I confess I'm still pretty new to git. I haven't had a very long time to wed myself to git's index and its presence makes me do extra ceremony that I resent whenever I want to polish my graph for my personal projects.

The main difference, it seems, is workflow: git's "prepare then commit" vs jj's "commit then revise".

Currently I do make use of `git add -p` just like grandparent, but I also feel a psychological burden: I will often leave like 3 or 4 separate 2-line changes in the worktree because I don't wanna bother with the ceremony right now, but my perfectionism also resists me putting a lump commit. That's jj's main appeal to me. It amends my work in, then supposedly let's me sculpt it when I'm ready with less of that ceremony.

JJ and Git seem to have different philosophies, so they cater to different users. I want my VCS to do only things I tell it to, so recording things into the index on its own and automatically rebasing commits are not things I actually want.

> I confess I'm still pretty new to git. I haven't had a very long time to wed myself to git's index and its presence makes me do extra ceremony that I resent whenever I want to polish my graph for my personal projects.

Have you realized, that Git versions the index yet? It was written by a filesystem guy, who (I think) considers the filesystem to be a shared space, so Git doesn't consider the filesystem to be its playground. Think of "git add" less of preparing things for the next commit and more of telling git that it can consider some state to be part of its world model. Your repository does not consist of everything below a directory (it can actually span across multiple randomly located directories), it does consist of everything that was once added to the repository.

> The main difference, it seems, is workflow: git's "prepare then commit" vs jj's "commit then revise".

I do the latter just fine in Git, but yes "git add" is a fundamental part of my workflow. I often add some lines already to the index and start writing the commit message, then trying something again in the working directory and either throwing it away or also adding it, before I finally commit. To me the index is a feature.

> but my perfectionism also resists me putting a lump commit

Sounds like you will use a VCS correctly.

> I don't wanna bother with the ceremony right now

I don't know what exactly you consider to be the "ceremony", but I think nearly any git GUI/TUI will let you add lines by selecting with the cursor and pressing a key. The good ones also allow you to edit this. This also works in the opposite way: removing or editing specific lines from an already existing commit. In my experience carefully adding lines results in less mistakes than adding everything and then carefully removing lines, but YMMV.