[Balinares]

In sort of the same way juggling apples is better than juggling hand grenades: it's mostly the same in the simple cases, but once you start doing the really fancy stuff, one of the two will get you a lot fewer messy explosions.

(Your question is not dumb, BTW. The pithy answer is: UX matters, but it does so in ways that can be hard to convey since it's about the amount of cognition you need to put in a given thing to get a desired outcome, and that's tricky to express in text. Also there will always be some people for whom a new mental model just doesn't work. That doesn't make them dumb either, at least provided they have the wisdom not to petulantly piss in the cornflakes of those who get a kick out of how much better the new thing works for them.)

[motbus3]

Thanks for the answer! To be honest, maybe because I've been using git for 16 years now, I find jj interface more confusing than git. All it takes to understand git, to me, is understanding the files and the operations.

There are annoying things for even experienced users like merging the history of merged repos, or sometimes patching a bisect for a bug.

Complex operations in git are complex and often there is nothing that makes them palatable enough to understand without really understanding git internal workings.

I will try once more when I feel my brain is more opened to the ideas jj is proposing. Thanks again

[minraws]

As a jj user, I would say I had the same experience for an entire year used it on and off, and then I just forced myself to use it, and it left a bad taste on the first week.

But on the second week I bungled a command that did some rebase and stuff and I paniced that I destroyed the work but alas it was all there.

I just hit jj undo and it all was there it snapshotted it all. I fell in love and just kept using it unafraid of making mistakes.

I think the worst part about git is being afraid to bungle up your work, jj makes obvious things obvious, asking someone in git land how to copy a commit as in duplicate it. And they might actually start crying even, if they have been using it for a while.

Generally you just create two branches but what if you want to copy and try to check which branch it would be easier to rebase on to, if you had to rebase.

This is not that hard if you have done it a couple times, but jj makes it so much easier, in big teams I feel like JJ is the only sane choice when git commands can get insane.

Also jj doesn't snapshot large files by default, aka, perfect no one mistakenly commiting a binary again. That is just unhinged when newbies do that and you need to flush that out of your git history.

Just the sane defaults + undo + obvious and simple commands was a huge sell for me and I grit my teeth and learnt it. And ofc in a jj git init repo you can always use git, best part often you can do all the simple operations in jj and then the hard one in git after creating a duplicate of the commit. To ensure nothing gets destroyed beyond recovery, further you can use jj state to recovery bad git state as well. It's all so nice that you will accept doing the harder stuff with git as well.

[Balinares]

My pleasure! FWIW I used git for just as long as you, and after a few months with jj I feel more proficient with it than I ever was with git. Somehow it clicked in a way the git commands and options never quite did. But git is not going anywhere either way and is still a good tool, so if it works for you, when it comes down to it, that's the important part.

[skydhash]

You have to put a lot of effort to mess up a git repo. So I'm not seeing the allusion to hand grenades.

[cornstalks]

I’ve done it multiple times without much effort. Or skill. Really it was a skill issue and I tried things that I thought would work but apparently don’t.

I screwed up jj a few times while picking it up, but jj’s undo command made that trivial to go back and try again. With git? I know a lot of things can be undone but I can never remember how to do it!

[Balinares]

I'm glad to hear you never encountered the kind of quagmire that can occur around e.g. non-trivial conflicts while rebasing a chain of git commits. On large enough codebases, those can be common.