The fact that jj doesn’t tell you what files have changed until you start a new commit is holding up my plans to use it. It’s frustrating for me and I imagine it would create tech support questions if I made others use it if it’s to replace git it needs some further ergonomics refinement.
I am not 100% sure what behavior you're talking about, but if it's that `jj` doesn't snapshot until you run a `jj` command, you can add watchman, and then it will do so on every filesystem change https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/config/#watchman
Otherwise, jj status will show you the current changes at any time.
I'll have to try it on a blank checkout because once I've run 'jj new' then 'jj st' does something similar to git st, but I had a situation on a fresh checkout where I know I'd saved changes in the IDE, git st showed them, but jj st came up as blank.
It may be that this only happens immediately after jj git init.
But any tool that lies to people is a huge red flag. Because while I can memorize that caveat it's presumptuous to assume that an entire team of people new to a tool will remember a footgun. That's on the tool not the victims.
With all due respect, it sounds like you might have some confusion about what happened. If you run `jj new`, `jj st` will virtually by definition show a clean working copy. You've created a new, empty revision, and as a consequence there are zero changes which have been made in that empty revision.
Asserting that `jj` "lies to people" is… probably uncalled for here. I'm not going to say it's impossible for the two commands to produce incongruent output, but knowing how they work it seems pretty unlikely. I think it's far more likely that either there was some confusion on your part (two different tabs in two separate projects?), you did something you didn't fully understand with a new and unfamiliar tool you were playing with (perhaps you misunderstood what `jj new` does?), or some other very reasonable and understandable thing occurred that falls pretty far short of "the tool lied to you".
In git terms (this is an analogy that is a bit wrong, but useful here), doing `jj new` after making some changes is the same as doing `git commit -am ""` then.
Would you expect `git status` to "show you the changes, full stop" then?.
Where the hostility is coming from, ugh
Why is it so hard for people to even consider for a minute that they might be wrong or confused - nooo, this tool that was in development for years by at least one full-time google employee with a decade of mercurial dev experience and a ton of contributors, and that is loved by a lot of people already for it's simplicity and functionality - definitely failed in such a basic task, it's not you misunderstanding some basics in how it works, definitely, "full stop".
Another thing is that you might have set a `snapshot.auto-track="none()"` config and never told us, which is an opt-in way to disable autotracking, and which `jj st` does not support fully (if at all in released version) yet - then you totally "opted in" being lied to, sorry.
You are confused or wrong, and you are making incorrect assertions about a system "lying" to you on that basis: you can see this for yourself by typing `jj git init` (or just `jj init`) in an empty directory, touching some files, then running `jj status`. You will see a listing of the added files. The same happens if you commit these files, then make some changes to their contents: `jj status` will show the changed files, and `jj diff` will show the diff per file.
