Find the closest bookmark in history to advance it forward

[jennings]

When appending a new commit to a branch using jj commit, I need to find the "closest" bookmark to move it forward. Is there a shorter way to do this besides jj bookmark set my-bookmark -r @-?

[jennings]

The revset to find the commit with the bookmark closest to @ is heads(::@ & bookmarks()).

Some people in the jj community have an alias they call jj tug that uses this revset to advance the closest bookmark. Configuration:

[revset-aliases]
'closest_bookmark(to)' = 'heads(::to & bookmarks())'

[aliases]
tug = ["bookmark", "move", "--from", "closest_bookmark(@-)", "--to", "@-"]

Usage:

$ jj new my-feature

# work work work

$ jj commit -m "Add some changes"
$ jj tug

# The bookmark my-feature is now at @-

If you want to move the bookmark to @ instead of @-, substitute @ in the definition of the tug alias.

[bryceberger]

Note that this doesn't play very nice with the megamerge workflow.

o current work
o merge point
|\
| o bookmark A
o | bookmark B
|/
o trunk

closest_bookmark() will see both bookmarks, and move both of them.

[senekor]

This can be fixed with a script. The following alias jj tug will correctly work with the mega-merge workflow.

[aliases]
tug = ["util", "exec", "--", "bash", "-c", """
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

for parent in $(jj log --no-graph --revisions @- --template 'commit_id ++ "\n"')
do
    jj --ignore-working-copy \
        bookmark move \
        --from "heads(::$parent & bookmarks())" \
        --to "$parent"
done
""", ""]

There are two small downsides to this:

1. bash must be installed. If you don't have it, it should be easy enough to port the script to another scripting language.
2. This script will create several entries in the op log, meaning it cannot be undone with a simple jj undo.

Edit: For the script to work, the merge commit must also be the working copy. So, in the example in the above comment, it doesn't work either:

o current work
o merge point
|\
| o bookmark A
o | bookmark B

It would work if it looked instead like this:

o current work (also merge point)
|\
| o bookmark A
o | bookmark B

[joyously]

Read about the --advance-branches feature request : #2338

[emesterhazy]

+1, please take a look and see if this meets your needs. There is additional discussion about it here as well: #3549