Jujutsu for everyone

I've been enjoying JJ recently, after giving it another try. I'd tried it when it was new, and the sharp corners were still a bit too sharp for my liking.

JJ seems to be part of a new "era" of tooling that's just really good. I mused about this a bit in a blog post:

https://pdx.su/blog/2025-08-13-the-quiet-software-tooling-re...

I'd definitely include nushell in this

I used zsh for gosh, over 15 years probably now. I swapped to fish at the start of this year on a bit of a whim (new year, new computer, new ~~me~~ shell).

It's pretty good in a "gets out of the way" kind of way, and the `abbr` feature is preferred over aliases but it has some annoying quirks like no dictionary type, the inability to "background blocks of code", requiring spawning a subshell + string which has other issues and in a way it feels sort of stuck between being new and friendly but still carrying over enough baggage to be annoying in other ways.

I tried Nushell a week or so ago and after getting my head around it (and $it and $in, haha) I think it feels like the future. It's not quite there ergonomically in some ways eg: reedline can't edit the current command line, but it's quite close.

What really sold me on it was when I

- Had a flat text file of "url\nartist\ntitle"

- Had to download these urls and insert the artist & title into a database

and I realised I could do it all with Nu primitives,

    open new-landings.txt
    | lines
    | each { $in | str trim}
    | chunks 3
    | each {{title: $in.0, artist: $in.1, url: $in.2}}
    | enumerate
    | par-each {
      http get ($in.item.url | str replace large medium) | save $"landing-($in.index + 101).jpg"
      # also insert artist title into database
      run-app ... etc
    }

Now, could you do the same thing with zsh/bash/sh? Yep. Some kind of awk/sed thing with xargs I would guess. But I'd have to look it up. With Nu, after a few hours of playing with it I already "knew" how to do it. That felt really powerful.

For reference, I also tried Murex and Elvish. Elvish doesn't support ctrl-z, so its disqualified right there though I like the syntax. Murex seemed fine but Nu was bigger with wider support. I think I saw Nu had pattern matching and it immediately got a big desirability bump.

I remember seeing another comment, wishing we had STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR and STDDATA, maybe one day.