JJ Cheat Sheet

Have a cheat sheet for Jujutsu.

I’ve been learning Jujutsu a.k.a. jj, a version control system that’s compatible with git repos. It’s clicked for me in a way that git hasn’t even after many years of use.

The best way to learn something is to teach it, so I wrote a reference and cheat sheet for jj with the help of a friend:

• The reference describes the state space of a jj repository and how it changes when you fetch and push.
• The cheat sheet visually shows what all of the common editing operations do to the repo state.

While there have been several excellent tutorials on Jujutsu, I haven’t seen anything that quite fills these roles. And importantly, they each fit on a page, so it’s possible to print it out double sided and keep it on your desk while learning jj!

While you can of course approach jj any way you please, if you’re truly new to it I would suggest first reading a tutorial first to grok some of the basics. Steve Klabnik’s tutorial, and Kuba Martin’s introduction are both excellent.

(A word about why you should read a tutorial first. If you’re coming from git, you may think of a repo as a collection of branches, or a merge conflict as part of an operation. These intuitions will stand in the way of you learning jj, and a tutorial is a better way to unlearn them than a reference.)

Without further ado, here’s the reference and cheat sheet. It’s written in Typst and the source is on Github.

February 11, 2025