Top all-time · #12197
Benjamin Tan
Personal blog · ofcr.seprogrammingproductivity
Benjamin Tan's personal blog at ofcr.se covers programming and productivity. Since 2024, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “A better merge workflow with Jujutsu”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Benjamin Tan's posts on Jujutsu (jj), the Git-compatible version control system, especially his megamerge workflow for working on many branches at once. Commenters suggest them to Jujutsu users.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
ofcrse is the website of Benjamin Tan, a software engineer from Singapore.
Most-linked posts?
- A better merge workflow with Jujutsu6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2024-07-01
What Hacker News says?
Yes. I have one repository, which is a fork of an OSS project, with a 7-way octopus merge of various patches I carry, and another 2-way merge on top of that one. Every week or two I pull the latest changes from upstream and I rebase all 9+ branches in a single command. If there are conflicts on any one of the parallel streams of work, I can trivially fix each conflict individually in any order I want. Jujutsu does n…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu for everyone”Submitted A better merge workflow with Jujutsu as a story · 135 points
HN discussionhere's a few links that you might find useful. But it would be worth exploring the other recent hn discussions on the topic - i and other unabashed evangelists have shared a lot. A great "Megamerge" workflow https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/jujutsu-megamerges-and-jj... https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow And an absolutely fantastic TUI that wraps jj cli. Might be the best TUI ive ever used, and consistently get…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu for everyone”It's not quite clear to me what you're talking about, but I think the Megamerge workflow might be something you'd be interested in. https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/jujutsu-megamerges-and-jj... https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu for busy devs”Here's a few great links that might be what you're looking for https://v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/jj-init/ https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/jujutsu-megamerges-and-jj... https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu for busy devs”I think you communicated well, probably I did not. > suspending the rebase and going to do something else This is what I find to be weird, personally. When doing a rebase, there’s no way I want to do something else in the middle of it, and having a modal state feels totally natural to me. At first approach (I read a (very good) intro[1]; I did not try), it seems there’s a lot of new things to learn (for instance the…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu for busy devs”First class conflicts are way better than modal states. https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow/ I literally will have like 4 PRs in flight at once and have an octopus merge of all my separate PRs that I can then work on top of. JJ can rebase all 4 separate branches, the octopus merge, and the work on top of the octopus merge in a single command: jj rebase -d main. If there are conflicts I can then resolve them whene…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow/
on “Jujutsu for busy devs”https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow With `jjui` this strategy takes only a few keystrokes to do operations like adding/removing parents from merge commits. It's so nice to have like 4 parallel PRs in flight and then rebase all of them and all the other experimental branches you have on top onto main in 1 command. Also, I cannot even stress to you how much first-class-conflicts is a game changer. Like seriously yo…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto”Heres a great article about a powerful workflow that jj makes practical https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow/ Where jj shines is advanced workflows that aren’t practical with git. If you aren’t interested in those then it doesn’t give you as many benefits over git. If you are breaking down your features into small PRs, stacking them, etc…, then jj is super helpful.
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow/
on “Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial”I am a git expert and I very much prefer jj. It enables workflows that are impractical with git. It’s hard to even imagine these workflows if you only use git because your thinking is constrained by the limitations of your tools. Git rebase is like programming with punch cards compared to jj’s rebase being like writing Python. https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow/
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow/
on “Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial”It's not the only improvement though, depending on your workflow. Another thing you can do is work on multiple branches at the same time. See: https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “Jujutsu (jj), a Git compatible VCS”magit can only be as good as git. jj’s first class conflicts and the way it handles rebase offers a UX that’s not possible with git. Like with jj rebasing a stack of branches is just a single command. In git you would have to rebase the branch at the top and then hard reset each branch pointer one by one. jj’s rebase is just more powerful than git’s. Like it doesn’t just rebase a linear series of commits it rebases…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow/
on “Show HN: ggc – A terminal-based Git CLI written in Go”Anonymous branches are amazing for when you are trying out a bunch of different approaches to a problem. As I search the space of possible solutions for what I'm really looking for, I end up with a tree of various approaches. Then when you rebase, the entire tree of anonymous branches can be rebased onto main in 1 command. This is why the first class conflicts and not having to resolve conflicts immediately is so im…
Comment linking /jujutsu-merge-workflow
on “What is jj and why should I care?”