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senekor | 6 months ago

Hi, author here. Since the target audience is people with little to no Git experience, a detailed comparison would not make sense. I did simply make that claim because the weirdness of Git's UI is usually justified by saying how powerful it is. So this statement is just intended to ease the readers mind that they're not missing out on power by choosing a tool that's easier to learn.

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jennyholzer|6 months ago

I appreciate this perspective.

IMO, the authors and evangelists of Git are essentially correct when they argue about its power.

However, I think that it's extremely difficult to gain practical experience with using Git in a high-powered, high-agency way, mostly because there are a lot of abstract concepts at play and there is no easily accessible place where these concepts can be "discovered".

Basically, Git is as good as it's cracked up to be, but only if you're an expert.

If you're interested in becoming a Git expert, I cannot recommend Emacs Magit strongly enough.

If not, I think Jujutsu could be an quicker road to a high-agency version control workflow. It's at least worth considering. I feel confident that Jujutsu can succeed, in particular because of Git's harsh difficulty curve.

senekor|6 months ago

Thanks, but I consider myself a Git expert already :-) I read the Pro Git book cover to cover. I have a gluten-free, artisanal, free-range git config that I've grown and cared for over years. single character aliases all the important commands, "log all graph oneline", "commit amend no-edit", interactive rebase (ofc. with autosquash, autostash, updaterefs and rebasemerges), reset hard, push force-with-lease... Also: commit signing, url rewriting, conditional configs for different orgs, all that jazz. I was super productive with it and loved it.

And then Jujutsu came along and casually doubled my VCS productivity. I didn't see it coming!

johnisgood|6 months ago

> If you're interested in becoming a Git expert, I cannot recommend Emacs Magit strongly enough.

Yes, Emacs' Magit and Git Cola.

marcuskaz|6 months ago

I suppose I want the article written for the experienced developer, convince me why I should try something different than the huge defacto standard that is git. I'm totally open to trying something new, but need a compelling case.

Beyond `jj undo` everything else in this thread feels just as complicated as git.

Izkata|6 months ago

A couple of them seem more complicated, like the example further up on the page for postponing merge conflicts. In git I'd just abort the merge and do it later.

I also found the exchange about named branches funny, that ends with:

> Ok, you need to call `jj bookmark set -r@ XYX` (or `jj b s -r@ XYX`), so what?

Apparently this is excusable, but people like to complain about git's commands being too obtuse - as far as I understand the git version is "git checkout -b XYX", right? (Or I guess "git switch -c XYX" with the new commands)

baq|6 months ago

do you know about git rerere? if yes, you might like jj.

stavros|6 months ago

There isn't a single thing in jj that's as complicated as git. I could go on to list a few features, but it would sound underwhelming, because you could do all that in git.

It's kind of like asking "why would I buy a digital camera when my film camera does all the same things? I can already see what the photo will look like when I take it, and developing my own film isn't that much of a hassle", yet film cameras have gone the way of the dodo, except for the occasional nostalgic enthusiast.

j2kun|6 months ago

> more powerful than git

> not missing out on power

Two very different claims, and it only makes me more skeptical.