Universality [LWN.net]

Universality

Posted Mar 4, 2026 18:17 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)
Parent article: Magit and Majutsu: discoverable version-control

Would it be so hard to fold some of this functionality into the built-in SCM-agnostic vc facilities? (Well, you'd have to get over core resistance to Just Doing Things, but that's a separate matter.) Have we, as an industry, just lost a sense for building one thing that abstracts over N things instead of building the same interface N times? Is it mobile-app culture leaking into dev tooling?

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Universality

Posted Mar 4, 2026 20:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Honestly, the problem really is that vc's UI is so different from magit's transient-mode-based one that you'd need to completely rewrite vc's user interface, or throw away what makes magit's so usable -- and both of these would face severe resistance from one camp or the other. Breaking compatibility and existing user workflows like that is very much not the Emacs way.

I think magit's UI is far superior and more discoverable, but then of course it is: it's decades newer and written with the benefit of a lot more experience with various sorts of Emacsy UIs than the old, old vc, which was originally built for RCS and thus has a massive impedance mismatch with modern VCSes to overcome as well.

Universality

Posted Mar 4, 2026 21:12 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps you're right about magit vs. vc, but is jj so different from git that we need to have a magit for magit?

Universality

Posted Mar 5, 2026 14:48 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Probably not, but again it might be quite difficult to make magit selectively ignore the staging area in its UI, etc -- after all, one rationale for having a magit in the first place was that it didn't need piles of complexity and compromises induced by needing to abstract over differences between multiple version-control systems. We already have one of those -- vc -- and as a direct result it's rather anaemic.

Universality

Posted Mar 5, 2026 16:31 UTC (Thu) by spacefrogg (subscriber, #119608) [Link]

There is a vc-jj package.