How would I recreate a git --work-tree setup?

[Aliervo]

Recently discovered jj and really enjoyed it as I followed through the tutorial, so I thought I would give it a slightly more "real world" try on my dotfiles. Unfortunately, I've hit a little snag. I use git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME, so I can clone my repo on a new machine and everything gets put into the proper config directory without any need to move things around. Is there a way to emulate this behavior with jj, preferably with a colocated git repo?

Best I've come up with so far is maybe something with a separate workspace in each required config directory, but I'm assuming this won't automatically happen when initializing on an existing git repo. I am not finding much documentation on how the jj workspaces interact with remote repositories. Are workspaces something that can be pushed to a remote, or are they more of a local only phenomenon?

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Edit: I had a bit of inspiration toward re-creating this setup without workspaces, you can use gitignore! Something like this:

# Don't track anything but the gitignore
*
!.gitignore

# Also track the .config folder and its contents
!.config
!.config/**

# Other folders that need to be tracked
!.some-program-that-doesnt-like-xdg
!.some-program-that-doesnt-like-xdg/**

The first line of the two "config folder" sections un-ignores the folder itself, the second un-ignores the contents of that folder.

This gets me 95% of the way there. I would have a .jj in my home repo instead of the slightly more descriptive .dotfiles (which doesn't actually contain any dotfiles) and I would have to move the README from said folder into the .config (which is probably more logical, just might not play as well with github).

[jennings]

This doesn't directly answer your question, but:

I used to do this with my dotfiles. I was never fully satisfied with this setup but it was good enough.

I tried switching to jj but nothing felt quite right.

I decided to instead use Chezmoi and I'm happier with it than I was before. It's cross-platform and has solutions for handling different config on different machines.

[Aliervo]

I always like learning about new programs, even if I don't end up using them. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!