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Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
- _whiteCaps_ 9mo agoI'm really looking forward to trying this out over Christmas break. Textualize is awesome for building Python console apps.
- mark_l_watson 9mo agoMe too. I am on a mobile device but I put the article link on my TODO list.
- jarbus 9mo agoThis looks really cool. I wonder if they support vi keybinds
- wasted_intel 9mo agoFirst 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.
- NSPG911 9mo agoNot planned for now I believe, you could try making a new Discussion for it.
- willm 9mo agoHi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.
- bunsenhoneydew 9mo agoSorry, 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 9mo agoThanks. Hope you like it.
- jswny 9mo agoVery 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 9mo agoACP 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 9mo agoCool idea but why python?! Rust please and I’m all ears.
- Hasnep 9mo agoThe author is also the creator of the textual Python library for creating TUIs. The performance benefits of Rust don't seem very useful in a tool where you spend a few seconds typing in a prompt and then 90% of your time is spent waiting. As long as the UI is responsive when typing there wouldn't be much of a difference.
- dc_giant 9mo agoDidn’t know that. Good reason then of course. But I do notice these sort of differences. Codex feels way better than Claude code to me for example. I tried Toad and to me it feels ridiculously slow and laggy. Switching between input and output (ALT+up/down) for example just lags, I can notice the transition. The whole UI lags. It's no wonder, it's python. Simply the wrong language for this, sorry.
- willm 9mo agoIt is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.
- dc_giant 9mo agoMaybe it's something on my setup then. I notice some delay even though it's by no means huge but noticable. For me these things add up, another example is pane resizing in tmux. I like things snappy, but it's kind of an OCD thing I guess.
- saberience 9mo agoYeah it feels slow and laggy to me too and I'm not on an old laptop. Running on a M3 Macbook Pro here. I definitely notice the difference between using something like Ghostty (Rust based - super fast) and Toad (Python).
- lemming 9mo agoToad 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 9mo agoI 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.
- lemming 9mo agoIn my first question, I'm referring to exposing functionality from the ACP client to the agent. Imagine an IDE ACP client which wants to expose language refactoring to the agent, for example - I can't think of a better example for something more like Toad. As far as I know the protocol doesn't expose a way to inject tools into the agent from the ACP client.
- willm 9mo agoThe ACP protocol supports MCP. That would be how the client provides additional functionality for the agent. There's no UI in Toad for that yet, but there will be in a future update.
- Cannabat 9mo agoHi 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 9mo agoThat’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.
- _ache_ 9mo agoI'm using ollama with local LLM for completion (tabby-ml) and Open WebUI for chat. What will be the goto local ACP server working with ollama ? Ideally working with toad to experiment with it.
- evalstate 9mo agofast-agent has ACP support and works well with ollama. Once installed you can just use `toad acp "fast-agent-acp --model generic.<ollama-model>"`.
- willm 9mo agoYou may be confusing Agent Communication Protocol with Agent Client Protocol. Yeah, 2 ACP protocols. I had no hand in the naming. If an agent can be configured to use Ollama, then you could use it from a Toad. It might be possible right now.
- anentropic 9mo agoJust installed it... How are new agents added? Do you have to write a dedicated plugin for each one? Or there's some kind of discovery mechanism? (I was looking for Copilot, but I guess that will depend on https://github.com/github/copilot-cli/issues/222 https://github.com/github/copilot-cli/issues/222 ?)
- NSPG911 9mo agoIt's more like just a simple toml file. https://github.com/batrachianai/toad/tree/main/src%2Ftoad%2Fdata%2Fagents https://github.com/batrachianai/toad/tree/main/src%2Ftoad%2F... gets you the currently supported ACP clients And Copilot isn't supported for now because, well, there is no ACP support
- willm 9mo agoIt’s stored statically in the Codebase. In the future, I suspect there will be enough compatible agents that there might be a web service to search them. I think they are working in the Copilot ACP layer. Doubt it will take long.
