til/jj/describe-current-changes-and-create-new-change.md

Describe Current Changes And Create New Change

One of the first patterns I learned with jj was a pair of commands to essentially "commit" the working copy and start a fresh, new change. So if I am done making some changes, I can add a description to the (no description) working copy and then start a new working copy change.

$ jj describe -m "Add status subcommand to show current status"
$ jj new

I learned from Steve in the jj discord that a shorthand for this pattern is to use the jj commit command directly.

When called without path arguments or --interactive, jj commit is equivalent to jj describe followed by jj new.

That means, instead of the above pair of commands, I could have done:

$ jj commit -m "Add status subcommand to show current status"

That would have had the same result in my case. However, notice the caveats mentioned in the quote above and check out man jj-commit for more details on that.