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Comment by jcalabro | Hacker News Reader

I've been using just at work and in personal projects for almost a year, and I like it a lot. In particular, its self documentation with `just --list` makes onboarding new folks easy. It's also just a nicer syntax than make.

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Agreed. Is it that different than Make with `.PHONY` targets? Yes — it is Designed To Do Exactly What It Does, And It Does It Well. That counts for something in my book.

All my Justfiles start with this prelude to enable positional arguments, and a "default" target to print all the possible commands when you run `just` with no target name:

    # this setting will allow passing arguments through to tasks, see the docs here
    # https://just.systems/man/en/chapter_24.html#positional-arguments
    set positional-arguments

    # print all available commands by default
    default:
      @just --list

in mise you wouldn't need that preamble. `set positional-arguments` is just how it behaves normally and `mise run` doesn't just show available commands—it's also a selector UI

That's nice, but I don't have any interest in switching because Just does everything I want. I legitimately have zero feature requests regarding Just.

Maybe worth reminding the self-documenting Makefile [0] discussed here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30137254

I've been using this for years; love it

I don't have my work laptop to hand to compare, but I usually run "just" to get a list of commands and what they do, rather than "just --list". Hope that saves you 7 key presses going forwards.

Running `just` will invoke the first recipe, so you need to add one that invokes `just --list` for this to work — see https://just.systems/man/en/listing-available-recipes.html and my sibling comment.

That seems like the most useless pattern to take from make, especially when you name your tool ”just”.

Just what?

> Just what?

"Oh... come on! Just... <waving hands angrily>"

Pretty clear to me :).

Just execute.

The same applies to make without arguments though, make what? Grammar / word meaning aside, unknown / missing commands printing the help file or suggestions is a good pattern.

I think it's less grammatically ambiguous with make. It implicitly means "make <the project>". For most projects that's pretty well defined (and also grammatically correct since 'make' is a verb and 'just' is not).

But even so it would have been a better design for `make` to list top level targets or something.

Yeah, I've been adding `just help` as an alias for `just --list` and making it the first recipe for this reason.

Hmm. Maybe the dev that set it up made the first recipe run `just --list`

Not as much as 7, you can just type `just -l`.

Total agree. It constrains the chaos in my projects, and its easy to refactor bits into more sustainable cicd, if or when that is ever needed.

The self documenting aspect is what puts jt above a folder of shell scripts for me

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