of engineers working on jj at Google now full time.

Steve Klabnik wrote a beautiful book style tutorial[2] about getting started with it. Hopefully it inspires someone else to take a look!

[1]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/jj-init/

[2]: https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/introduction...

If using git as the backend were an option, this problem would be hundreds of times easier to solve. Legal documents have a lot of complex formatting and include elements like tables, images, and footnotes. The diff function needs to handle all this, so it needs to be custom built from the ground up.

If git is used as just a backend, all of those elements could feasibly be extracted into a textual representation, which git can diff and merge and such, but those diffs and merges are presented to the user graphically in a style they recognize.