Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
23 comments
·December 22, 2025mark_undoio
willm
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.
browningstreet
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.
jarbus
This looks really cool. I wonder if they support vi keybinds
_whiteCaps_
I'm really looking forward to trying this out over Christmas break. Textualize is awesome for building Python console apps.
mark_l_watson
Me too. I am on a mobile device but I put the article link on my TODO list.
willm
Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.
Cannabat
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.
lemming
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?
dc_giant
Cool idea but why python?! Rust please and I’m all ears.
jswny
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
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...
bunsenhoneydew
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
Thanks. Hope you like it.
fcarraldo
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.
wey-gu
toad is next level in many ways
adammarples
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
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
I guess I have never heard them! Thanks for the tip
willm
I'm sure you recognise some of these? https://github.com/batrachianai/toad/blob/main/src/toad/app....
dc_giant
Cool idea but I want something this fundamental written in rust not slow laggy python.
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!