Top all-time · #7111
Nathan Witmer
Personal blog · zerowidth.comprogrammingsystems
Nathan Witmer writes zerowidth positive lookahead, a personal blog at zerowidth.com about programming and systems. Since 2013, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Jump Point Search Explained”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nathan Witmer's posts on Jujutsu (jj) version control and on pathfinding, mainly Jump Point Search for grid maps. The comments point to them as related reading rather than praising the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nathan Witmer's website, with technical articles and links to various projects.
Most-linked posts?
- Jump Point Search Explained3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-21
- What I've learned from jj2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-01
- Parsing TOML in Ruby with Parslet2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-24
What Hacker News says?
You can work exactly this way using the “gitpatch” diff editor[1]. 1. Your working copy contains whatever mish-mash of changes you want. 2. When you’re ready to stage and commit these changes, run `jj commit --tool gitpatch` 3. The iterative “stage this hunk?” UI from git lets you choose what to commit. 4. Your editor opens for a commit message. 5. The changes you selected are now in a new parent commit of your work…
Comment linking /2025/jj-tips-and-tricks/
on “Jujutsu for everyone”Submitted What I've learned from jj as a story · 217 points
HN discussionI don’t think simplified model is even the best selling point, but it’s definitely up there. IMO one of the killer features that you absolutely cannot get in git is universal undo. For example, rebases can always be a little tedious and tricky no matter how experienced you are. Not only does jj make that whole process easier and safer to work through, but if you do still manage to get to a state where you just want…
Comment linking /2025/what-ive-learned-from-jj/
on “Jujutsu for busy devs”Submitted Jump Point Search Explained as a story · 70 points
HN discussionAlso jump point search: https://zerowidth.com/2013/a-visual-explanation-of-jump-poin...
Comment linking /2013/a-visual-explanation-of-jump-point-search/
on “Pathfinding”Submitted Parsing TOML in Ruby with Parslet as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRelated to this idea is the "Jump Point Search" algorithm, an optimization of A* which does this sort of straight-line optimization for exactly this use case. http://zerowidth.com/2013/05/05/jump-point-search-explained....
Comment linking /2013/05/05/jump-point-search-explained.html
on “Optimizing A* for grid maps”Submitted Jj Tips and Tricks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jump Point Search Explained as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted What I've Learned from Jj as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An example for building parsers with Ruby: Parsing TOML as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
