Looking for clarification on one of the tenets.

[Thovthe]

In the docs there's a page about the core tenets of the project. One of those is "Having as few states as possible." I was wondering exactly what this meant. Is it about states of changes, the whole repo, interface modes?

It really isn't clear to me and I figure core tenets should be kept as clear as possible.

[PhilipMetzger]

One of those is "Having as few states as possible." I was wondering exactly what this meant. Is it about states of changes, the whole repo, interface modes?

The goal articulated here comes from the observation that you can run any command on any mutable revision in a repo since for example rebase never fails because it has no in-between state unlike Git. The same applies to a bunch of different commands so its both in the interface and the repo.

[jennings]

Maybe "modeless"? In the way that vim is a "modal editor"?

The repo itself is "state", but we're trying to convey that the UI doesn't have modes where it behaves differently.

[Thovthe]

If that's how you think of it; what about "No modes!" and a link to Larry Tesler's Wikipedia page.

[steveklabnik]

👍 for "mode", that's what I was going to reply with until I saw these last few replies also suggesting it :)

I wouldn't link to tesler, I'd just change the wording.

[Thovthe]

How about:
"JJ strives to be modeless. If at all possible commands should work as the user expects every in every situation."

[PhilipMetzger]

yes, following the discussion above this should be rephrased as that. The stateless came from a conversation in 2024 with Julia Evans which should get some credit for the initial sentence.

[Thovthe]

Sorry for opening as an issue, I didn't realise it should have been a discussion.

[Thovthe]

Hey, I opened a PR around this here but really not interested in a google account.

I thought the winning wording might be, "Strive to be modeless: If at all possible commands should work consistently and as the user expects in every situation."

Use under whatever license the the docs are under at time of writing. Looks like apache.