- joshka 9mo agoHey Will, just wanted to say this looks pretty damn spectacular. No notes. :)
- willm 9mo agoThanks!
- fcarraldo 9mo agoThis 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 9mo agoI see what you did what that intro and I approve :)
- willm 9mo agoI'm very taken by your response!
- adammarples 9mo agoThis 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 9mo agoGuess 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 9mo agoI guess I have never heard them! Thanks for the tip
- willm 9mo agoI'm sure you recognise some of these? https://github.com/batrachianai/toad/blob/main/src/toad/app.py#L58 https://github.com/batrachianai/toad/blob/main/src/toad/app....
- adammarples 9mo agoAh right so they are your quotes. No not enough that it wasn't quite a shock to spin up a cli tool and the first thing it says is "I didn't murder him" lol
- browningstreet 9mo agoI 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 9mo ago[flagged]
- wey-gu 9mo agotoad is next level in many ways
- mark_undoio 9mo agoVery 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 9mo agoHope 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.
- ra 9mo agoI have written a coding agent which I plan to open up soon. By far the biggest time sink has been in the TUI - I've just implemented ACP and I really hope that I can use toad as a front end.
- willm 9mo agoIt should be as easy as running: toad acp “command”
- reactordev 9mo agoDoes it work with local models? ollama? LM Studio?
- ra 9mo agoyou still need an agent, but yes.
- delichon 9mo agoIt would be a matrushka to run Toad in a Zed terminal.
- willm 9mo agoPretty sure I could run Toad in Toad, but I’m scared to try.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoThe name Toad gave me a flashback to Tool for Oracle Application Development, an IDE and debugger for SQL and pl/sql back in the 1990s.
- taude 9mo ago90s? I used that solidly into the mid-2000s! Worked across more than Oracle, if I remember correctly, was the DataGrip of it's time.
- jefflinwood 9mo agoIt's still around!
- shagie 9mo agoVery much still around... and one of those "this (the terminal tool the HN post is about) might have some trademark challenges" given that every license of TOAD (Tool for Oracle Development) is bundled with some AI and the likelihood of confusion and overlap is quite real. ... and Quest really likes putting that ® after every mention of it.
- pjmlp 9mo agoStill going strong, https://www.quest.com/toad/ https://www.quest.com/toad/
- D13Fd 9mo agoI’m not a big fan of the name Toad, but the Textual framework is fantastic. I’ve been using it for years in a small project and it’s just a wonderful tool - it makes it really easy to get a super fast little UI for scripts.
- shevy-java 9mo agoGet outta my terminal!
- CGamesPlay 9mo agoI strongly resonate with the problem statement, but this implementation was very far off the mark for me. Every interaction feels bad. I fired it up, and the first thing I notice is that the arrow keys don't work. I can't select Claude Code. Oh, apparently it's in a different control, so I have to press Tab, and then the arrow keys work. Wow, this list of buttons has a slow scrolling animation when navigating it. Can I turn that off? Press enter on Claude, now I'm in a tiny modal window. Press enter, because I want to do the obvious thing, but apparently the obvious thing is "show in launcher", so the background of the modal is weirdly changing while a tiny single character inside the button is indicating that this is the part I'm supposed to be focusing on. No, I want to do the obvious thing of running Claude code. You could easily fit the 4 actions of this form on my screen, but by choosing to use a tiny modal window you're now forcing yourself to use another modal drop-down control to choose the action and a separate "yes actually do it" button, so the OBVIOUS ACTION of RUN THIS AGENT requires pressing tab, enter, down, down, down, enter, tab, enter. Great. Now I'm at a chat interface with an error screen, because it isn't installed. Quit the program, restart, enter, tab, enter, down, down, enter, tab, enter to install. It shows a successful run of the "ACP adapter" for claude. Shift-tab, enter, down, enter, tab, enter. Now I'm back at exactly the same error screen because apparently the install didn't work. Now, I know that you need to be running "npx @zed-industries/claude-code-acp", so I check the docs and apparently I can "toad run COMMAND". But it doesn't work for multi-word commands. And my trial with toad comes to an end. So I can't test it for anything actually useful right now, but I'll add this to my list of projects to watch. Hopefully, being a UX-focused project, the creator actually focuses on the UX and fixes some of these silly decisions.
