The InfoQ Podcast Building a More Appealing CLI for Agentic LLMs Based on Learnings from the Textual Framework
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Dec 15, 2025 Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual libraries, dives into his journey from early computing on a ZX Spectrum to revolutionizing terminal interfaces. He discusses the motivation behind Rich and Textual, emphasizing the need for interactivity in terminal applications. Highlighting his latest project, Toad, he envisions a more user-friendly command-line experience interacting with agentic LLMs. McGugan also addresses creative design challenges in terminal constraints and how Toad aims to streamline agent interactions, making it accessible for developers.
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From ZX Spectrum To Rich And Textual
- Will McGugan started coding on a ZX Spectrum and built simple games which hooked him into computer science.
- That early tinkering led to a career creating Rich and Textual to improve terminal UX.
Rich Enabled Better Terminal Presentation
- Rich focuses on producing beautifully formatted terminal output like colors, tables, and progress bars.
- That capability opened possibilities for more interactive interfaces which motivated Textual's creation.
Textual Turns Terminals Into GUIs
- Textual builds on Rich by handling input, layout, and interaction to create dynamic terminal GUIs.
- Will argues these are effectively graphical interfaces despite using text characters as primitives.