I don't remember my first steps with subversion, mercurial, or git too well, but I don't think any of them were any more intuitive. My understanding is that jj is supposed to be easier to use for day-to-day version control. I'm very comfortable with git, but that was hard earned and I don't see that level of confidence with most devs that I've worked with over the years. Hoping jj can be more accessible to the average working software engineer than git has been.
Yeah being new to a tool it's expected that you'll have a learning curve.
But some stuff is just ridiculous.
Ok you use the mercurial model and have bookmarks not branches... oh wait you also didn't create a default bookmark when you initialised the repo.
Ok you also have the mercurial model where there is no staging of files... but now you've added in a whole new command to solve the problem that mercurial solves by just letting you name files on the command line.
Everything about it just feels like it's being different from something for the sake of being different, not for any actual benefit.
Great article -- I'm going set aside some time with a notebook and pencil today and give this a try.
I'm not sure I agree with the left brain/right brain, analytical and logical vs creative and emotional dichotomy. I think good design work can be just as analytical as it is creative. I think it has to be when it comes to UI and UX.
I outsource most of my esoteric `jq` syntax questions to ChatGPT. It does really well with them, usually turning up solutions that I'd struggle to munge together from several different google search results.
I wonder how ChatGPT would do with focussed pandoc requests.
Hey, I'm Josh, the creator of this TIL repo. I've started it back in 2015 and still contribute to it a couple times a week. I reference TILs all the time to remember how to do something. It has been a great practice and I'd recommend to anyone to maintain their own TIL repo.
I tend to use one tmux session per project. I usually have 2-3 open for various client projects, one open for my TIL repository, and then I go from there. Within those sessions I tend to have separate windows and panes as a way of organizing any (web) servers and other long-running processes. The 'first' window of each session is usually a split between Vim (where I'm working) and zsh (where I'm executing git commands, running tests, etc.).
> I refer back to mine a LOT. The principal audience for them is future me - if anyone else finds them useful too that's just a bonus.
100% this. Several times a week I'll be trying to do something, remember I've written about, and then find a TIL my past-self wrote that explains how to do the thing. It's really satisfying each time it happens.
