I have always wanted a version control system that was basically Emacs/Vim/Neovim's undo-tree[0] but persistent and social. Why do I have to manually talk to git? You are a computer, track every modification I make while editing and let me decide (or help me decide) on what a checkpoint is.
Jujutsu might be what you’re looking for then.
Seconding Jujutsu! I've been working to add Jujutsu support to basically every open-source tool and framework I use, including the agentic ones [0]. While it doesn't work for everyone, I've found it can really work for some people. (like myself)
It's absolutely great for keeping a bunch of exploratory changes alive, quick prototyping, etc. as I tend to do with basically every source I have on my machine. I don't have to think at all about the stuff I hate about git (babying the index, being careful to amend and etc. right the first time because undos are annoying, etc.)
Does not support LFS or submodules though.
[0]: https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done/tree/jj-vcs
submodules are cursed. LFS support looks to be coming soon in the form of jj ignoring LFS files and just allowing you to use git-lfs to manage them.
Submodules are cursed, but I like to clone my repos without colocation, but then sometimes find that I need to re-colocate in order to `git submodule update`.
Relatedly, when I use filesystem paths as remotes they need to be colocated or else it doesn't work, which is a little annoying!
Submodules are already that way as well.
Mostly true, but the weird edge case I run into is workspaces. Since they seem to be independent of and not backward compatible with git worktrees, there is no fall back to git for submodules within a workspace.
We still use submodules in a number of places at work so it’s a bit of friction for me. Other than that, I’m rapidly becoming a jj convert.
Ahh, so workspaces don't currently support colocation, aka "put a .git directory in there". So that's what's up there. Interesting corner case! I know upstream is working on it.
Zed’s DeltaDB is that very idea I believe
https://zed.dev/deltadb
is there some more information about DeltaDB? this seems to be an early access feature and not something available at the moment but I would be interested to learn more about it.
Edit: this was actually announced at a very recent blog post (11 july 2026 so just 11 days ago): https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb
The blogpost also has some more relevant information as well.
Software is made between commits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 (214 comments)