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Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

willmcgugan.github.io

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

#71

Post by saberience »

dc_giant wrote: post #55
Hasnep wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Yeah 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).

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

#72

Post by CGamesPlay »

willm wrote: post #69
CGamesPlay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty sure you are a troll 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. > 100x20 characters IIRC > Which is displayed prominently in the footer. > 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. "Agen…

Not saying there isn't room for improvement. This is the first release, and work is ongoing. But I can't predict everyone's assumptions. Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, and in 6 months of testing nobody has made assumptions you just did. For instance, "toad run" takes a path to a directory and not a command (check the usage). You've made an incorrect assumption about how that works, based on previ…

> Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, and in 6 months of testing nobody has made assumptions you just did. > For instance, "toad run" takes a path to a directory and not a command (check the usage). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46370722> ("toad acp COMMAND") and substituted "toad run COMMAND". I saw in the usage that it mentions "PATH" without specifying what it is the path to, and does include a "--agent" flag but with no explanation about what it does. This level of documentation is far from what I would call good, but I'll give it to you that I could have figured that one out. ([append] `toad run` isn't even the right command and as near as I can tell --agent does nothing. But `toad acp` is what I actually wanted and finally I can actually test the app)

> But you've chosen to be combative Merry Christmas, I will continue to watch this project. Maybe I will open a discussion in the Github if I end up successfully able to use it with my newfound understanding of the "acp" subcommand.

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

#73

Post by Hasnep »

saberience wrote: post #71
dc_giant wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah 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).

It doesn't really make sense to compare the performance of Ghostty, a terminal emulator, with Toad, a TUI. Also Ghostty is written in Zig, not Rust.

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

#75

Post by delichon »

saberience wrote: post #70
joshribakoff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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”

Vim 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…

I 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.

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

#76

Post by saberience »

Hasnep wrote: post #73
saberience wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 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).

It doesn't really make sense to compare the performance of Ghostty, a terminal emulator, with Toad, a TUI. Also Ghostty is written in Zig, not Rust.

It's obviously way slower though. Also the point stands, it's written in a low-level, performance-oriented language. The author of Toad could have written it in Rust, Zig, C++, etc, but chose Python instead. He valued ease of development versus performance and the result is we get a laggy terminal.

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

#77

Post by willm »

saberience wrote: post #76
Hasnep wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really make sense to compare the performance of Ghostty, a terminal emulator, with Toad, a TUI. Also Ghostty is written in Zig, not Rust.

It's obviously way slower though. Also the point stands, it's written in a low-level, performance-oriented language. The author of Toad could have written it in Rust, Zig, C++, etc, but chose Python instead. He valued ease of development versus performance and the result is we get a laggy terminal.

I know for a fact that Textual can generate an entire frame in less than a 60th of a second. Any lag you see has nothing to do with the choice of language. A TUI just doesn’t require that much number crunching to use a low level language.

I’d be interesting in knowing what platform and terminal you observed the lag, when testing Toad.

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

#78

Post by dovin »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #49

I 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…

This has been my experience also, so far. I like a lot about this and want to start using it, but beyond the initial awkwardness of key bindings feeling wrong, it just seems a bit too early for me. For example, most of the agents I tried to get working on my Arch system failed to connect, only Claude Code and Vibe worked. Most worked on MacOS (except Codex, even though it's installed on my system). But I need to be able to set the agent into Bypass Permissions mode, and when I do, I'm still constantly prompted with permissions checks. There also seem to be weird errors caused by fish shell. I'd also really like to be able to define my own custom agents (eg one use case I'd like is to be able to launch Claude Code but swapping out the Anthropic endpoint for OpenRouter's so I can try new models using CC's agent harness).

It's possible this is just part of the learning curve, but it is making me think I'll have to come back to this project in a month or two to see if there are fewer pain points. Great work so far though.

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

#80

Post by aja12 »

willm wrote: post #69
CGamesPlay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty sure you are a troll 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. > 100x20 characters IIRC > Which is displayed prominently in the footer. > 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. "Agen…

Not saying there isn't room for improvement. This is the first release, and work is ongoing. But I can't predict everyone's assumptions. Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, and in 6 months of testing nobody has made assumptions you just did. For instance, "toad run" takes a path to a directory and not a command (check the usage). You've made an incorrect assumption about how that works, based on previ…

From someone who has not tried the software but might be interested if it gains traction:

You should decide whether you are building this for yourself or as a product to others. Each stance is perfectly valid but are somewhat not compatible, the software can be very opinionated or intuitive but attempts to be both seem to often fail.

If you are building opinionated software for yourself and are ok with alienating a part of the userbase: great, some great software are built this way! (Alacritty, Kakoune come to mind). This should be clearly communicated to prospecting users though, it may need to convey "this software has strong opinions you may not agree with, that's fine but it may not suit you" somehow.

If you aim for maximum reach: expect your sense of what is "intuitive" to constantly be challenged, and to have to make many difficult compromises. You also need to take feedback from a more forgiving angle, and above all, assume good faith from your users. In this instance, GP stated their enthusiasm for your shared vision of the problem space, and your knee-jerk reaction was calling them a troll.

Builders of opinionated software should pay trolls no heed and refrain from engaging, and builders for maximum reach should think trolls don't exist.

footnote: `toad run` expecting a folder and not a command seems to fall in the "opinionated" ballpark

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