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Will McGugan

@willmcgugan.bsky.social
3.1K followers 415 following 256 posts

CEO / Founder of textualize.io Hyperborean Python expert, author, humanist, husband, sometimes wildlife photographer. Carbonara aficionado. He/him.

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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I built a thing... Dinkus Markdown Studio for Mac. Visually author Markdown with a native app. Images, tables, code blocks, and more, are displayed in the editor. Try typewriter mode and paragraph or sentence focus for a distraction-free writing experience. dinkus.textualize.io
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I've added a way of trying Ishmael in the browser. Give it a shot and let me know what you think... ishmael.textualize.io#try
ishmael.textualize.io
Ishmael — a distraction-free novel-writing app for Mac
Ishmael is a distraction-free novel-writing app for Mac — beautiful typography, typewriter and focus modes, chapter management, and export to Word, EPUB, HTML, and Markdown.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Ishmael. Now with 100% more pull quotes! ishmael.textualize.io
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Ishmael. Now with 100% more pull quotes! ishmael.textualize.io
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Coming soon to Ishmael — the ability to customize the caret.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Introducing Ishmael. A distraction free word processor for novelists. Typographic interface, chapter management, EPUB and Shunn manuscript export. Contact me for a free copy if you would like to review Ishmael. #WritingCommunity ishmael.textualize.io
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Ishmael is now live on the app store! I will be giving away some free copies on a first come first serve basis. Send me your email address if you are interested. If I've already promised you a copy, your free copy is assured. ishmael.textualize.io
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
A little work on selections and annotations in Ishmael. I've added rounded corners to selections (will anyone even notice)? Notes have changed from an underline to a background, mimicking a highlighter pen. Finding the "visible but not distracting" sweet spot requires a lot of experimentation.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Working on Ishmael. I tweaked the design of the writing surface controls and statistics panel. Breaking things out into smaller panels and keeping them all the same size looks so much better. Also added two more light themes. More of a dark theme guy, but I I could work with these...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Any writers in my feed? I'm building a novel writing app. Today I've been iterating on the EPUB publishing side. Ishmael (the software) can configure chapter headings with ornate dropped and raised caps. Follow me if this kind of thing interests you!
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Jan Pipek @janpipek.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
While preparing my last two presentations, I probably spent more time fiddling ("ape-coding") with the presentation software then with the slides content. So here it is: github.com/janpipek/cli... - a cross-platform presentation TUI app/lib for your slides. #python #cli #presentation #textual
github.com
GitHub - janpipek/clippt: CLI slideshows in Python and Textual
CLI slideshows in Python and Textual. Contribute to janpipek/clippt development by creating an account on GitHub.
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ibeex.bsky.social @ibeex.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
@willmcgugan.bsky.social github.com/ibeex/mother I started form example and just kept adding. Thx for the inspiration. Maybe give it a try 😁
github.com
GitHub - ibeex/mother: The slow agent for your terminal — an LLM that works with you, one step at a time
The slow agent for your terminal — an LLM that works with you, one step at a time - ibeex/mother
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Christopher Trudeau @trudeau.dev · 24/04/2026
This week @digiglean.bsky.social and I talk about using NumPy to make music, fire-and-forget async code, signals, and more. With content from: @djangoproject.com @kennethreitz.bsky.social @mkennedy.codes @willmcgugan.bsky.social @bbelderbos.bsky.social and others not on the 🦋
buff.ly
Episode #292: Becoming a Better Python Developer Through Learning Rust – The Real Python Podcast
How can learning Rust help make you a better Python Developer? How do techniques required by a compiled language translate to improving your Python code? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this…
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David Brochart @davidbrochart.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
I just released tdiff, a Textual diff viewer based on @willmcgugan.bsky.social's awesome textual-diff-view. github.com/davidbrochar...
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GOTO Conferences @gotocon.com · 13/04/2026
AI coding tools have terrible UIs. @willmcgugan.bsky.social got annoyed and built something better — on sabbatical. "Toad" is a terminal-native AI frontend that actually respects developers. Live demo + honest takes on AI's real strengths and limits. Watch: youtu.be/5iqMTP9Ja5k?...
youtu.be
Toad: Your AI Coding Agent Deserves a Better User Interface • Will McGugan & Olimpiu Pop • GOTO 2026
YouTube video by GOTO Conferences
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Patrik Svensson @patriksvensson.se · 22/02/2026
I've added both Layout capabilities and McGugan boxes (the box drawing technique created by @willmcgugan.bsky.social) to Spectre.Tui. Starting to look pretty good!
