Manipulating Commits

Once you can navigate the status window, the next step is rewriting history. Jujutsu is built around the assumption that commits are mutable — you reword them, split them, squash hunks between them, and move them around. Bad Juju exposes those operations as cursor-driven actions on the status and log buffers.

This page walks through the most common ones.

Abandoning a change

If you decide a commit shouldn't exist at all — say you started a spike, hated it, and want it gone — abandon it. The commit's descendants get rebased onto its parent automatically.

1. Open the status or log buffer.
2. Place the cursor on the commit you want to delete.
3. Press a (magit profile in Neovim/VS Code/Emacs) or invoke the Abandon commit <rev> code action.

Bad Juju runs jj abandon <rev> and refreshes the buffer. With no cursor on a commit row, a defaults to the working copy.

Heads up: Jujutsu's op log makes this reversible. If you abandoned the wrong thing, press u (or U in Emacs) to invoke jj undo.

Rewording a commit (describe)

If the commit is fine but the message isn't — typo, missing context, wrong issue number — you want to describe it.

1. Place the cursor on the commit.
2. Press d.

Bad Juju opens describe.jujutsu populated with the existing message. Lines beginning with JJ: are comments that get stripped on save. Save and close (<C-c><C-c>, Ctrl+Enter, or C-c C-c depending on the editor) to apply.

If you change your mind, abort instead of saving (<C-c><C-k>, Escape Escape, or C-c C-k).

Squashing a single file into the parent

Suppose you realize a change you made belongs in the previous commit, not in your current working copy. Squashing a file moves its changes from @ (the working copy) into the parent commit.

1. Open the status buffer.
2. Place the cursor on the file in the WORKING COPY CHANGES list.
3. Press s.

The file disappears from @'s changes and lands in the parent. If the working copy ends up empty, you can keep working on the same commit or move on with n (new).

Need to pull a file back out of the parent? Press U (or Ctrl+K U in VS Code if U is shadowed by another keymap) — that's unsquash.

Multiple parents? If the working copy is a merge commit, Bad Juju will pick the parent that already touches the file. If the file isn't in either parent (or both), the client prompts you to pick one.

Squashing changes between revisions

Suppose you decide a change should be moved to a different revision — not just the immediate parent, and maybe only some of the hunks. Bad Juju's commit-to-commit squash workflow handles this.

The flow has three steps: mark a source, mark a destination, then pick the hunks.

1. Mark the source

Place your cursor on the commit whose changes you want to move out of. Press s (Emacs) or the Squash from this revision code action (VS Code, Neovim, Helix).

The status/log buffer header updates to confirm the pending source.

2. Mark the destination

Now move the cursor to the commit you want the changes to land in. Press s again (Emacs) or invoke Squash into this revision.

Bad Juju materializes a squash window at .jj/badjuju/squash/<from>-<to>.jujutsu. It has two sections:

• REMAINING CHANGES — every hunk in the source that hasn't been selected yet.
• SELECTED CHANGES — the hunks you're moving into the destination.

Initially, everything is in REMAINING.

3. Pick the hunks

In the squash window, navigate to a hunk and toggle it between REMAINING and SELECTED:

You can also:

• Select everything with a (Emacs) or Move all hunks to SELECTED — equivalent to a plain jj squash.
• Deselect everything with A (Emacs) or Move all hunks to REMAINING.
• Edit a hunk before squashing. Press e (Emacs) on a hunk to open hunk-edit.jujutsu. You can tweak the additions and context lines, save, and Bad Juju applies the edited hunk via jj squash --interactive. See the Hunk edit buffer reference for details.

4. Finalize

Close the squash window when you're happy with the SELECTED set. Bad Juju applies the move and refreshes the status/log buffers. If you change your mind partway through, cancel the pending squash via the Cancel pending squash action (or just close the squash window with everything still in REMAINING — nothing gets moved).

Rebasing onto a different destination

To move a commit (and its descendants) onto a new parent, press r with the cursor on the commit you want to rebase. The client prompts for a destination revset; on submit, Bad Juju runs jj rebase -r <src> -d <dest>.

Managing bookmarks

Press b to open the bookmark manager. It's a single popup/picker that handles create, move, delete, track, and forget operations — the same five things jj bookmark does, just from inside your editor.

Undoing the last operation

Jujutsu records every mutating operation in its op log, which makes mistakes cheap. To undo whatever you just did:

This invokes jj undo and refreshes the status buffer.

Pulling from / pushing to the Git remote

If your repo is colocated with Git, you can fetch and push without leaving the editor:

These are best-effort wrappers — they run the corresponding jj command and surface the output. For anything more nuanced (specific remotes, branches, or refspecs), drop into the terminal.