[HN Gopher] Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
___________________________________________________________________
Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
Author : nikolatt
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-12-22 15:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (willmcgugan.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (willmcgugan.github.io)
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I'm really looking forward to trying this out over Christmas
| break. Textualize is awesome for building Python console apps.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Me too. I am on a mobile device but I put the article link on
| my TODO list.
| jarbus wrote:
| This looks really cool. I wonder if they support vi keybinds
| wasted_intel wrote:
| First thing I thought of, too. If not, I hope it's planned. I'm
| all in on TUI tools, and vi keybinds are a necessary part of
| that for me.
| willm wrote:
| Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.
| bunsenhoneydew wrote:
| Sorry, not a question, just wanted to say congrats on putting
| this together. I am so the target market for a nice terminal
| interface. I can't wait to try this out!
| willm wrote:
| Thanks. Hope you like it.
| jswny wrote:
| Very interesting project! I have 2 questions:
|
| 1. How has it been working with ACP? Is it anywhere near
| feature parity with Claude code's native interface?
|
| 2. I see your repo is written in Python which is interesting to
| me for a responsive TUI. Is it snappy and performant and if so
| what gave you done to make it feel native? And why did you
| choose Python?
| willm wrote:
| ACP is will designed. It will always be a few features behind
| the native CLIs as the protocol catches up. But there is very
| little that you can't do with ACP. A lot can be done with
| slash commands that are passed through to the agent verbatim.
|
| Python is more than capable of running a TUI. It is just text
| manipulation after all. Toad uses Textual, which is currently
| the best TUI library around. I may be biased saying that as I
| built it...
| dc_giant wrote:
| Cool idea but why python?! Rust please and I'm all ears.
| lemming wrote:
| Toad looks really nice, I will definitely try it out. I have
| some ACP questions if you don't mind.
|
| First, from my reading of the ACP doc, one thing that seems
| pretty janky is if the ACP client wants to expose a tool to the
| agent, e.g. if Toad wanted to add the ability for the agent to
| display pretty diffs. In the doc they recommend stdio to the
| ACP server, then stdio to an MCP server, and then some out of
| band network request back to the ACP client. Have you thought
| about this, or found a better solution working on Toad?
|
| Similarly, it would be useful to be able to expose a tool which
| runs a subagent using ACP using a different agent, e.g. if I'm
| using Claude for coding but I'd like to invoke codex for code
| review. Have you thought about doing anything like this? Is it
| feasible over the protocol?
| willm wrote:
| I don't follow your first question. Toad already displays
| pretty diffs. MCP works in the same way as the native CLI.
|
| One of the advantages of Toad is that it is vendor agnostic.
| In the future Toad will be able to run sub agents, and
| allocate any agent to any job. Still to figure out the UX for
| that.
| Cannabat wrote:
| Hi Will,
|
| I was about to try opencode after using claude code for quite a
| while.
|
| I think understand the fundamental difference in how they work
| (acp against existing agentic loops with toad vs a single
| agentic loop for all models with opencode) but I'm curious why
| we might want toad over something like opencode, which lets me
| use any model under the sun.
|
| I suppose toad gets to use the highly specialized agentic loops
| for each cli. And has a nicer (? opencode is pretty slick from
| my brief usage...).
|
| Curious to hear about why you chose to built this way and what
| advantages you see.
| willm wrote:
| That's pretty much it. You can bring your own agent.
| Including OpenCode by the way. I doubt they will mind as they
| still get paid for the tokens.
|
| You get a nice UI that is only going to get better as time
| goes on.
|
| It's far better model to separate the agent from the UI. The
| current situation is like building a browser for a single
| website.
| fcarraldo wrote:
| This looks great! Looking forward to trying it out. I recently
| tried moving to OpenCode but it didn't quite scratch the itch UX
| wise.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| I see what you did what that intro and I approve :)
| willm wrote:
| I'm very taken by your response!
| adammarples wrote:
| This is absolutely awesome but the little jokey captions that
| Claude did (Discombobulating... Laminating...) all that stuff,
| they were a little annoying but cute enough, but whatever is
| running this one (I did not murder him... I thought I was
| special....) they are genuinely offputtingly bad. This great app
| doesn't need clunky humour front and centre, I'm not sure if it's
| Claude or toad but it seems markedly worse than Claude used to
| be.
| willm wrote:
| Guess you don't like sci-fi movie quotes. You can change that
| to a simple pulse animation in the settings.
|
| It literally is using Claude under the hood. Should be no
| different than Claude's own CLI.
| adammarples wrote:
| I guess I have never heard them! Thanks for the tip
| willm wrote:
| I'm sure you recognise some of these? https://github.com/ba
| trachianai/toad/blob/main/src/toad/app....
| browningstreet wrote:
| I already used Toad to run a conversion task I've been
| procastinating on.
|
| It worked perfectly and looked splendid doing so.
|
| Excited to dig in further.
| dc_giant wrote:
| Cool idea but I want something this fundamental written in rust
| not slow laggy python.
| wey-gu wrote:
| toad is next level in many ways
| mark_undoio wrote:
| Very excited to see this come out - though coding agents are
| impressive their UIs are a bit of a mixed bag.
|
| Textual offers incredibly impressive terminal experiences so I'm
| very much looking forward to this.
|
| I wonder how much agentic magic it'll be able to include though -
| Claude Code often seems like a lot of its intelligence comes from
| the scaffolding, not just the LLM. I'm excited to see!
| willm wrote:
| Hope you like it. It is still Claude Code doing the work. Toad
| talks to the agent, and is the agent that works with the LLM.
| So the results should be identical to the native CLI.
| delichon wrote:
| It would be a matrushka to run Toad in a Zed terminal.
| willm wrote:
| Pretty sure I could run Toad in Toad, but I'm scared to try.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-23 23:00 UTC)