McGugan text boxes in the terminal
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Nikos Vaggalis @nikosvg.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Toad-Pythonic Universal Terminal Interface for AI Agents-" Wouldn't it be great to have an interface that could work with any AI agent? #Toad is #Python 's answer to a unified front-end for the many #AI #coding agents out there" cutt.ly/ytxPsRR2 @willmcgugan.bsky.social @pythonhub.dev
cutt.ly
Toad-Pythonic Universal Terminal Interface for AI Agents
Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
A bit of polish to Toad's shell. AI prompts and the shell can be interleaved. It's a remarkably natural workflow. You can even run the Python REPL from within Toad. github.com/batrachianai... Worth a ☆ ? #Python #Toad
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Dengothedev @dengothedev.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Published my keyboard-driven sticky notes TUI. Got tired of heavy apps for simple tasks, so this is just pure Python and Textual. #python #textual #terminal #linux github link: github.com/dengo07/text... @willmcgugan.bsky.social
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Clelia Astra Bertelli @cle-does-things.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
Repo 👉 github.com/AstraBert/w...
github.com
GitHub - AstraBert/workflows-acp: ACP wrapper for LlamaIndex Agent Workflows
ACP wrapper for LlamaIndex Agent Workflows. Contribute to AstraBert/workflows-acp development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Clelia Astra Bertelli @cle-does-things.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
These past few days I've been cooking🍳 Say hello to 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀-𝗮𝗰𝗽, a new python package (and CLI toolkit) to build versatile generalist AI agents🚀 The stack: @llamaindex.bsky.social Agent Workflows, with their unmatched power in building powerful event-driven systems🦙
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
I've added a tree view to pick files in Toad. 🐸 Fuzzy searching is great when you know what you're looking for. But a tree view is more natural when you want to look through your files. Toad is a unified interface for agentic coding, and all things AI, in your terminal. github.com/batrachianai...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
I've added a few settings to Toad 🐸 to customize the UI. You can tweak these settings to create an ultra minimal interface, if that is your thing! I'm going to squeeze this release in before I take an end of year break. 🎄 #Toad #AI #Python youtube.com/shorts/iL7nd...
youtube.com
Make a minimal UI with Toad
YouTube video by Will McGugan
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Alrighty. The Toad is out of the bag. 👜🐸 Install toad to work with a variety of #AI coding agents with one beautiful terminal interface. I've been told I'm very authentic on camera. You just can't fake that kind of awkwardness. #AI #Python #Toad www.youtube.com/shorts/ZLhct...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
I've spent the day writing a blog post and tweaking Toad. 🐸 It is not vaporware! I have pics and it did happen. I'm planning on making the repo public on Thursday. Little nervous TBH. I've been working on this for 6 months. But I have had good feedback. #Python #AI #Toad
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Check out this podcast where I discuss CLIs, TUIs, and I may have mentioned Toad (a Terminal UI for agentic coding)! If all goes well, 🐸 will land on Thursday... www.infoq.com/podcasts/lea... #Python #Toad #AI
infoq.com
Building a More Appealing CLI for Agentic LLMs Based on Learnings from the Textual Framework
Will McGugan, the maker of Textual and Rich frameworks, speaks about the reasoning of developing the two two libraries and the lesson learned. Also, he shares light on Toad, his current project, which...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Vibe coding my heart out today. I think this is pretty nifty. WDYT? www.batrachian.ai
batrachian.ai
Toad - Universal AI Terminal Interface
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
I recorded a video about a new feature I added to Toad... Toad will detect "dangerous" shell commands in bash commands.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Odd little website. What’s this all about? www.batrachian.ai
batrachian.ai
batrachian.ai
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adamghill @adamghill.com · 01/12/2025
0.4.0 of django-new is released. 🚀 Now with interactive mode! ✨ `uvx django-new` steps through prompts to create a Django application. It also shows the tree structure of what was created. Both thanks to `rich` by @willmcgugan.bsky.social. 🛠️ github.com/adamghill/dj... 📦 pypi.org/project/djan...
github.com
GitHub - adamghill/django-new: Create new Django applications with pizazz. 🚀
Create new Django applications with pizazz. 🚀. Contribute to adamghill/django-new development by creating an account on GitHub.
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nilearn.bsky.social @nilearn.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
did you know that Nilearn optional supports the awesome rich library (h/t @willmcgugan.bsky.social) for prettier logging? rich.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 27/09/2025
My BMI is now in the healthy range. This deserves a celebration. Cake for breakfast.
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Daniel Roy Greenfeld @daniel.feldroy.com · 23/09/2025
Coming in Air 0.32, released hopefully tomorrow! To make reading HTML output easier, we will have features for converting dense HTML to pretty printed HTML! All credit goes to github.com/tallerasaf for the PR and @willmcgugan.bsky.social for the rich library its built on.
What browsers see being output from Air, which is HTML with unnecessary whitespace stripped for speed and efficiency.What developers can see if they so choose. Which is HTML formatted for clarity and highlighted for easier reading.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
Put some final touches to Toad's permission request screen. When the agent has an update, it pops this screen up. You can review the diffs in unified or split view, then decide if you want to accept or reject the changes. Watch this space!
