Live updating jj log?

[andrewyur]

I have started with jujutsu recently and I really like it so far. However, I dont have a great memory for the change ids, and so have been using jj log very frequently. If the graph displayed by jj log updated every time a jj operation was done then I could just have it on a terminal pane off to the side and not have to worry about remembering the change ids.

What do you guys think? Is this feasible?

[tim-janik]

@martinvonz has recently given a presentation of JJ where he used 2 tmux panes, the lower one basically just ran:
watch jj log --color=always
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV0JzI8IcCY

That would be one way, another is jj-fzf where the central piece is the jj log view and all sorts of jj operations can be carried out with a hotkey while the log view updates:
https://github.com/tim-janik/tools/tree/master/jj-fzf

The JJ wiki lists additional GUIs beyond the terminal:
https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/wiki/GUI

[andrewyur]

watch works perfectly! this was exactly what i wanted, thanks for showing me

[martinvonz]

You may want to have the watched command be jj --ignore-working-copy log or something like that. Otherwise you'll occasionally run into cases where the snapshotting done by the watched command conflicts with some operation you ran manually.

[ilyagr]

If you don't go with jj-fzf or a GUI, I recommend hwatch, which requires some configuration, or viddy. Either of them allow you to scroll the output.

I also have a script that I pass to hwatch. The script runs jj --ignore-working-copy resolve --list 2>/dev/null¹, then runs jj diff --stat, and then jj --ignore-working-copy log with some customization to see all the info I want. As Martin mentions, you might want to add --ignore-working-copy to the first command as well (in fact, I might try it); but certainly at most one of them should look at the working copy.

My script and some tricks that may or may not be useful

Note/update: After writing this all down, I'm not sure I'd do things this way if I was starting from scratch (is it worth the effort?), but I did already write it down. It might look OK the way I described it above.

I'll mention a couple of these tricks, one of which uses ifne from moreutils. Here's a version of my script without some of the customization:

#!/bin/sh
(
  jj --ignore-working-copy --color=always diff --stat | grep -Ev "^\d+ file";
  jj --ignore-working-copy --color=always resolve --list 2>/dev/null
) | ifne sh -c "cat && echo"
jj --ignore-working-copy --color=always log

The grep trick and filters out a line I find annoying and helps with the following trick.

The ifne trick is so that a newline is printed between the diff/conflict list and the log, but only if there were any diffs or conflicts. If I was doing it now, I might use a shell variable instead of ifne.

So, you could even run

hwatch '(
  jj --ignore-working-copy diff --stat| grep -Ev "^\d+ file";
  jj --ignore-working-copy resolve --list 2>/dev/null
) | ifne sh -c "cat && echo"
jj --ignore-working-copy log'

---

Footnotes

1. The 2>/dev/null suppresses an error message if there are no conflicts. ↩

[avamsi]

Lots of good points here! And +1 to viddy, it has tons of good features!

I recently started hyperlinking change IDs to Gerrit (https://github.com/avamsi/dotfiles/blob/e4e78763121687327cf5b85d236f7df741f34dec/.jjconfig.toml#L39-L47), I was using viddy earlier but it doesn't support hyperlinks (I don't think any popular watch commands do?), so I wrote my own https://github.com/avamsi/dekh (and made it look like viddy) -- it's pretty limited, but supports hyperlinks and 2D scrolling.

Coming to the content itself, I display working copy and parent commit changes, along with any conflicts (sorry about the aliases, they're at https://github.com/avamsi/dotfiles/blob/e4e78763121687327cf5b85d236f7df741f34dec/.jjconfig.toml#L68-L94):

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
#
# Usage: jjx

print '@ Working copy changes:'
# We intentionally don't use bg(c) here to let jj automatically commit
# changes to the working copy (so it's not stale on output).
jj --color=always whatsout --revision=@ | indent
conflicts=$(jj bgc resolve --list 2>/dev/null) && {
	print '\n\e[31mx Conflicts:\e[0m'
	print "$conflicts" | indent
}
print '\n| Parent commit changes:'
jj bgc whatsout --revision='parents(@)' | indent
print
jj --config-toml='ui.log-word-wrap=false' bgc log --revisions=interesting