Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#11

Post by willm » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

jswny wrote: post #10

willm wrote: post #4

Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.

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?

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...

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#12

Post by adammarples » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

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.

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#13

Post by willm » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

adammarples wrote: post #12

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 th…

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.

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#14

Post by adammarples » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

willm wrote: post #13

adammarples wrote: post #12

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 th…

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.

I guess I have never heard them! Thanks for the tip

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#15

Post by willm » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

adammarples wrote: post #14

willm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I have never heard them! Thanks for the tip