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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Toad. A unified terminal UI for coding agents

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…

Toad is a terminal user interface for interacting with coding agents. It provides developers with a more polished command-line experience for working with AI-powered code assistants. Built by a former startup CEO with… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    A new Emacs mode for AI-assisted coding (Claude Code style), with native Emacs buffers instead of a flickering terminal. Built on top of pi, a no-bs open source Claude Code alternative. It supports Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama. I've been using it daily for weeks. Demo video that says more than $NUMBER words: https://danielnouri.org/media/pi-coding-agent-demo.mp4 The key decision here is that we have two separate windows: chat history is a markdown-mode buffer, with beautiful rendering, unlimted scrollback, selective tool expansion where it matters, etc. The input window…

    May 2026 · pi.dev · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Superset▲541

    Hey HN, we’re Avi, Kiet, and Satya. We’re building Superset, an open-source terminal made for managing a bunch of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc) in parallel. - Superset makes it easy to spin up git worktrees and automatically setup your environment - Agents and terminal tabs are isolated to worktrees, preventing conflicts - Built-in hooks [0] to notify when your coding agents are done/needs attention, - A diff viewer to review the changes and make PRs quickly We’re three engineers who’ve built and maintained large codebases, and kept wanting to work on as many features in…

    Feb 2026 · superset.sh · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    opencode▲393

    Your terminal's AI agent, with any model you want

    2025 · opencode.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    For almost two years, we've been developing Charlie, a coding agent that is autonomous, cloud-based, and focused primarily on TypeScript development. During that time, the explosion in growth and development of LLMs and agents has surpassed even our initially very bullish prognosis. When we started Charlie, we were one of the only teams we knew fully relying on agents to build all of our code. We all know how that has gone — the world has caught up, but working with agents hasn't been all kittens and rainbows, especially for fast moving teams. The one thing we've noticed over the last 3…

    Jun 2026 · charlielabs.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Tabnine▲306

    The private, personalized & protected AI coding assistant

    2024 · tabnine.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Keep coding agents always in sight

    Jun 2026 · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Toad▲10

    The antidote to complexity

    2025 · meettoad.co.uk · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Godmode▲98

    An AGI in your browser

    2023 · godmode.space · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Libretto (https://libretto.sh) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding agents to generate real scripts you can inspect, run, and debug”. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cDpIntmHAM. Docs start at https://libretto.sh/docs/get-started/introduction. We spent a year building and maintaining browser automations for EHR and payer portal…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hey HN, Small OSS project that i created for myself and want to share with the community. It's a declarative, scriptable, terminal-based IDE focussed on agentic engineering. That's a lot of jargon, but essentially its a multi-agent IDE that you start in your terminal. Why is that relevant? Thanks to tmux and SSH, it means that you have a really simple and efficient way to create your own always-on coding setup. Boot into your IDE through ssh, give a prompt to claude and close off your machine. In tmux-ide claude will keep working. The tool is intentionally really lightweight, because I think…

    Mar 2026 · tmux.thijsverreck.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi HN! I've recently been finding productivity in running parallel CLI coding agents(after not believing in them initially). After having to do a ton of git stashing and branch fumbling, I decided I needed to something to more ergonomically run these agents in their own dedicated spaces. I tried a lot of the existing products but they either were too convoluted or flat out didn't work. Some of them also seem to roll their own chat UI which I don't think is the right approach, I wanted to something to lightly wrap my terminal sessions. So I built FleetCode! It uses git worktrees and let's you…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Code▲20

    Hey HN, Today we're launching Code, a community-driven, open-source coding agent for your terminal. It's a fork of OpenAI's codex with a focus on developer ergonomics and local control. Key features: - Browser integration – attach to your Chrome via CDP or use a built-in headless browser. You can browse pages, run the CLI in a browser session, and even take screenshots from the terminal. - Multi-agent commands – /plan, /solve and /code orchestrate multiple models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to propose and implement solutions, with consensus or race options. - Diff viewer – see…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Run Claude Code agents in terminal with a visual editor

    Feb 2026 · spacecake.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    VEXI▲94

    Open-source AI coding agent for your terminal

    Jun 2026 · vexi.pro · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent. First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked. Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only. Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns. It's now ~400 lines. In…

    Apr 2026 · pu.dev · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, I’m Michael, I built AgentGrid with my friend Souren because we were tired of losing our coding sessions and couldn't keep track of what was actually being built across our many projects. Our approach was to use an infinite canvas desktop app for the TUIs we already know and love, mainly claude + codex. We drew inspiration from Figma and Railway. Overtime we added image nodes, notes, terminals, coding editors, source control, etc. I wasn't sure about it at first. It took me a month to give the first version Souren built a real try. What got me was an Apple System Update I've been…

    Jul 2026 · agentgrid.sh · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    This was by far the most common missing feature of the library since my first post, so I'm really happy I managed to figure it out. See the release for some code examples and a detailed changelog, and most importantly, have a great day!

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    tui-use lets agents interact with programs that expect a human at the keyboard — REPLs, debuggers, TUI apps, and anything else bash can't reach. - onesuper/tui-use

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    We were both genuinely impressed by Claude Code after it helped each of us fix nasty CI problems overnight. Doing those fixes manually would have taken days. After that experience, we each found ourselves struggling through Ctrl+Tab through multiple Claude Code windows in our terminals. While we enjoyed having agents working for us in parallel, context switching and cycling through each terminal tab was a real pain. So we thought: Can we design a TUI dashboard that manages a large swarm of agents in one place? Even better, can agents manage agents hierarchically, like how companies work?…

    May 2026 · omar.tech · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    One terminal. Every agent. Total clarity.

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    Toado▲2

    Toado Eats Bugs

    Jun 2026 · toado.dev · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi everyone! Hope you had a great day so far, and maybe its about to get just a little bit better (thanks Winter ;) So I had way to many terminal windows flying about when using Claude, and kept losing track of which terminal / session / project im in right now. So I built a solution for that, presented it to my team, and now we're using our new tool all the time, and developing it to be the most helpful agents organization tool we can think of. Unfortunatelly, Claude Code only for now, will do Codex soon tho. What it does for you: Main features: - Overview of your projects, with…

    Aug 2026 · episko.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I’ve been tinkering with what a “multi-agent IDE” should look like if your day-to-day workflow is mostly in terminal (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.). The more I played with it, the more it collapsed into three fundamentals: * A good TUI: Terminal is the center stage, with other stuff (CodeEdit, Diff, Review) baked on the side. I don’t like piping Agent’s output through some electron wrapper, here you get to run CC/Codex/Droid/Amp/etc directly. * Isolation: agents shouldn’t step on each other’s toes. The simplest primitive I’ve found is Git worktrees. It is not as…

    Jan 2026 · agentastic.dev · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A free AI assistant for developers who live in the terminal.

    Jun 2026 · ghost-cli.eu.cc · its alternatives →

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