Conversations with JJ

In the past six months, the author has been using jj alongside Git to tidy up their commit histories. They started with Steve's tutorial and relied on jjui for editing commit history, finding it very smooth. While jj offers a rich set of operations and individual commands for distinct concepts, the author uses jjui more often and feels comfortable with Git commands.

The undo feature is praised, allowing easy recovery of lost data and experimentation with changes. The CLI is described as friendly, and the author appreciates the log feature, though it can be confusing due to the presence of many branches from other people. The author prefers named branches for easy navigation between commits but finds that switching between Git and JJ leaves them on a detached HEAD, requiring an extra step before committing.

Auto-snapshotting helps prevent permanent data loss but can be unpredictable and accidentally snapshot unwanted files like node_modules, which some heuristic attempts to detect. The author also mentions an interesting behavior called same-change merges, where JJ automatically rebase changes in one commit into another, a feature not commonly used in Git.