just
February 14, 2024
I've never used Make before (as someone creating the Makefile), but I just tried out just and found it to be fairly intuitive/well documented. There were a couple things I struggled with, but nothing too serious: composing recipes has some nuance that I didn't pick up on at first, silencing output of commands/recipes I got to work how I wanted but mostly by luck. The end result is that the next time the work needs to be done, using just will be a far better experience than the step-by-step directions it is replacing.
I feel like Just is a good sibling tool to Ansible. Ansible would have been overkill for what I did with Just, as well as harder to set up for a new person. just is a simple binary, no minimal boilerplate to speak of, simple syntax. I'm looking forward to seeing where else I can use it. I expect that the next justfile I create will come along much faster than this first one did.