[Feature Request] Migrate Claude Code to Toad Terminal UI Framework
Status Closed — not planned
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 10 comments · opened Aug 27, 2025 · closed Jan 15, 2026
Feature Request Summary
Replace Claude Code's current terminal interface with Will McGugan's Toad framework to resolve critical UX issues and provide a modern, responsive terminal experience.
Current Problems with Existing UI
Critical Performance Issues
- View races/teleports up and down the buffer uncontrollably, requiring session termination
- Scrolling becomes painfully slow after large sessions or compaction
- UI jumps to buffer start automatically every ~15 seconds during work
- Terminal "jumps" and "skips" with multiple terminals or certain shells (fish)
Text Input/Output Issues
- Multi-line pastes get truncated or freeze the CLI entirely
- Copied text gains unwanted formatting characters
- Bracketed-paste mode corrupts text input
- Text selection copies unwanted line numbers/prefixes
Accessibility Concerns
- Current terminal-first UI favors Vim/Emacs/power-terminal users
- Not friendly to developers using standard terminal environments
Proposed Solution: Toad Integration
Technical Benefits
- Flicker-free updates: Partial region updates as small as single characters eliminate visual disruptions
- Enhanced text interaction: Proper text selection and copying without formatting corruption
- Architectural separation: Front-end (Python/Textual) separated from back-end for better maintainability
- Performance optimization: Smooth scrolling, minimal startup overhead (~100ms)
- Cross-platform compatibility: Works efficiently on low-power devices
User Experience Improvements
- Stable viewport: Eliminates buffer racing and unwanted scrolling
- Reliable paste operations: Proper handling of multi-line content
- Clean text copying: No extra formatting or line number artifacts
- Responsive interface: Consistent performance across different terminal environments
Advanced Features
- Interactive UI elements (contextual menus, inline editing)
- Real-time streaming of markdown responses
- JSON-based communication protocol for extensibility
- Potential for future multi-platform interfaces
Expected Impact
Immediate Benefits
- Elimination of current critical UX bugs
- Improved accessibility for all developer types
- Reliable text input/output operations
Long-term Benefits
- Modern, maintainable codebase architecture
- Foundation for future UI enhancements
- Better cross-platform compatibility
Technical Implementation Details
Toad Framework Advantages
- Built with Textual for advanced terminal UI capabilities
- Separates front-end presentation from back-end processing
- Language-agnostic backend implementations possible
- Minimal resource usage and fast startup times
Key Features to Implement
- Stable Buffer Management: Prevent unwanted scrolling and jumping
- Enhanced Text Operations: Proper multi-line paste, clean copy operations
- Responsive UI: Smooth scrolling and consistent performance
- Cross-Shell Compatibility: Works reliably with fish, zsh, bash, etc.
References
- Toad announcement: https://willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-toad/
- Toad in its end-of-July state https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKsCS54xduo
- Textual framework: https://github.com/Textualize/textual
10 Comments
I can't emphasize how much this would help the UI catch up to a lot of the other CLI coding agents out there. Toad looks like an amazing opportunity to expand Claude Code's use case to an "everything tool" for technical individuals. There would be so many tools you could extend when having just a little bit of UI to go with it.
The engineers at Anthropic _must_ know that for Claude Code to continue to be state of the art its terminal ui (TUI) needs to evolve. Off the top of my head I want:
I have a feeling that this is known and likely being worked on right now. using Textual would probably get you there faster. Let us hope! 🤞
I'll settle for any solution that makes it usable for more than ~20 minutes at a time. It gets slower and slower until some "event" happens (>50 lines paste), at which point the view will just start teleporting up and down like you mention, and never recover.
I don't understand how this is still a bug. "Text" has been a solved problem since the 1970's.
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While this feature request specifically calls out Textual unnecessarily, the principle stands. Ink is likely not the right framework to build out this Tui. The Claude Code terminal UI could be much better than it is. A few months spent doing a rewrite would pay dividends almost immediately, in my opinion. Toad, Opencode, Crush, Gemini-CLI and others are leading the charge in terms of UI, even if Claude has many more features.
Still hitting the paste freeze issue. Here's a specific reproduction case that narrows down the cause:
Repro:
Ctrl+Gto open nvimKey finding: The same paste into nvim launched directly (outside Claude Code) works instantly. No freeze at all.
This pretty much confirms the issue is in Claude Code's PTY/stdin forwarding layer when subprocess editors are active, not in the terminal or editor.
Environment:
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