Toad. A unified terminal UI for coding agents
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Hi HN,Up to the middle of 2025, I was the CEO/CTO of a startup called Textualize. Somehow I had managed to land seed funding for my Python libraries for fancy terminal output. We wrapped up after three years because the funding ran dry.I honestly thought I was sick of coding at that point. But it turns out I was sick of the stress and working all hours. A few weeks rest was all I needed.It was about that time that coding agents exploded, and I could no longer ignore them. I wasn't impressed with the UI these tools offered. Having worked in the terminal for a few years, I knew you could get a better user experience. And so this project was born.I had planned to create some kind of layer between the agent's SDK and the front-end. Fortunately after I started building this, Zed Industries released Agent Client Protocol (https://agentclientprotocol.com/). Which was precisely what I needed.I've just released the code (It was a private repo for a while). Toad (a play on Textual Code) can run a large number of AI agents, which a nicer terminal UI.Think of it as a "bring your own agent" coding CLI. Use whatever agent you want. I'm not trying to sell you tokens.Ask me anything. I'll be hanging around for a while, if this post takes off.
HN · launched Dec 18, 2025 · 14 upvotes (top 41%) · 0 views
Niche: terminal user interface tools · 86 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 86 launches in terminal user interface tools →
Could you build this?
Partial The terminal UI frontend is feasible with existing TUI frameworks, but managing bi-directional PTY multiplexing, agent process orchestration, and IPC across multiple concurrent coding agents introduces real systems concurrency challenges.
What it would actually take: The project requires a terminal user interface library (such as Textual or Ratatui) communicating over an async event loop (Tokio or AsyncIO) with pseudo-terminal (PTY) abstractions to handle child agent processes. The core difficulty lies in low-level terminal emulation (ANSI escape code parsing, resize signal propagation, raw mode management) and robust agent process life-cycle control. It requires solid systems programming experience in process control and TUI mechanics.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 1215 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #559 of 1216 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 48 days after the earliest competitor.
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal · hn · 2026-07-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Bestie, a coding agent that respects you · hn · 2026-09-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Daemons · hn · 2026-04-21 · 70 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Remy, an AI agent that compiles annotated Markdown into full-stack apps · hn · 2026-04-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- I left VSCode to build an IDE to handle many projects/agents workflow · hn · 2026-07-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Pu.sh · hn · 2026-04-30 · 92 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE · hn · 2026-03-18 · 88 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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