Not meaning to offend anyone: Nix is cool, but adds complexity. And as a disclaimer: I used jujutsu for a few months and went back to git. Mostly because git is wired in my fingers, and git is everywhere. Those examples of what jujutsu can do and not git sound nice, but in those few months I never remotely had a need for them, so it felt overkill for me.
The most frequent "complex" command I use is to find commits in my name that are unsigned, and then sign them (this is owing to my workflow with agents that commit on my behalf but I'm not going to give agents my private key!)
jj log -r 'mine() & ~signed()'
# or if yolo mode...
jj sign -r 'mine() & ~signed()'
I hadn't even spared a moment to consider the git equivalent but I would humbly expect it to be quite obtuse.Does "own" try to sign working copy snapshot commits too? That would greatly increase the number and frequency of signatures.
> Does "own" try to sign working copy snapshot commits too?
Yes
You can find this pattern again and again. How many redditors say 120fps is essential for gaming or absolutely require a mechanical keyboard?
For jujutsu, it's fine on your own computer, but you probably have to use git in the CI or on remote servers. And you probably started with git, so moving to jujutsu was an added effort (similar to dvorak).
I don't get the mechanical keyboard one, though. I am fine with any keyboard, I just like my mechanical keyboard at home. Just like I am fine with any chair, but ideally I would have a chair I like at home.
120fps I have no experience with, but I would imagine it's closer to video quality. Once you're used to watching everything in 4K, probably it feels frustrating to watch a 1080p video. But when 4K did not exist, it was not a need. I actively try to not get used to 4K because I don't want to "create the need" for it :-).
I don't use aliases, I guess I'm insane?
Also 99.9% of the time, git "just works" for me. If I need to do something special once a year, I can search for it. Like I would with jujutsu.
If I change a line of code several times and rebase on to a branch that changed the same lines of code, how are you sure what the right one is?
At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.
That said, the OP's commands are useful, I am copying them (because obviously I won't ever memorize them).
I wrote a cheat sheet in my notes of common commands, until they stuck in my head and I haven't needed it now for a decade or more. I also lean heavily on aliases and "self-documenting" things in my .bashrc file. Curious how others handle it. A search every time I need to do something would be too much friction for me to stand.
Yes! We mostly wouldn’t tolerate the complexity and the terrible UX of a tool we use everyday--but there's enough Stockholm Syndrome out there where most of us are willing to tolerate it.
Git may be sharp and unwieldy, but it's also one of the decreasing amount of tools we still use - the trend of turning tools into toys consumed the regular user market and is eating into tech software as well.
https://github.com/denisidoro/navi
But for Git, I can't recommend lazygit enough. It's an incredible piece of software:
FWIW I too was once a "memorised a few commands and that was it" type of dev, then I read 3 chapters of the Git book https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 (well really two, the first chapter was a "these are things you already know") and wow did my life with git change.
Or, perhaps better yet, defining your own functions/helpers as you go for things you might care about, which, by virtue of having been named you, are much easier to remember (and still compose nicely).
Don't feel bad - no one remembers them all, we just remember a few idioms we use...
We can't.
Why do you think the `man` command exists?
And yes, I'm also ecstatic when I manage to iterate over anything in `jq` without giving up and reaching for online reference. For `git`, functionality I use divides neatly into "things I do at least every week or two" and "things that make me reach for the git book every single time".
I mean, that was true until ~year or so. Now, I just have an LLM on speed dial. `howto do xyz in $tool`, `wtf is git --blah`, `oneliner for frobbing the widget`, etc.
But jq I use maybe once a week, and it just won't stick. Same for any git features beyond basic wrangling of the history tree (but, on the flip side, that basic wrangling has eliminated 99% of the times I have to look things up).
If you have multiple machines (/must have), just apply your user config to current machine?
I often feel I need to setup bots to make superfluous commits just to make it look like my useful and stable repos are “active”
One example (not mine) a a qr-code generator library. Hasn’t been updated in 10 years. It’s perfect as is. It just provides the size and the bits. You convert those bits to any representation you want. It has no need to be updated
It's not impossible, of course, but if I saw even a qr library that hadn't changed in 10 years I would worry that it wouldn't build on current systems (due to dependencies) and that nobody was actually using it (due to lag of bug reports).
A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.
I agree with you - and yet the barcode library I used recently for a variable-data-printing project was last updated 13 hours ago, despite having been around since 2008!
Agreed. Assuming there are no open issues and PRs. When I find a project, if the date of the last commit is old, I next look at the issues and PRs. If there are simple-to-deal-with issues (e.g. a short question or spam) and easy-to-merge PRs (e.g. fixing a typo in the README) which have been left lingering for years, it’s probably abandoned. Looking at the maintainer’s GitHub activity graph should provide more clues.
> I often feel I need to setup bots to make superfluous commits just to make it look like my useful and stable repos are “active”
I have never done it, but a few times thought about making a “maintenance” release to bump the version number and release date, especially since I often use a variant of calendar versioning.
A language that properly maps to the data model, and has readable identifiers is a boon. Git is a database, a database needs a proper query language.
`git log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --`
Which is something I see a lot of people alias in Git for viewing logs.
Disclaimer: I love jq too :)