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I see a future in jj

(steveklabnik.com)
295 points steveklabnik | 3 comments | 22 Oct 25 17:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.622s | 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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steveklabnik ◴[22 Oct 25 18:45 UTC] No.45673426[source]▶
I think being conservative about tool use is totally fine! I'm actually pretty conservative about most of the tools that I use.

The goal of this post wasn't really to convince anyone on why they may want to give jj a shot, more of just a post about how I think about technologies I may want to spend my limited time on this planet working on, and announce that I'm making a move.

I don't think that you're being unreasonably negative. I think it's crucial for technologies to understand that your position is basically the default one, and that you need to offer a real compelling reason to choose a new tool. For some people, jj has enough of that already to bother with choosing, but I think the real power is in things that aren't widely available yet. Hence the need to go build some stuff. It's early days! Not even 1.0 yet. It's very natural that most people do not care at this stage.

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jimbokun ◴[22 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45673620[source]▶
One thing not mentioned in the article: what advantages does jj offer over plain git?
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steveklabnik ◴[22 Oct 25 19:16 UTC] No.45673808[source]▶
So for me, the most compelling thing about jj is that it is somehow simpler than git, while also being more powerful than git.

What I mean by simpler is, there's fewer features, which makes things easier to pick up, because these features fit together in a way that's more coherent than git's. By more powerful, I mean jj lets me regularly do things that are possible, but annoying and/or difficult in git.

I loved git. I was never the kind of person who thought its CLI was bad. But then, when I found jj, I realized why people thought that.

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1. zZorgz ◴[23 Oct 25 03:38 UTC] No.45677921[source]▶
Just my feedback - I've personally found jj more complex for simple projects. Like if you have a non-collaborative repo where you push to main most of the time after making a series of commits, in jj you have to keep updating a bookmark before pushing it and there's no one command to do both.

If you have another machine on main without any outstanding changes and you want to pull the latest changes that is probably also two steps (git fetch + new?)

That said, I've been liking jj quite a bit for more mature / collaborative projects. It has been a learning experience. (don't enjoy updating bookmarks for PR branches though; jj encourages rewriting history which is not my favorite choice for code review branches; I often work in repos that squash-on-merge).

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2. steveklabnik ◴[23 Oct 25 03:42 UTC] No.45677946[source]▶
Yeah, in that case you may want to configure bookmarks to auto update for sure :)
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3. zZorgz ◴[23 Oct 25 04:21 UTC] No.45678147[source]▶
Is there a way to do that today?

For updating bookmarks I've found like half a dozen variants of `tug` alias the community has come to using which is just a slight improvement (bit daunting to newcomer to pick 'best' one and not fan setting up aliases on all my working devices).

It would be nice if jj was better than git for the fundamental workflows like this out of the box overall.