Toad: A Unified CLI Tool for All Your LLMs That Promises Improved UX From Existing Ones

"The newly publicly released tool aims to provide a unified, "beautiful" GUI for multiple coding agents in your terminal, accessible via the same tool via the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP). McGugan, who dedicated his last couple of years to building frameworks that make terminal applications more usable and appealing to users, believes that applications from companies in the AI space are less appealing because the technology stacks they use lack the appropriate building blocks."

"At the time of writing, it supports 12 agent CLIs and uses the ACP protocol to standardise communication, allowing new tools to be added as they appear. According to McGugan, he focused on making the onboarding as seamless as possible - if you have the native tool for a given LLM agent already set up, it's enough to get started in Toad."

"Toad focuses on UX features that make terminals feel more like graphical coding assistants, including an "@" convention to pull project files into context via fuzzy search that respects .gitignore. The prompt editor supports keyboard and mouse navigation, selection, cut/copy/paste, and live Markdown syntax highlighting, even for code blocks before the closing fence is typed. Image Source: batrachian.ai It also streams Markdown responses efficiently, remaining responsive for large outputs while rendering tables and syntax-highlighted code fences instead of falling back to plain text."

Toad is a terminal application that provides a unified graphical interface for multiple coding agents using the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP). The tool acts as a front end for AI tools such as OpenHands, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and other ACP-enabled agents, consolidating separate CLIs into a single workflow. It supports twelve agent CLIs at launch and standardises communication so new agents can be added easily. Onboarding requires only the native tool for a given LLM agent already set up. UX features include an @ convention for project-aware fuzzy file search that respects .gitignore, a prompt editor with keyboard and mouse navigation, and live Markdown syntax highlighting. Markdown responses stream efficiently, render tables and syntax-highlighted code, and remain responsive for large outputs.

Read at InfoQ