Less needed than magit [LWN.net]

Less needed than magit

Posted Mar 4, 2026 16:52 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Magit and Majutsu: discoverable version-control

I sincerely wish majutsu as much success as magit and I bet I will use it someday but I'm afraid it's needed nowhere near as much.

Before I learned JJ, I used to find magit indispensable to massively speed up "instant fixups", interactive rebases etc. compared to using the (still pretty horrible) git command line. But JJ's command line is a joy to use and automates away the vast majority of git's tediousness for history management.

> After years of using Git, it [JJ] can feel uncomfortable — but Majutsu makes it easy to explore. For a version-control system that has to wrestle with Git's dominance, having a discoverable interface feels like an important step toward making it easier for inveterate Git users to migrate.

"We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection" and that's exactly what magit did for me for years. But JJ simply got rid of all these user interface issues, by design. For instance, interactive "rebases" have become much less frequent because many of them happen automatically.

The only JJ road bumps and confusion I've experienced were related to its interaction with git, especially with git branches and remotes. I wouldn't have wanted "too many indirections" obscuring and restricting things then. Moreover, there are several outstanding JJ tutorials available and they all teach JJ "directly".

My 2 cents, sorry to disagree.

Less needed than magit

Posted Mar 5, 2026 8:00 UTC (Thu) by gasche (subscriber, #74946) [Link] (1 responses)

I understand the general idea -- I also see the need for rich non-standard tooling on top of the VCS as a sign of weakness or at least missing features in the underlying, standard tools.

Specifically for interactive rebases, I have been missing an easy way to reorder commits in jj. Good news, 0.39 which was just rebased comes with `jj arrange`, which offers an interactive-rebase-like TUI for reordering commits.

Less needed than magit

Posted Mar 5, 2026 15:26 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Interactive rebases was probably the top reason why I used magit so much. Now I very rarely tell jj to move more than one or two commits at a time because:
- many rebases come "for free". For instance: when editing a commit which is not last (not "HEAD").
- jj absorb and "mega" merges mean I don't need to re-order before pushing https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/jujutsu-megamerges-and...

Even before "jj arrange" it was already possible to move several commits at once using the command line. Only to a single destination.

"jj arrange" looks useful and very nice to have but it won't be used as much as "git rebase [-i]" which was required for almost everything related to history rewrites.