My dotfiles setup is very simple: I version control my $HOME directory using git. I ignore everything by default to avoid accidentally adding files I do not want to track. This avoids the need for any scripts or frameworks. Lately, I have been using Jujutsu for more personal projects and decided to use jj to manage my dotfiles.

I am using jj version 0.21.0 at the time of this writing.

Migration

The migration was fairly straight-forward. Before doing anything, I made sure all my changes were tracked and push to github. I also made sure I had a working backup.

For my work laptop, I chose to colocate git and jj together. This will allow me to fall back to git commands in a pinch.

Steps:

0. cd $HOME
1. Colocate git and jj - jj git init --colocate
2. Track my branch on github - jj branch track main@origin

For my personal laptop, I decided to force myself to only use jj.

Steps:

0. cd $HOME
1. Remove the .git directory - rm -fr .git
2. Initialize Jujutsu - jj git init
   • This will create an empty commit based on root. We will fix this in a minute.
3. Add github as a remote - jj git remote add origin git@github.com:hjr3/dotfiles.git
4. Fetch the latest changes - jj git fetch or jj git fetch --remote origin
5. Track my branch on github - jj branch track main@origin
6. Move the empty commit - jj rebase -d main@origin

Moving the empty commit will change the repo from this:

◆  ppxsuksz herman@hermanradtke.com 2024-09-28 09:48:15 main 7962ecfe
│  Add instructions to set up jj
~  (elided revisions)
│ @  porzoswr herman@hermanradtke.com 2024-09-28 10:19:32 79747d01
├─╯  (no description set)
◆  zzzzzzzz root() 00000000

To this:

@  porzoswr herman@hermanradtke.com 2024-09-28 10:22:39 d396a016
│  (empty) (no description set)
◆  ppxsuksz herman@hermanradtke.com 2024-09-28 09:48:15 main 7962ecfe
│  Add instructions to set up jj
~

No More Forcibly Adding Changes

My workflow did slightly change. My .gitignore file used to be:

# Ignore everything
*

and I would use forcibly add changes usinggit add -f <pathspec>.... There is no concept of git add in jj though.

Instead, I explicitly added my files to .gitignore. I ran git ls-tree -r main --name-only to find all files being tracked by git in my main branch. Then I used the ! operator in .gitignore to opt them in. Now, my .gitignore file looks something like this:

# Ignore everything
*

# Manually add files we want to track
!.gitignore
!.ssh/config

These changes are compatible with git and I can easily revert back to my old workflow if I decided to stop using jj.

Docs

I primarily used two sources of documentation to figure this all out:

• The excellent Jujutsu Tutorial by Steve Klabnik
• The Jujutsu Git Comparison Command equivalance table