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I see a future in jj

(steveklabnik.com)
295 points steveklabnik | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 17:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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kelnos ◴[22 Oct 25 18:34 UTC] No.45673281[source]▶
At the risk of being unreasonably negative, stuff like this just makes me feel... tired. Git is... fine. I'm sure it doesn't solve every problem for everyone, and oh boy does it still have many rough edges, but it works and (as the article points out), git has won and is widely adopted.

I've extensively used CVS and Subversion in the past. I touched Mercurial and Bazaar when I ran into a project that used it. I remember in the CVS days, SVN was exciting to me, because CVS was such a pain to use, in almost every way. In the SVN days, git was exciting to me, because SVN still had quite a few pain points that poked me during daily use. Again, yes, git had and has rough edges, but nothing that would make me excited about a new VCS, I don't think.

Maybe I'm just getting old, and new tools don't excite me as much anymore. Learning a new tool means spending time doing something that isn't actually building, so my eventual use of the new tool needs to save me enough time (or at least frustration, messily converted into time units) to balance that out. And I need to factor in the risk that the new tool won't actually work out for me, or that it won't end up being adopted enough to matter. So I think I'll wait on jj, and see what happens. If it ends up becoming a Big Deal, I'll learn it.

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1. dxdm ◴[22 Oct 25 19:47 UTC] No.45674219[source]▶
I think yours a perfectly reasonable stance, and I often feel the same way. And all this complaining about git is getting tiresome, especially if you had to deal with its predecessors.

FWIW, I still tried out jj and found it a joy to use. I use it all the time now. Most of the time, it not only gets out of your way, but rolls out the red carpet. I'm saying that as someone who knows their way around the git command line. t's like replacing your trusty old remote control with a new one where the buttons are well labeled, ergonomically placed, that lets you do entirely new useful things, and it has a universal back button that just works.

Maybe jj is an especially good fit for my way of working, but I do think that it is a real, actual improvement for everyone.

And it's super easy to pick up anytime. So yeah, I think you're doing it right! Sit back and let it come your way. From what I can see, there's a pretty good chance that it will.