W

Will McGugan

willmcgugan.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007

Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual Python libraries, writes about terminal UIs, open source and founding Textualize.

What HN saysCommenters say he writes great posts and software, and HN links his piece on moving from open source maintainer to startup founder.
44HN people shared it
15linked it in comments
80stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
10 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
  2. 2
    Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
    4 people · 211 points · first shared 2025 · 53 comments on HN
  3. 3
    From Open Source maintainer to Founder / CEO
    4 people · 11 points · first shared 2021 · 3 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Building Rich Terminal Dashboards
    3 people · 533 points · first shared 2021 · 120 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Efficient Streaming of Markdown in the Terminal
    3 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    The Toad Report #1
    3 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Adding Type Hints to the Django ORM
    3 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    CSS in the Terminal with Python and Textual
    2 people · 21 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
  9. 9
    The Ethics of Readme Ads
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
  10. 10
    A Prettier Python REPL with Rich
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
    Textual
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    Making money with Python
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
    Agentic Coding with Toad
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    I'm working on open source full time
    1 people · 406 points · first shared 2021 · 190 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Possibly a new way of drawing boxes in the terminal
    1 people · 258 points · first shared 2022 · 104 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

lumpa · 2021-02-16
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
ori_b · 2012-08-03
> 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-p…
rbren · 2025-12-10
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/
willm · 2025-12-09
Python is more than capable of doing that. It’s not an issue of raw execution speed. https://willmcgugan.github.io/streaming-markdown/
SushiHippie · 2024-04-06
https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/from-open-source-maintainer… > 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.
kingkongjaffa · 2023-10-09
I hope he doesn't mind, but the creator of Rich and Textualize is a good guy, and Scottish: https://www.willmcgugan.com/about/ https://www.textualize.io/ https://github.com/Textualize/rich
Flimm · 2023-08-19
This particular project has raised seed funding. Textual's founder has written a blog post about it here, you may be interested in reading it: https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/from-open-source-maintainer…
bluedino · 2022-11-16
There are attempts at similar things - https://www.willmcgugan.com/tag/textual/
asicsp · 2022-08-03
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.
billowycoat · 2015-11-20
If anyone is interested, I blogged about how to deploy Techblog to Heroku. https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/deploy-moya-tech-blog-with-…
twotwotwo · 2025-12-27
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?

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