i’ve always been interested in improving the git workflow i have for my small team (usually 2-3 other programmers), i think particularly hopping branches/commits, merging changes, rebasing and reorganizing history, i think git does suffice for that stuff if you know the commands, but jj makes it feel so fluid and easy to do, and having enough depth to get as expressive as you need to be

a lot of other tools ive found were lacking for one reason or another, and mightve not been git compatible. with jj you can hop between git and jj commands as you please, essentially full compatibility with git

I was always very frustrated with git workflow for working on multiple features/bugfixes simultaneously (multiple branches [1]). Changing between them, or combining them for testing is tedious -- constant stashing, switching, cherry-picking. Conflicts fit very poorly into git's version control model - you can't just tell git to ignore some conflict and continue for the moment so you can take care of it later. You have to stop the thing you wanted to focus on and instead babysit git because it found a conflict. Etc.

These are less of an issue once you've molded yourself to fit into git's strange ways, but jj feels like a much nicer tool -- especially for beginners, but feels like it frees up cognitive space even for more experienced folks. You can focus less on the tool and focus more on what you actually want to do.

[1]: I've tried using multiple working trees, but that workflow never really "stuck" with me.

I've done the multiple trees thing too, and agree it didn't work very well.

jj solved the biggest problem for me, which is how much time you spend rebasing when you have 1 PR = 1 stack of commits on top of main. It's easy enough to work on multiple branches this way, but it's a lot of repeated pain when `main` diverges and your changes on top are still out for review. (I honestly just started squashing all of my commits before review, so I would only have to resolve conflicts once.) jj fixes all of this. I especially enjoy working on a 3rd pending change that refers to the previous 2 pending changes; `jj new june/feature-1 june/feature-2` and then you add feature 3 there. You can even `jj squash --into june/feature-1` if something makes more sense being in a prior commit. It's all very wonderful if you are working with other people and you can't immediately mutate `main` upon finishing some work.

I didn’t really have any complaints about git, but people I trust told me to check out jj anyway. Now I’m not going back. Something can still be nicer without another thing having to be bad, basically.