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.
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
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.
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.
