Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal. Will McGugan is building his own take on a terminal coding assistant, in the style of Claude Code and Gemini CLI, using his Textual Python library as the display layer.
Will makes some confident claims about this being a better approach than the Node UI libraries used in those other tools:
Both Anthropic and Google’s apps flicker due to the way they perform visual updates. These apps update the terminal by removing the previous lines and writing new output (even if only a single line needs to change). This is a surprisingly expensive operation in terminals, and has a high likelihood you will see a partial frame—which will be perceived as flicker. [...]
Toad doesn’t suffer from these issues. There is no flicker, as it can update partial regions of the output as small as a single character. You can also scroll back up and interact with anything that was previously written, including copying un-garbled output — even if it is cropped.
Using Node.js for terminal apps means that users with npx can run them easily without worrying too much about installation - Will points out that uvx has closed the developer experience there for tools written in Python.
Toad will be open source eventually, but is currently in a private preview that's open to companies who sponsor Will's work for $5,000:
[...] you can gain access to Toad by sponsoring me on GitHub sponsors. I anticipate Toad being used by various commercial organizations where $5K a month wouldn't be a big ask. So consider this a buy-in to influence the project for communal benefit at this early stage.
With a bit of luck, this sabbatical needn't eat in to my retirement fund too much. If it goes well, it may even become my full-time gig.
I really hope this works! It would be great to see this kind of model proven as a new way to financially support experimental open source projects of this nature.
I wrote about Textual's streaming markdown implementation the other day, and this post goes into a whole lot more detail about optimizations Will has discovered for making that work better.
The key optimization is to only re-render the last displayed block of the Markdown document, which might be a paragraph or a heading or a table or list, avoiding having to re-render the entire thing any time a token is added to it... with one important catch:
It turns out that the very last block can change its type when you add new content. Consider a table where the first tokens add the headers to the table. The parser considers that text to be a simple paragraph block up until the entire row has arrived, and then all-of-a-sudden the paragraph becomes a table.