In my mind, in some sense, every commit can simultaneously be a stash, staging area, part of a branch and more. Because you can easily create endless branches on top of, beside, before, as merges of, etc.. any commit. And it all automatically rebases, conflicts often auto-resolve (or at least don't block you immediately).
I really don't know how to best describe it. But there's a reason that many people are quite literally evangelizing it in every post that comes up - who does this for git, or anything?
Just give it a try. And, even better, use it via jjui
You now you can give stashs a commit message?
It is just SO EASY to move, merge, split, rebase, squash etc commits, and even just individual lines and sections from within commits (via split).
And it's all even easier via jjui
I don't think there's anything any of us can really say to convince those of you who are constitutionally skeptical about it (or even allergic to it) why you should try it... If all of our fawning and evangelizing isn't enough to get you to at least give it a fair shake, then there isn't much else to be said.
It's also that I want my commit hashes to be stable (because I cross-reference them) and it sounds like they wouldn't in jj, because it is kind of rebase-y?
The only thing left for me to say to folks like you who think git is just fine (or even great) is that you're in Plato's Cave. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
You just don't know what you're missing out on. But if you give it a fair shake, you'll see the light quite quickly.
Take care!
Generally you use the id, not the hash.
And yes, everything you can do with jj you can also do with git. It’s just that most people don’t, because it’s much harder with git, involves rebases and changing hashes, and so on.
This gets even better with octopus merges (known in the jj community as "megamerges"): open up 5 branches at the same time, address minor tweaks in any number of them, and `jj absorb` the content into the right parent branch.
I have never tried git absorb across merges, no clue if that works.
Moreover, jj should be able (I haven't explicitly tried this) to autogenerate the conflict resolution in the `jj absorb` case, since it knows what the final post-merge state should be.
When I eventually figure it all out, I can tidy it all up into completely coherent, discrete, sequential commits that make it look like I knew exactly what I was doing from the start, then push to remote.
Conversely git staging around stashing was always an absolute, terrifying mystery to me. I could never remember what was stored where, and would consequently end up losing work, repeating work, and, most of all, just making massive commits that make no sense.
I was sold on jj from essentially the moment I found it, but I remain routinely amazed at how much more powerful (yet simple!) it is than I realized.