Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)

132 pointsposted a day ago
by bitpatch

32 Comments

martinvonz

16 hours ago

Thanks for working on this project!

It was mentioned on the JJ Discord server that there doesn't seem to be any information available about who you are. Especially since the project seems to be closed-source, perhaps you could share some information about who you are in order to build trust.

I hope you understand. I think users may hesitate to download and install the application without knowing anything about its publisher.

bitpatch

16 hours ago

Totally understandable! I'm a solo dev out of LA who's mostly consulted on various apps and sites over the years, and out of my own personal need I began working on the project earlier this year.

The project is indeed closed-source. Personally I've had experiences where I found the project moved forward towards the roadmap much faster - specifically when considering smaller-scale projects that are UI heavy and therefore take in many UI changes in parallel - when I instead implemented feature requests and focused most of my energy on listening to user feedback rather than reviewing code. UI polish can be quite tricky when it comes from many sources :)

That said, nothing is set in stone! If at some point there are enough feature requests to where I am the bottleneck, this is something I would revisit.

I'd be happy to hop on the Discord as well!

MrJohz

9 hours ago

You can make the code open source without accepting pull requests or contributions from other people. You might still get pull requests or patches, but you can set expectations up front and then ignore/auto-close any contributions you get.

This is how SQLite is developed, for example.

socalgal2

11 hours ago

More power to you! I bought Sublime Merge. I'd consider buying yours once it has a little more history. I've been using gg and really miss a side-by-side diff view. Maybe that makes less sense with jj though

juped

11 hours ago

That's their choice, don't try to pressure them to self-dox. What is wrong with you / the "JJ Discord server"? Please identify yourself and everyone there so I can be sure to up my paranoia around each of you.

kpcyrd

3 hours ago

The post also mentions this is only a problem because of closed source, I think "I want to keep my government identity private, but here's the source code" would be a fair compromise.

If one wants to be extra "there's nothing up my sleeve" they could also publish instructions for how to do reproducible builds for the compiled artifacts (which does require publishing the source code however).

martinvonz

11 hours ago

I think you misunderstood. I didn't ask for their name. Luckily the author didn't seem to misunderstand.

As for information about me, you can search the internet for my username. Let me know if you don't find anything and I can try to help. I'm not going to share information about others on the Discord server.

onatm

7 hours ago

This looks great though I like TUIs more. I’ve been using https://github.com/idursun/jjui for the last few months, I highly recommend it if you are a TUI person like me.

KempyKolibri

5 hours ago

jjui is amazing, sometimes I feel like I shouldn't rely on it so much so I learn the CLI, but it's just so useful!

deevus

9 hours ago

Since no one has asked. What is the tech stack?

jgtrosh

8 hours ago

From the Discord:

> It's a compose multiplatform[1] app, and it's templated-output-parsed rather than Rust-based.

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/compose-multiplatform/

zem

7 hours ago

interesting, would love to read more about the experience of using compose multiplatform for this

ambentzen

5 hours ago

Looks neat, have you considered releasing an AppImage for wider Linux support?

stavros

13 hours ago

I haven't managed to try this because the "select repo" does nothing on Ubuntu 24.04. It doesn't seem I can actually perform any action at all.

swoorup

6 hours ago

not to be that annoying guy, but does anyone have a nix flake for this xD ?

swaits

11 hours ago

This looks great! Excited to try out out and play with it!

cies

6 hours ago

There are a lot of new use cases for VCSes with AI around.

harryyking

18 hours ago

Awesome would love to follow this journey

aaomidi

13 hours ago

I wish this was open source. Even if you kept comments etc disabled.

Or if you shipped the source code alongside the binary. Or just had a zip of the source.

g00k

12 hours ago

This is so cool. Man I need to find another line of work there are too many cracked devs out there

IshKebab

17 hours ago

It's difficult to go back to a separate VCS app after using IDE git support (specifically VSCode & the 'git graph' extension which is sadly permanently abandoned).

tcoff91

10 hours ago

I think there’s a JJ vscode plugin

ilyagr

14 hours ago

VS Code now has an OKish git graph built-in, in case you didn't know. This feature is a few months old.

IshKebab

6 hours ago

Yeah I did but it's merely OKish as you said. Git Graph is still significantly better.

chrisweekly

15 hours ago

I'm confused -- what would you be going back from, given your preferred VSCode extension is abandoned?

IshKebab

6 hours ago

Even though it's abandoned it still works perfectly fine and I still use it.

ambentzen

5 hours ago

Doesn't that make it "complete" as opposed to "abandoned"?

Everything does not need constant updates and new features.

haykuro

11 hours ago

give "git lens" a try.

IshKebab

6 hours ago

Yeah I've used it for a long time but not for its commit graph feature, which still isn't as nice as Git Graph. Actually the main feature I used it for was "Compare working tree with <commit>" which gives you a nice "what have I changed overall" view but one where the files are editable still in the diff view.

However I found this better extension for that: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=letmaik....

So I don't really need Git Lens any more, which is good because they've made it all commercial and annoying.

lolmisfortune

12 hours ago

Nitpick: "judo" and "jujutsu" are already heavily used terms. Googling around for information about this, at least for me, is pretty difficult. Judo is an international olympic sport, jujutsu is one of the most famous traditional japanese martial arts, jiu jitsu is the most popular submission base for MMA...

I'd love a rebrand or rename in order to avoid having to work around the name collision.

Best of luck!

jgtrosh

8 hours ago

"JudoJJ" is quite distinct and searchable imo