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Working on Windows

Jujutsu works the same on all platforms, but there are some caveats that Windows users should be aware of.

Line endings conversion

Jujutsu has a setting, working-copy.eol-conversion, similar to Git's core.autocrlf1, but does not currently honor .gitattributes and the core.autocrlf Git config, so it is recommended to keep the working-copy.eol-conversion setting and the core.autocrlf Git config in sync1.

Note

If you created a colocated workspace and forgot to keep these two settings in sync, resulting in a dirty working copy with only EOL diffs, you can set the working-copy.eol-conversion setting correctly and run jj abandon to fix it.

Regardless of this setting, the line endings conversion is skipped on binary files based on a heuristic. This behavior is subject to change when we support the text Git attribute.

Jujutsu may incorrectly determine whether a file is a binary file and apply line endings conversion incorrectly, but currently, Jujutsu doesn't support per-file configuration of line endings conversion. If this occurs, you can disable line endings conversion by setting the working-copy.eol-conversion config to none or just removing the config altogether.

PS> git config core.autocrlf input
# Use `none` instead of `input` to avoid applying EOL conversion.
PS> jj config set --repo working-copy.eol-conversion none
# Abandoning the working copy will cause Jujutsu to overwrite all files with
# CRLF line endings with the line endings they were committed with, probably LF.
PS> jj abandon

This means that line endings will be checked out exactly as they are committed and committed exactly as authored, ensuring Git will check out files with LF line endings without converting them to CRLF. You'll want to make sure any tooling you use, especially IDEs, preserve LF line endings.

Pagination

On Windows, jj will use its integrated pager called streampager by default, unless the config ui.pager is explicitly set. See the pager section of the config docs for more details.

If the built-in pager doesn't meet your needs and you have Git installed, you can switch to using Git's pager as follows:

PS> jj config set --user ui.pager '["C:\\Program Files\\Git\\usr\\bin\\less.exe", "-FRX"]'
PS> jj config set --user ui.paginate auto

Typing @ in PowerShell

PowerShell uses @ as part the array sub-expression operator, so it often needs to be escaped or quoted in commands:

PS> jj log -r `@
PS> jj log -r '@'

One solution is to create a revset alias. For example, to make HEAD an alias for @:

PS> jj config set --user revset-aliases.HEAD '@'
PS> jj log -r HEAD

WSL sets the execute bit on all files

When viewing a Windows drive from WSL (via /mnt/c or a similar path), Windows exposes all files with the execute bit set. Since Jujutsu automatically records changes to the working copy, this sets the execute bit on all files committed in your repository.

If you only need to access the repository in WSL, the best solution is to clone the repository in the Linux file system (for example, in ~/my-repo).

If you need to use the repository in both WSL and Windows, one solution is to create a workspace in the Linux file system:

PS> jj workspace add --name wsl ~/my-repo

Then only use the ~/my-repo workspace from Linux.

jj supports symlinks on Windows only when they are enabled by the operating system. This requires Windows 10 version 14972 or higher, as well as Developer Mode. If those conditions are not satisfied, jj will materialize symlinks as ordinary files.

For colocated workspaces, Git support must also be enabled using the git config option core.symlinks=true.


  1. This poses the question of whether we should support reading the core.autocrlf setting in colocated workspaces. See details at the issue