Skip to content

# Glossary

## Anonymous branch

An anonymous branch is a chain of commits that doesn't necessarily have any bookmarks pointing to it or to any of its descendants. Unlike Git, Jujutsu keeps commits on anonymous branches around until they are explicitly abandoned. Visible anonymous branches are tracked by the view, which stores a list of heads of such branches.

## Backend

A backend is an implementation of the storage layer. There are currently two builtin commit backends: the Git backend and the native backend. The Git backend stores commits in a Git repository. The native backend is used for testing purposes only. Alternative backends could be used, for example, if somebody wanted to use jj with a humongous monorepo (as Google does).

There are also pluggable backends for storing other information than commits, such as the "operation store backend" for storing the operation log.

## Bookmark

A bookmark is a named pointer to a commit. They are similar to Git's branches and even more similar to Mercurial's bookmarks. See here for details.

Unlike in Git, there is no concept of a "current bookmark"; bookmarks do not move when you create a new commit. Bookmarks do automatically follow the commit if it gets rewritten.

## Branch

In the context of `jj`, the work "branch" usually refers to an anonymous branch or, less formally, a branch of the commit "tree" (which is itself an informal way to refer to the commit graph, parts of which might resemble a tree even when it's not mathematically a tree).

We also sometimes discuss Git's branches and branches on Git remotes. Locally, these correspond to bookmarks. In a co-located repository, each local Git branch corresponds to a `jj` bookmark.

## Change

A change is a commit as it evolves over time. Changes themselves don't exist as an object in the data model; only the change ID does. The change ID is a property of a commit.

## Change ID

A change ID is a unique identifier for a change. They are typically 16 bytes long and are often randomly generated. By default, `jj log` presents them as a sequence of 12 letters in the k-z range, at the beginning of a line. These are actually hexadecimal numbers that use "digits" z-k instead of 0-9a-f.

For the Git backend, Change IDs are currently maintained only locally and not exchanged via push/fetch operations.

## Commit

A snapshot of the files in the repository at a given point in time (technically a tree object), together with some metadata. The metadata includes the author, the date, and pointers to the commit's parents. Through the pointers to the parents, the commits form a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) .

Note that even though commits are stored as snapshots, they are often treated as differences between snapshots, namely compared to their parent's snapshot. If they have more than one parent, then the difference is computed against the result of merging the parents. For example, `jj diff` will show the differences introduced by a commit compared to its parent(s), and `jj rebase` will apply those changes onto another base commit.

The word "revision" is used as a synonym for "commit".

## Commit ID

A commit ID is a unique identifier for a commit. They are 20 bytes long when using the Git backend. They are presented in regular hexadecimal format at the end of the line in `jj log`, using 12 hexadecimal digits by default. When using the Git backend, the commit ID is the Git commit ID.

## Co-located repos

When using the Git backend and the backing Git repository's `.git/` directory is a sibling of `.jj/`, we call the repository "co-located". Most tools designed for Git can be easily used on such repositories. `jj` and `git` commands can be used interchangeably.

See here for details.

## Conflict

Conflicts can occur in many places. The most common type is conflicts in files. Those are the conflicts that users coming from other VCSs are usually familiar with. You can see them in `jj status` and in `jj log` (the red "conflict" label at the end of the line). See here for details.

Conflicts can also occur in bookmarks. For example, if you moved a bookmark locally, and it was also moved on the remote, then the bookmark will be in a conflicted state after you pull from the remote. See here for details.

Similar to a bookmark conflict, when a change is rewritten locally and remotely, for example, then the change will be in a conflicted state. We call that a divergent change.

## Divergent change

A divergent change is a change that has more than one visible commit.

## Head

A head is a commit with no descendants. The context in which it has no descendants varies. For example, the `heads(X)` revset function returns commits that have no descendants within the set `X` itself. The view records which anonymous heads (heads without a bookmark pointing to them) are visible at a given operation. Note that this is quite different from Git's HEAD.

## Hidden commits, abandoned commits

See visible commits.

## Operation

A snapshot of the visible commits and bookmarks at a given point in time (technically a view object), together with some metadata. The metadata includes the username, hostname, timestamps, and pointers to the operation's parents.

## Operation log

The operation log is the DAG formed by operation objects, much in the same way that commits form a DAG, which is sometimes called the "commit history". When operations happen in sequence, they form a single line in the graph. Operations that happen concurrently from jj's perspective result in forks and merges in the DAG.

## Repository

Basically everything under `.jj/`, i.e. the full set of operations and commits.

## Remote

TODO

## Revision

A synonym for Commit.

## Revset

Jujutsu supports a functional language for selecting a set of revisions. Expressions in this language are called "revsets". See here for details. We also often use the term "revset" for the set of revisions selected by a revset.

## Rewrite

To "rewrite" a commit means to create a new version of that commit with different contents, metadata (including parent pointers), or both. Rewriting a commit results in a new commit, and thus a new commit ID, but the change ID generally remains the same. Some examples of rewriting a commit would be changing its description or rebasing it. Modifying the working copy rewrites the working copy commit.

## Root commit

The root commit is a virtual commit at the root of every repository. It has a commit ID consisting of all '0's (`00000000...`) and a change ID consisting of all 'z's (`zzzzzzzz...`). It can be referred to in revsets by the function `root()`. Note that our definition of "root commit" is different from Git's; Git's "root commits" are the first commit(s) in the repository, i.e. the commits `jj log -r 'root()+'` will show.

## Tree

A tree object represents a snapshot of a directory in the repository. Tree objects are defined recursively; each tree object only has the files and directories contained directly in the directory it represents.

## Tracked bookmarks and tracking bookmarks

A remote bookmark can be made "tracked" with the `jj bookmark track` command. This results in a "tracking" local bookmark that tracks the remote bookmark.

See the bookmarks documentation for a more detailed definition of these terms.

## Visible commits

Visible commits are the commits you see in `jj log -r 'all()'`. They are the commits that are reachable from an anonymous head in the view. Ancestors of a visible commit are implicitly visible.

Intuitively, visible commits are the "latest versions" of a revision with a given change id. A commit that's abandoned or rewritten stops being visible and is labeled as "hidden". Such commits are no longer accessible using a change id, but they are still accessible by their commit id.

## View

A view is a snapshot of bookmarks and their targets, anonymous heads, and working-copy commits. The anonymous heads define which commits are visible.

A view object is similar to a tree object in that it represents a snapshot without history, and an operation object is similar to a commit object in that it adds metadata and history.

## Workspace

A workspace is a working copy and an associated repository. There can be multiple workspaces for a single repository. Each workspace has a `.jj/` directory, but the commits and operations will be stored in the initial workspace; the other workspaces will have pointers to the initial workspace. See here for details.

This is what Git calls a "worktree".

## Working copy

The working copy contains the files you're currently working on. It is automatically snapshot at the beginning of almost every `jj` command, thus creating a new working-copy commit if any changes had been made in the working copy. Conversely, the working copy is automatically updated to the state of the working-copy commit at the end of almost every `jj` command. See here for details.

This is what Git calls a "working tree".

## Working-copy commit

A commit that corresponds to the current state of the working copy. There is one working-copy commit per workspace. The current working-copy commits are tracked in the operation log.