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
I have spent the last few days implementing a Diif viewer for Toad. It supports unified and split view diffs, with line-level highlights. Rather pleased with the results! #Python #Textual
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Brett Cannon @snarky.ca · 03/09/2025
If you do decide to vote, please read the candidate details. If you do read the details, do notice how one stands out. If you do notice one standing out, do check out how that person is acting on discuss.python.org right now. If you do all that, then please cast your vote.
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Phil Ewels @ewels.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Last year I gave a talk at #PyCon Sweden about one of my pet-projects: rich-click. The title was "Accidentally popular: Beautiful CLI interfaces with rich-click". I talked about the library, but also the #opensource journey, involving @willmcgugan.bsky.social, @tiangolo.com and Daniel Reeves 😊
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
I posted about Toad, my agentic coding interface for the terminal. Going to make this a regular-ish thing until the app is solid enough to share. willmcgugan.github.io/toad-report-1/
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Brett Cannon @snarky.ca · 26/08/2025
The Python documentary by @cultrepo.bsky.social is going to be debuting live on YouTube on Thursday the 28th at 7pm CET/10am PT! www.youtube.com/@cultrepo I'll share a link the day before to the doc that will have a countdown to the debut. I'm planning to be in the live chat during the debut.
youtube.com
CultRepo (formerly Honeypot)
🧠 Formerly Honeypot, now independently owned and led by the original team behind the viral tech documentaries 📽️ Documentaries and shorts about the human stories of open source and technology 🌟 Our mi...
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Screenshot of Toad, my agentic coding UI.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
I've been working on a new fuzzy search file picker for Toad (my terminal AI interface). It is similar to the other terminal based agentic coding tools, but I want to address a few UX issues, and hopefully make it prettier in the process!
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Python Software Foundation @python.org · 08/08/2025
Please congratulate our newest PSF Fellow Members for Q2, 2025! Their continued contributions to the Python ecosystem are so very important to our community. #python
pyfound.blogspot.com
Announcing Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q2 2025! 🎉
The PSF is pleased to announce its second batch of PSF Fellows for 2025! Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q2! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community:
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Python Bytes @pythonbytes.fm · 06/08/2025
Python Bytes 443: Patching Multiprocessing pythonbytes.fm/episodes/sho... w/ @mkennedy.codes and @brianokken.bsky.social #Python - rumdl - markdown linting in Rust - Coverage 7.10 and subprocess - aioboto3 - Friends don't let friends create unnecessary Python classes - PyPI phishing
pythonbytes.fm
Patching Multiprocessing
News and announcements from the Python community for the week of Aug 4th, 2025
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eastmad @eastmad.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
Not so easy talking about the UI of agentic CLIs running inside a terminal. h/t to @willmcgugan.bsky.social for talking about the issue. thenewstack.io/user-interfa...
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Christopher Trudeau @trudeau.dev · 01/08/2025
On this week's episode, @digiglean.bsky.social and I talk about lots of releases, using coverage to make sure your tests are running, t-strings, and much more. With content from: @willmcgugan.bsky.social @simonwillison.net @hugovk.dev @martinfowler.com @mitsuhiko.at and others.
buff.ly
Episode #259: Design Patterns That Don't Translate to Python – The Real Python Podcast
Do the design patterns learned in other programming languages translate to coding in Python? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and…
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
I blogged about efficient streaming of Markdown in the terminal. This was part of a different post, but it was a bit of a footnote. I think it deserves its own post. willmcgugan.github.io/streaming-ma...
willmcgugan.github.io
Efficient streaming of Markdown in the terminal
While working on Toad, it occurred to me there was a missing feature I would need. Namely streaming markdown. When talking to an LLM via an API, the Markdown doesn’t arrive all at once. Rather you get...
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 23/07/2025
Wrote some notes on Toad, Will's new not-yet-open-source-but-soon terminal coding agent built on Textual He's charging companies $5,000 for early access to the preview before it goes open source, I'd love to see that model work here! simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/23/...
simonwillison.net
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. …
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Tom Slee 🇨🇦 @tomslee.net · 23/07/2025
McCugan really does know terminal use at a ridiculous level of detail and I hope this code (which I am confident will be highly professional) and this business model work for him.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
The Toad is out of the bag! 🛍🐸 Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-t... #Python #AI
willmcgugan.github.io
Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal
I’m a little salty that neither Anthropic nor Google reached out to me before they released their terminal-based AI coding agents.
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Will McGugan @willmcgugan.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
The day before treason day (jk) is a terrible time to announce anything, so consider this a teaser. I've spend the last two afternoons hacking on an experimental terminal UI for a AI coding agent called Toad 🐸 Will be posting more soon. Follow me if you aren't already! #Python #Textual #AI
youtube.com
Toad
YouTube video by Will McGugan
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