possible isn't the same as supported and working. A non-terminal hunt-and-peck typer sits down and is presented with a terminal, what's the second that happens when they're typing? they make a mistake and try to click on the word they misspelled, and it doesn't work.
That’s a very specific gripe to make. So specific that you have to acknowledge it’s not going to be a deal breaker for everyone. Which makes me wonder why you’d use the “Stockholm Syndrome” argument — assuming you used it in good faith and not just because you wanted to sound edgy (or some approximate synonym of)
> It's a thing that confuses every single person the first time they touch a terminal!
I get that. But it doesn’t mean those that prefer the terminal have Stockholm Syndrome.
The terminal is a UI optimised for keyboard entry. So of course mouse input to move the caret wouldn’t be something that is prioritised to support.
Again, that’s not Stockholm Syndrome; it’s just a different workflow.
> Could do without the diction-based ad hominem.
You’re the one making ad hominem attacks by saying CLI users suffer from “Stockholm Syndrome”. That was your comment not mine.
I said I was willing to take your comment in good faith. Which isn’t a personal attack.
I’m really not interesting in meta arguments nor using intentionally antagonistic language. And if you continue to communicate this way then I will just ignore you.
You're taking the Stockholm syndrome thing way too seriously. I wasn’t trying to imply terminal users are irrational or trapped, I'm just pointing out that some default behaviors are genuinely non-obvious to newcomers and feel rough around the edges at first. That’s more about historical ergonomics than user psychology.
Terminals optimize for keyboard-centric workflows and composability. Once that mental model clicks, a lot of the tradeoffs make sense. But the first-contact confusion is real and pretty universal, which is what I wanted to highlight.
I agree it’s not useful to escalate into meta arguments about tone. Different tools, different workflows, different preferences. The interesting part is how we lower the initial friction without losing the power that keeps people using them decades later.
Which, Ghostty added cl=line support in e06742b36ec9, so we're getting there!
A terminal emulator in a GUI environment such as Linux is expected to play nice with the GUI and support mouse-based select, copy and paste, as well as being a terminal emulator, and this means that the terminal itself is consuming mouse events to support text selection.
If you wanted to write a shell that has mouse support you could certainly do so, and this would be based on sending escape codes to the terminal to tell it to return mouse events as input rather than let the terminal consume them itself. The shell could then itself support the clipboard if it wanted to, as well as support mouse editing.
I just googled it, and apparently "fish shell" does exactly this, but your hypothetical user is more likely to stumble upon a bash shell which is letting the terminal emulator consume the mouse events and support copy and paste.
Readline is one of the oldest libraries available on modern systems.
So old that Charm, the framework featured in this article, is written in a programming language that was decades away from conception back when readline was first released.
Comparing modern TUIs to readline is like comparing an analogue rotary phone to a smartphone.
Readline is also no longer the default experience for your average new user since macOS switched to Zsh many years ago and Microsoft will push Powershell over WSL in the row documentation.
I do get the point you’re trying to make. But it’s a pretty weak argument give the age of your examples.
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.
I 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.
Ah 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
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?
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.
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...
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.
It’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.
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!
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).
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.
Maybe 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.
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?
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.
