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Comment by Svoka | Hacker News Reader

I want to be excited about Jujutsu, but what always bothers me about JJ is that if you search the page you can find 'jj' 47 times and 'git' - 49.

Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git? May be with some pictures? Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500?

EDIT: I am looking for tutorials with explanation on how JJ works, preferably without referring to Git, and even more preferably with some visual explanations, which, there are plenty for Git. It seems I am not very good in reading text trees. It is my issue, not yours, but may be you know something which would help.

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Git is nearly universal, so highlighting the areas where jj makes things that are painful in git trivial and obvious isn't exactly a bad strategy. It's also worthwhile pointing out that it is interoperable with git, so your company and team don't have to change just because you do.

> Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading?

I haven't ever needed to memorize a SHA or change ID with jj. What are you referring to?

> Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500?

I have used jj for two years on teams without anyone else needing to be aware. Other teammates that I've convinced to give it a shot have switched, and we all work together happily alongside the git users. If anything, it's easier to work with others when they switch to jj because you no longer have to worry about rewriting history of branches that have been pushed. If you have a branch that multiple people are working on, that's bad form in git but it's just another day with jujutsu.

I was referring to tutorial(s), which refer to commits just by hashes. It is very hard to read for me. While git is nearly universal, my concern was about leaning jj and what it is useful for, what are its limitation etc.

But in jj you can refer to commits, changes etc by the shortest unique substring in its hash, and it automatically highlights what that is

sjenfidb skeifixu

These could be referred to as sj and sk. And their associated git commit hash might be

2748dn49 48jdj40r

Would be 2 and 4

Again, the output highlights those unique prefixes.

But there's also jjui, which is an incredible TUI for jj. Makes everything even simpler and efficient than it already was.

https://github.com/idursun/jjui

Try https://senekor.github.io/jj-for-everyone/introduction.html .

A snippet from the intro:

"At the time of writing, most Jujutsu tutorials are targeted at experienced Git users, teaching them how to transfer their existing Git skills over to Jujutsu. This blog post is my attempt to fill the void of beginner learning material for Jujutsu."

That’s very fun. I’ve been wondering what would happen if someone new to programming started with jj directly.

Thank you!

> Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git?

There can and will be, but at this stage in the project's life, git familiarity can be assumed.

> Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading?

Nope! The CLI has nice syntax highlighting to show you the shortest valid prefix, so for example, right now I have something that looks like

  lzrvnkxl

but the initial l is in purple, while the zrvnkxl is in grey. This means I can just use the l when referring to the change. That can be harder to demonstrate in a blog post, which can't know how to highlight this, and so often they have no highlighting.

> Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500?

Yes. Because it's backed by a git repo, nobody else needs to know you're using jj. Everyone can use the tool they choose.

> The CLI has nice syntax highlighting to show you the shortest valid prefix, so for example, right now I have something that looks like lzrvnkxl but the initial l is in purple, while the zrvnkxl is in grey. This means I can just use the l when referring to the change. That can be harder to demonstrate in a blog post, which can't know how to highlight this, and so often they have no highlighting.

This is such a simple UX feature that I have ended up using all the time after I switched to jj a few months back.

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