I see a future in jj

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.

jj is actually so good though. People don't need to know you're using it, which is why it's nice.

A problem I run into when working with other people is that code reviews take forever and I need to build on top of them. Code gets merged while it's being reviewed, and it becomes a burden to keep rebasing your stack of PRs. It's also difficult to do things like designing each PR against the main branch, but testing all 3 of them together. (Sometimes you want to write the docs / take screenshots as though all your features are merged as-is.) jj makes all this trivial. You tell it what you want and it does it without involving an index or working copy or interrupting you to resolve conflicts.

I've found that it really makes me less annoyed when working with other people. I don't know why it takes people longer to review code (or to even open the review request) than it takes me to write things. But it does, and jj is what keeps me sane.

To be fair, I also use it on personal projects because sometimes you have 3 things you want to try at once and they're not related to each other. Upstream isn't going to change without your understanding, but it's still mechanically something to maintain the rebases on those 3 branches. jj just makes this burden go away.

Having said that, I don't know why a "jjhub" is needed. Github seems fine. jj's just a UI for git.

I have a question and you might have an idea about this:

I have a workflow where I have my main and a bunch of branches that are children of other branches. So: main, branch_a, branch_a_1, branch_a_2, branch_a_1_x, etc. Probably not a good workflow, but that's what I do.

I keep editing old commits in my branches to have clean, atomic commits, which fucks up my branch structure and I need to cascade-rebase everything manually.

Do I understand correctly that jj does it automatically?