Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual Python libraries, writes about terminal UIs, open source and founding Textualize.
Commenters say he writes great posts and software, and HN links his piece on moving from open source maintainer to startup founder.
I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that now I want a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!
I'm sure you've thought of this, but lots of people get 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to them) use of some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like what Google is offering.
If you wanted to let those access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.
And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no profile settings and bringing your own tools is just a special case of using your own VM image or setup script.
But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever, and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is a pretty good open standard to build on.
Is the chat descended from Sketch?
https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/from-open-source-maintainer-to-founder-ceo/
> Additionally, I would work on a cloud service using both those projects which at some point would become a business.
> Now this was a good plan. The money from GitHub sponsors which I had previously been donating to charity would take the sting out of not having an income for a while. While far from a salary (where I live), at around $1000 a month it would help pay a few bills.
> I have far more confidence in that vision now that I have raised seed funding. Predicated on that cloud service, I have enough funding to hire a few developers to work on it with me. Last month I was an unemployed code monkey, today I am a Founder / CEO of Textualize. Go figure.
Just realized that the post author submitted[0] it hours before I did, but it didn't come up in search because it was dead at the time.
This is sad because Will writes great posts[1] and great software[2], but somehow his submissions mentioning Rich tend to end up dead. Would it be a case of bad project name for HN titles?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147831
[1] https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/
[2] https://github.com/willmcgugan
From https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/textualize-is-hiring/
>At the end of last year I took a year off to work on my Open-source projects and develop an idea that I believe will allow the terminal to eat some of the browser’s lunch. Turns out this idea was compelling enough to attract some sweet sweet VC cash and I am now hiring a third Python developer to join the company.
> He's saying it doesn't have to be the greatest tool for the job, he's saying it's a good intro for would-be programmers and dabblers.
Perhaps. But we should be able to do better. Pygame, for example -- The example I found[1] looks quite nice and easy to use:
[1]http://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/2007/6/4/opengl-sample-code-for-pygame/
The OpenHands CLI has had some major improvements since v1: https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands
MIT license and model agnostic
I’d also keep a close eye on Toad which is launching this month:
https://willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-toad/