Haxy is a new git forge in preview at try.haxy.net: MIT licensed, written in Zig, and running as a single binary. It is built around two ideas unlike the usual forge. First, issues, discussions, and patches are stored in the repository itself, so they travel with it. Second, the forge is a terminal application, served over SSH. Both work on the live preview today.
Metadata lives in the repo
The landing page puts the design plainly: “Haxy stores your issues, discussions, and other metadata in your repo.” Issues and patches sit on a special haxy/events branch, “which means you can push them to other Haxy instances and even view them offline.” The mechanism, per the README, is event sourcing: every metadata change becomes a commit on that branch, one event per commit, “stored as JSON in the commit message itself,” and the server consumes the events into its database. The payoff the project lists: replicate a project to a different instance, or run the Haxy binary locally to browse a repo’s issues and metadata offline, edit them, and push later “just like you do with code.”
The TUI is the interface
ssh try.haxy.net drops you into the forge from any terminal, and your public key is added to your account automatically, so git operations over SSH work immediately. Haxy’s bet is that this is the UI, not a companion to a web UI: to avoid two codebases, “the web UI will simply render the TUI in your browser”; the README says it will be done accessibly for screen readers and mobile devices. Parts of the README are written as intent; the live instance already serves the terminal view it describes.
Federated, not peer-to-peer
Haxy names its comparison directly: “The main difference between Haxy and Radicle is that Haxy is not peer-to-peer.” Peer-to-peer adds complexity and makes a consistently good experience hard, the README argues. Haxy calls itself federated instead: “anyone can run a Haxy instance, and your projects can be easily moved between them.” On self-hosting, the pitch is one binary with no external dependencies, a server that does not even need git installed.
The preview fine print
Two caveats come with it. The landing page’s own warning is that the instance is temporary and “all data will be deleted before the production release.” And there is nothing to install yet: the release list is empty, so Haxy is built from source with Zig 0.17.0 (zig build; the binary also runs in local mode inside any git repo, and serve runs the forge). Development still happens on GitHub for now, and the project hosts its own example: Haxy on Haxy, plus a larger Zig mirror (a preview example, not an endorsement).
My read
The metadata-in-the-repo design is the one to watch: it turns backup, migration, and moving between hosts into a git push. The SSH-first interface is a real bet, not a gimmick, and federated-not-peer-to-peer is coherent. It is early: preview data is temporary by design, there is nothing to install but source, and parts of the README are still promises. Worth a throwaway project before the wipe.
Source: the Haxy preview site and the project README.