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Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is one of those folks who were able to fully grasp the beauty of the Git data model for the first time by switching to Jujutsu. It makes it easier to see the “DAG of commits” vision than Git with its index and stashes and confusingly named commands with fifty flags.

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Yeah, exactly, and I've fruitlessly read too many guides on git's data model.

What was holding me back turned out to be the fact that git has too much magic (it updates branches automatically when you commit, rebasing "does stuff", conflict resolution was just arcane).

Jj exposes all that into simple, composable principles, making everything click.

> What was holding me back turned out to be the fact that git has too much magic

Considering jj is built on top of git, doesn't that mean jj has even more magic? That's like saying React is too magical so we should use Next.js instead (which is built on React).

Maybe you just mean that jj has a more intuitive CLI than git?

Jj uses git's data model, that doesn't mean it uses git commands for everything under the hood. Creating a commit with jj doesn't move the branch tag automatically, whereas git does. That's what confused me with git, it didn't expose the internals enough, so even though I had read about the data structures, it never clicked what was changed when, because git did it under the hood.

Which is why I always make sure to show that graph to co-workers new to git (we have a lot of code still on svn):

  git log --graph --oneline --decorate --all -100

I keep it as an alias, but it is annoying that seeing the whole structure is so hidden away.

Isn't this the same graph, that every Git GUI program shows?

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