- willm 9mo ago[flagged]
- CGamesPlay 9mo ago> Pretty sure you are a troll < OK, I'll come clean: I knew what Textualize is before I even evaluated toad, and have never to date found a Textualize app that "sparked joy" as it were. But I figured I should try Toad anyways since A) I strongly resonate with the problem statement of Toad and B) surely the creator of the library would create a best-in-class implementation using that library. Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912796 > If you don't like the keyboard control, you could always just use your mouse to click stuff. < You're reading me backwards. I like keyboard control, but feel like Textualize is a mouse-first UI library. Pressing arrow keys when launching Toad does nothing because I'm not in a "control". As a user, I am supposed to intuitively know that "Recommended" and "Coding agents" are "different controls" and so it should be obvious to me that the arrow keys would not navigate between them? > 100x20 characters IIRC < You have 20 lines to work with and you decided to shove 4 of the 5 actions for the form into a modal control within the modal dialog. That's my point. > Which is displayed prominently in the footer. < That's rich. You dedicate 3 lines to the "show in launcher" button and a "Go" button and say the one line at the bottom of the screen is "prominently". Also, that message isn't even on the opening screen of the app, presumably because I have a flawed understanding of what a "control" is. > I don't think you were interested in fixing it, as you would have mentioned an error message. No, the error message was perfectly clear! That's how I knew the solution. "Agent returned a failure code: 127 - /bin/sh: claude-code-acp: command not found" The solution is to run via npx. > It does work for multi-word commands. But if your command contains a space you will need to wrap it in quotes. < You are wrong. $ toad run "npx @zed-industries/claude-code-acp" Not a directory: npx @zed-industries/claude-code-acp > I imagine you don't work in the terminal much? < Please don't blame your users for uncovering bugs that your coding agent put in that you didn't catch in review. Anyways, go take your sabbatical, relax, you need it. I do genuinely want a better CLI interface for my coding agents and what you said elsewhere that the landscape is "like building a browser for a single website" is very true. Hopefully you come back with fresh eyes and can make a compelling offering in this space.
- fatliverfreddy 9mo agoThis looks fantastic! Check out vibecommander - it’s a young tool in this space with a different take that wraps around CLI coding assistants with IDE-style file and git panels that compliment the experience by letting the human do the code review part of the task seamlessly. Will add Toad support ASAP, I’m sure they’ll be great together. https://github.com/AvitalTamir/vibecommander https://github.com/AvitalTamir/vibecommander
- joshribakoff 9mo agoYou could also consider checking out vim, which solved this 50yrs ago ;) in all seriousness, you have terminals, splits, lazygit… so to me, it seems like this is a case of “not invented here”
- saberience 9mo agoVim has a terrible user experience though. There's a reason everyone stopped using it as soon as they possibly could and moved to other text editors. Now the only vim users are the 60 year old+ greybeards who try to convince everyone they're such morons for not using it. Stop trying to convince people to use vim, it sucks, it's got a terrible ux, it's not intuitive, it's overly complicated, hard to learn, arcane, and looks like ass.
- delichon 9mo agoI disagree, but I'm a 60 year old+ greybeard who has managed to get a bunch of other devs addicted to vim. My real goal is to keep the key bindings popular enough that I won't have to reprogram my muscle memory before I shuffle off.
- cdecker 9mo agoLong time `rich` and `textual` user here, just wanted to say thanks :-)
- glitch253 9mo agoCongrats and thank you for making Rich and Textual
- willm 9mo agoDe nada.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- phanimahesh 9mo agoThis was fun: https://willmcgugan.github.io/facts-about-toads/ https://willmcgugan.github.io/facts-about-toads/
- stuaxo 9mo agoI've long been integrating terminals with GUIs and wanting more of this sort of stuff. Reading the article I felt like the "sickos: yes!" meme.