If you don't like Jujutsu, you're wrong
As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve been using it for years knowing what a few commands do, and whenever it gets into a weird state because I fat-fingered something, I have my trusty alias, fuckgit , that deletes the .git directory, clones the repo again into a temp folder, and moves the .git directory from that into my directory, and I’ve managed to eke out a living for my family this way.
Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing people rave about Jujutsu, and I always wanted to try it, but it never seemed worth the trouble, even though I hate git. I idly read a few tutorials, trying to understand how it works, but in the end I decided it wasn’t for me.
One day I randomly decided to try again, but this time I asked Claude how to do with Jujutsu whatever operation I wanted to do with git. That’s when the mental model of jj clicked for me, and I finally understood everything, including how git works. I never thought a VCS would spark joy in me, but here we are, and I figured maybe I can write something that will make jj click for you as well.
It also doesn’t hurt that Jujutsu is completely interoperable with git (and thus with providers like GitHub), and I can have all the power of Jujutsu locally on my git repos, without anyone knowing I’m not actually using git.
The problem
The problem I had with the other tutorials, without realizing it, was that there was a fundamental tension between two basic things: The best way to explain jj to someone who knows git is to use all the git terms they already know (because that makes it easy for them), but also to tell them to think about the git terms they know differently (because otherwise they’ll form the wrong mental model). You can’t really explain something by saying “a jj commit is like a git commit, except where it’s not”, so I’ll try to do things a bit differently.
This will be a short post (or, at least, not as long as other jj tutorials), I’ll explain the high-level mental model you should have, and then give a FAQ for how to do various git things with jj.
Warnings
Just a disclaimer before we start, this is going to be far from an exhaustive reference. I’m not an expert in either git or Jujutsu, but I know enough to hopefully make jj click for you enough to learn the rest on your own, so don’t be too annoyed if I omit something.
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