Changes & Commits

Dojo uses an immutable, change-based model inspired by Jujutsu. This is fundamentally different from Git’s staging-area approach.

Working copy is a commit

In Dojo, your working copy is always a commit. Every time you modify a file, the change is automatically recorded. There’s no staging area, no git add.

# Just edit files — they're automatically tracked
echo "hello" > file.txt
dojo status
# Shows: A file.txt (in your working copy commit)

Changes vs Commits

• A change is identified by a change ID — a stable identifier that survives rewrites
• A commit is a specific version of a change, identified by a commit ID

When you amend or rebase a change, the change ID stays the same but the commit ID changes. This makes it easy to track changes through history rewrites.

Describing changes

# Describe the current working copy
dojo commit -m "Add feature X"

This does two things:

1. Sets the description on the current working copy commit
2. Creates a new empty working copy on top

Editing earlier changes

You can go back and edit any change in your history:

# Edit the parent of your current working copy
dojo edit @-

# Make modifications...

# Go back to your latest change
dojo edit @

Child changes are automatically rebased on top of your edits.

The operation log

Every operation in Dojo is logged and can be undone:

# View operation history
dojo history ops

# Undo the last operation
dojo rewrite undo