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Madeleine Mortensen: Jujutsu For Busy Devs (Part 1)
(maddie.wtf)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Programming
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It is no secret that git's interface is a bit too complex - even XKCD has made fun of it.
But what is amusing is that people now have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, and plain refuse to believe there could be something better.
(Perhaps motivated by the long list of half-assed helper interfaces and GUIs which just were hapless trying to hide the sprawling complexity).
Right but that's mostly because the CLI is a mess, not because the fundamental data model is bad.
Yeah you could view jujutsu as git with a simpler and more tidy CLI.
No it has very significant differences to Git beyond the CLI.
Telling people they have Stockholm syndrome is not a good way to convince them to change their behavior. Present the pros, be honest about the cons and let people make their own decisions. The jj workflow isn't for everyone, and sometimes people's git workflows are simple enough that there isn't a benefit to learning a new tool. I like jj because I have to deal with complicated workflows for work and jj makes them much easier. At a different job it was much simpler and I wouldn't have paid too much attention to jj.
Yeah that's probably not the best way to express it. Perhaps it is more like:
Git is huge and complex to learn, and some people have spent a lot of time to learn it - hundreds of hours.
Now, eyeing jujutsu, they expect that for doing this complex task with jujutsu they will again have to learn a very complex interface, with a lot of effort, and they decide it probably ain't worth it. Which by the way, for software is a reasonable heuristic most of the time.
So if somebody tells them that jujutsu is less effort to learn to do complex tasks, they don't believe it and that's it.
It also seems to happen frequently that people try jujutsu, but it does not click for them, they try commands but they do not get what's the advantage - perhaps because it is too different from git. And later they try again and it clicks. Steve Klabnik described that for himself.
Moreover some people don't need to do complex tasks.
And people in general hate it when interfaces change in unwanted ways. Which is human nature too and a valid way to allocate time and attention, which both are a scarce resource.
I do a lot of complicated stuff with git - what sort of workflow does this solve for you?
git rebase -iandgit squashwork well for combining commits and cleaning up history. I'm not finding anything aboutjjyet that does better? And I'm finding a lot about it that are just deal breakers (auto-commit everything, make me lookup hashes of things).For me, I am and have been using it in two different situations:
at work, when I was writing tests and documentation for an old numeric library somebody else wrote, and tests for an OS abstraction layer for real-time systems. With git, I used to use worktrees to keep and extend the documentation in another branch. I found that in jujutsu, a worktree was not needed because it was easier/quicker to work on different branches (or series of changes) than in git.
at home, in two leisure projects written in Guile and Rust. Here, I wanted a clean/tidy history including for the parts that were developed in an experimental manner. With the git CLI, that would have required heavy use of rebase and so on. I would have used the Magit git interface, but most likely I would have avoided most of the tidying up because of the extra effort1. With jujutsu, this was much less effort - it was fun.
Currently, I don't use jujutsu at work because I am taking over an old legacy project from an almost-retired developer and he is still helping me explaining things and looking at his last changes in the maintenance branch. I don't want to burden him with a new tool as his time is very scarce. (But jujutsu is perfect for things like "throwaway refactoring" of legacy code, so I will for sure use it in the future).
BTW, I was using git CLI since 2008 or so, and Emacs/Magit since about 2017, full time. But I often needed to look up more complex git functions in the man pages.
I have to work with Gerrit, which requires amending existing commits after they've been pushed to the remote branch to address comments. I'll frequently have lots of commits I'm working on above the commit in review. Along with a couple other branches. Every commit also has to compile and pass tests. I'll frequently go git rebase -i --autosquash paired with git fixup. I've made mistakes before that are hard to untangle. With jj it's just jj edit .
Or if I want to insert a commit between two others it's just jj new -A to create a new commit after the change id (but BEFORE the previous change that was after the commit). With git I'd need to commit then rebase, put it in the right slot and recompile, rerun tests, re-edit. If I work on a branch I'd need to rebase, possible merge conflicts. jj just puts me on that commit then helps me manage merge conflicts going up. It's fewer commands focused on what I want to do and less on the tree like git.
squashexists but it squashes commits.The rebase command is a bit more flexible but a key difference is handling of conflicts: They represent as regions with conflict markers in the conflicted text regions and all following commits/changes, and they disappear once the conflict has been resolved. No weird interim stated and
git rebase --abort. If you want the old state back, you only need to dojj undoand that's it.Wow - way to just brush away any and all criticism as "that sounds like a you problem".
jujutsu changes a lot of the affordances to manage changes and I understand that many people will be reluctant to use such a changed interface - for one, after they have spent so much time with learning the git CLI, and also because there are dozens of alternative git UIs and VCSes which claim to offer something simpler.
But: jujutsu offers about similar power and flexibility as git, while requiring much less UI complexity. The proof for this is the much, much smaller amount of required documentation as well as practice before one can work productively with it.
All the changed elements give a very orthogonal and cohesive whole, which is very rare for software of that complexity.
Will this work for everyone? Probably not, that happens extremely rarely.
Will many people pick it up on a whim? No, change does not happen that way. In the ideal case, a kind of logistic function but adoption will be very unlikely to be as rapid as git's adoption.
Will experienced git users drop the work they have to do and spend half a day to try a new tool? Some do, and this is good. Some don't, and this is also good.
So, no, I don't have a problem. People have time and decide to look at something or they don't. Both is fine.
You lost all credibility when you just blamed my criticism on "stockholm syndrom". Sorry buddy.
BTW there are two configurations / new commands that could be helpful for you:
auto-track='none()', already mentioned by other commenterd here) to switch off auto-adding of new filesOh, I was referring to people who do not want to believe at all there could be something easier to use than git. Probably not the best way to express this.
I don't know whether it fits your use case. You decide that.
Also, jujutsu is still immature and has many rough edges.