My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
Skills which I have used to create a terminal app that offers a more pleasant experience for agentic coding. Toad (a play on Textual Code) is a front-end for AI tools such as OpenHands, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many more. All of which run seamlessly under a single terminal UI, thanks to the ACP protocol.
At the time of writing, Toad supports 12 agent CLIs, and I expect many more to come online soon.
Here’s a screenshot:
So what does Toad offer over the CLI apps from big tech?
It has most of the UI interactions users have come to expect from agentic coding, but hopefully more refined. For instance the “@” character to bring in files into the context. Here’s Toad’s implementation:
A snappy fuzzy search which filters patterns from the project’s .gitignore (if there is one).
The prompt editor offers an experience which you might be surprised to find in a terminal. You can navigate and select with the keyboard and mouse, select, cut, copy, paste, etc. The prompt will highlight Markdown as you type (even syntax highlighting code fences before you close them).
Toad has really nice Markdown streaming, based on the techniques I described here. It remains fast with large documents, and renders everything from tables to syntax highlighted code fences.
Many other tools either don’t bother to render the Markdown, or they do a fairly half-hearted job.
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