Integration with editors / IDEs

[eproxus]

I tried to find info on this but couldn't find anything (so apologies if it has been brought up before): is there any way to integrate with editors, tools or IDEs that are already Git aware?

I'm mostly interested in my editor being able to show the current workspace diff and being able to look at the log and blame. Since jj uses Git under the hood, I was hoping that there would be some Git repository hidden somewhere which could be used. I found .jj/store/repo/git but that seems to stay on main regardless of which branch the jj checkout is on.

It would be cool if there would be a way for jj to export some .git directory that somehow represents the current working state of the jj repo, but I realize this might be extremely hard or impossible (e.g. see the work that has gone into GitButler to represent multiple branches active in the same repo at the same time).

Does this idea even remotely make sense, or is it just a pipe dream and we should wait for native jj integration instead?

[martinvonz]

This is one common reason people use colocated repo (which should perhaps be called "colocated workspaces").

[eproxus]

That is great to hear, will try it out! A bit of feedback: I search a long time for "editor integration" and "IDE support" and various other phrases in that vein, but didn't find anything. Perhaps some more keywords like that could be added so it would be easier to find?

[cormacrelf]

It's missing one thing if you want to call it colocated workspaces -- jj workspace add ../second should make the second workspace also appear as a git repo. Currently you can't do this if you use Nix flakes / direnv, because it will no longer respect your .gitignore.

[ilyagr]

This might be worth creating an FR about. It might not be trivial to implement, but could be doable. I expect some diving into libgit2's and/or gitoxide's support for worktrees would be required, and we'd have to hope their support is good enough.

The most natural way this could go is if we could make the "co-located workspace" also a Git worktree. This would mean that jj git export and jj git import would have to learn to understand worktrees.

[cormacrelf]

#4436