Jeffrey Yasskin

How I use Jujutsu

I’m used to git, so to adopt Jujutsu (jj), I need to find and memorize replacements for my common operations. This post exists to record my latest strategies.

Contents

  1. Configuration
  2. Fetch from upstream
  3. Checkout a branch or change
  4. Push changes
    1. Create a branch and push it
    2. Set a remote branch to the current change
  5. Rebase all branches on main
  6. Push everything
  7. See the state of my local checkout
  8. See what needs to be pushed
  9. Create a Github PR
  10. Delete a branch

Configuration

For now I’m trying to follow https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/guides/multiple-remotes/, which recommends that origin be the shared repository that I push my changes to, before sending a PR, and if there’s a central shared repository that I can’t write to, it’s upstream. This differs from my git pattern of calling the central shared repository origin whether or not I can write to it, and using a jyasskin remote if I need somewhere else to push changes. The Github CLI (gh) prefers the same upstream pattern as jj, but Chromium’s depot-tools gets confused.

I expect that most of my checkouts, where I’m not the primary editor of the shared repo, will have the following configuration (in .jj/repo/config.toml):

[git]
fetch = ["origin", "upstream"]
push = "origin"

Fetch from upstream

jj git fetch

Checkout a branch or change

jj edit [name]

OR

jj new [name]

new is safer because edits go into a new change, so I can apply them intentionally. I haven’t figured out yet which I’ll use in general.

Push changes

Create a branch and push it

jj new main -m 'description'
# Edits
jj b c [name] -r @
jj git push -N  # Do I need `-b [name]`?

Set a remote branch to the current change

jj b m [name] -t @
jj git push

Rebase all branches on main

git rebase-update  # Using depot-tools
jj rebase -b 'bookmarks()' -d main

The jj version completes immediately, and tells you about all the conflicts. The git version makes you handle conflicts as it goes.

Push everything

jj git push --tracked

See the state of my local checkout

git with depot-tools: git s, which is a local script consisting of

git map-branches -v
git status
jj log

I might need a shorthand to only show bookmarks and not the whole graph…

See what needs to be pushed

git: git diff origin/branch branch for each potential branch.

jj: jj log and look for *s, representing tracked bookmarks that don’t match their upstream?

Create a Github PR

gh pr create

jj: ??

Delete a branch

git branch -D [name]
jj abandon [name]

Except jj needs to abandon each change individually. Something like jj abandon main::[name] would probably drop the whole branch, but I need to test that.