Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.
Hey Will, just wanted to say this looks pretty damn spectacular. No notes. :)
Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#52The 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.
90s? I used that solidly into the mid-2000s! Worked across more than Oracle, if I remember correctly, was the DataGrip of it's time.
2000s? Our EBS consultants still use it
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 networ…
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.
In 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.
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool idea but why python?! Rust please and I’m all ears.
The creator of Toad, made a TUI framework in Python (Textual). What is so special about Rust, aside from it being blazingly fast and compiled, that you want from it?
Safety, performance, avoiding python dependency hell.
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.
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool idea but why python?! Rust please and I’m all ears.
The 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.
Didn’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.
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#56I 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…
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Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In 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.
The 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.
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#58Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 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.
Didn’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.
It is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.
Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
#60Long time `rich` and `textual` user here, just wanted to say thanks :-)