Jujutsu and Radicle

Summary

Jujutsu + Radicle = ❤️ How I use Jujutsu in tandem with Radicle Published by fintohaps on 14.08.2025 Roughly a year ago at the first ever Local First Conference, a friend and previous colleague – Alex Good – told me about this tool called jj (Jujutsu). We did the usual thing and I sat down beside him as he explained it to me. My brain did the usual thing and took in some of the information but not enough of it, and so I didn’t touch jj for quite some time after that – but what’s good enough for Alex Good is good enough for me. After that, I feel like I saw a post about jj once every couple of months on Hacker News – confirmation bias anyone? It was a constant talking point during Git Merge 2024, and now it’s a third Git tool that uses the concept of change identifiers, so it’s a talking point on the Git mailing list. So, fast-forward a year or so, and I’ve been using jj for quite some time while contributing to and maintaining the heartwood repository – the home of the Radicle protocol – as well as some others. Did I have to convince my whole team that jj should be used by all of us and we all switch to this new workflow? No. The first piece of “magic” of jj is that it is essentially a version control system that has a transparent layer on top of Git itself. A change in jj will always point to a Git commit. The beauty of its implementation is that the underlying commit can change as much as it wants, while the jj change remains the same. This unlocks a lot of nice flows for managing changes using jj. So, you must be wondering by now, “How do I blend Radicle with jj?” Well, let’s dance between the three worlds of jj, Git, and Radicle, to see how they have melted together to form a beautiful (almost) branch-less workflow. Radicle and Git I won’t spend too much time here, but if you don’t know by now, Radicle works on top of Git to allow people to use this ubiquitous tool, while we benefit from its storage and protocol. When you start a Radicle repository, it’s essenti...