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skydhashyesterday at 3:34 AM2 repliesview on HN

I use magit on a daily basis. And I do use tig occasionally (I don't like lazygit). Most of my magit workflows only requires a handful of keys (most are only two keys). If you've not tried Magit before, it's like vim for a git repo. tig is more barebones, but I could quickly configure it to be able to do most of the magit tricks I need.

Git cli is tedious. But like all cli operations the goal is always to script your workflow or alias the most used commands in something shorter. I'm sure that jj may have an easier learning curve. But some people do know how git works and like the level of control over commits.


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sswatsonyesterday at 7:05 PM

I’ve never used magit but my impression is that it’s similar to jj in the sense that it smooths out git’s rough edges in an elegant way and in the sense that it’s hard to properly appreciate without using it.

That being said, I also much prefer a UI layer (lazygit originally, now lazyjj), and personally I find the benefits of jj to be partly complementary to the UI ones.

That is, after getting used to jj, my problems with git are (1) the CLI ergonomics, and (2) the model is actually more complex than it needs to be, in a way that materially diminishes my experience. Only the first is addressed by lazygit (though maybe magit does both; not sure).

One other point: jj doesn’t actually impose a level-of-control tradeoff on the curation of commits. You can mimic the git workflow by modeling the working copy and staging area as commits (changes, in jj parlance), or you can experiment with any number of alternatives. What git gives you is the opinionated support for the working-copy-staging-area-commit approach.