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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2138 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 23, 2025

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Are people here familiar with git frontends?

Having again lost a day's work to git deciding to delete files I hadn't committed yet (nor will I ever commit to the master), I'm now looking for a git frontend that doesn't completely suck balls. Is there anything that fits the following tenets:

  1. My local files are sacred. Under no circumstances can they be deleted without some way to undo it. No exceptions. If the files in the repo and my working copy differ, show it to me so I can choose what to do on a per-file / directory basis.
  2. The repo has only a single origin. I don't care if Linus needs twenty thousand different repos to pull and push things from. I use one. The tool shall treat every branch as always having that as origin.
  3. A submodule should only mean the short text file that contains the SHA hash. The contents of submodule directories should be completely ignored when pulling, merging, committing or pushing. Yes, I know the repo's submodule refers to a different set of files than the ones in my working copy. That is intentional.
  4. I don't want to ever have to see or care about staged files. My files are either being worked on or have been committed. There is no such thing as a staged file.
  5. No operation should leave things halfway, something staged or any ><!¤#"¤#% characters in files. It either completes succesfully or leaves the working copy as it was before. Not some quantum Schrödinger's halfway state.

It gets really laborous having to have the actual working copy, the one git wants to see and the authorative origin/master and manually trying to manage them without git completely fucking up my working copy just because a branch pointer was changed somewhere.

I don't want to ever have to see or care about staged files. My files are either being worked on or have been committed. There is no such thing as a staged file.

Maybe take a look at jujutsu: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

It uses git as a back-end so it's completely compatible with git, but it follows the idea that you always have a commit in the works:

Working-copy-as-a-commit: Changes to files are recorded automatically as normal commits, and amended on every subsequent change. This "snapshot" design simplifies the user-facing data model (commits are the only visible object), simplifies internal algorithms, and completely subsumes features like Git's stashes or the index/staging-area.

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