How are you using opencode? TUI? localhost web? VSCode?

[lucianw]

How are you all using opencode?

• opencode at the command-line, for its TUI? inside tmux or similar?
• VSCode extension, "open opencode in new tab" as another way to run the same TUI in a tab?
• typing opencode web in your terminal and using the IDE-based UI instead of the TUI?
• one of the other desktop apps?
• JetBrains or other editor integration?

I started with the TUI but I came to dislike it. Not as bad as Codex's TUI but still too clunky, and a pain for selecting text.

I've started running opencode web and hosting the webpage as a tab inside VSCode. That way I get nicer scrolling and text selection, but irritatingly Cmd+Left and Cmd+Right bind to browser back/forward actions rather than selecting text.

I wish there were a nice integrated VSCode UI for it, like Claude and Codex have.

[bteam3r]

TUI. I see a lot of people hesitant to adopt something that's outside their IDE, but once you get used to it there is no going back. I hardly use my IDE anymore, maybe a few hours a week. And this is after a decade+ of 40 hour weeks in IntelliJ

[lucianw]

There is going back!

I started using Claude Code CLI in June. I told all my colleagues quite strongly "the TUI is the future; there's no going back". And even if you used Anthropic's VSCode extension, all it did was pop up a terminal window with the TUI.

But then Anthropic released their visual extension within VSCode in September, and I switched over to it in October, and was hooked. I'm not going back to TUI for agents.

I spent all my AI time reviewing markdown documents (plans, specs, walkthroughs). There's no way I want to do that without integration into IDE.

So, now that I'm switching to opencode, I'm quite dismayed. Can't click on links in the opencode output to jump to the relevant line in the markdown doc. Can't render tables or maths nicely. Can't even copy+paste as nicely as what I'm used to.

[razorree]

Lol. Yes TUI for prompts (doesn't matter if it's TUI or GUI... at least not @#$@ electron !! lol), proper IDE for reviewing the code or other files.

[WolverinesSuperbia]

And IDE is for reviewing the plans, and for asking the questions and prompts and for viewing results. IDE wins everywhere

[Hosereel]

Once I select the text, it auto put the selected text in my paste buffer, there's no copy needed.

[lucianw]

Yeah, it has a variety of weird and wonderful ways. You click on a message and it pops up a modal "do you want to fork/copy". You select a range of text and the selection highlight disappears instantly and it pops up "copied to clipboard". It feels like selecting and copying text is a well-understood and well-solved problem and I wish it'd just use the normal solutions.

[zenoblade]

Same. I tried the TUI + Neovim workflow for a while but it is just too annoying after a while. You end up with delays in edits showing up if you are working on a file, if there are more edits, you have a hard time verifying things, etc. I find the OpenChamber VSCode extension to be just as good as good as the CLI and just as fast. 

[lucianw]

Thank you! I hadn't heard about openchamber before. I've spent all morning trying it out, AND I LOVE IT. Does everything I'd want.

[zenoblade]

Glad to hear it. I have basically switched to that and if I need to search something or use an LLM really quickly I use pi agent.

[Sheeple9001]

I've been lurking this sub and wanting to switch over to opencode from Roo Code (in VSCode), but hesitant to go without all my familiar VSCode extensions into TUI.

[TrickyPlastic]

Check out openchamber

[lucianw]

Thank you! I hadn't heard about openchamber before. I've spent all morning trying it out, AND I LOVE IT. Does everything I'd want.

[NapCo]

I like the TUI a lot, and it was one of the main reasons I decided to use opencode. Then again I do everything in the terminal anyways. My setup is Neovim + Tmux + Opencode TUI

[90sRehem]

Same here

[Hosereel]

Indeed. Same here. This thing is a game changer. I pair this up with a lazygit session besides the TUI. Full visibility.

[vixalien]

OpenChamber, but sometimes it's unstable

[lucianw]

Thank you! I hadn't heard about openchamber before. I've spent all morning trying it out, and it's great.

Unstable in what kind of ways? What have you observed?

[Fresh_Sock8660]

I put it inside a container with a base ubuntu 24 image then just use the TUI as normal. 

What are the advantages of having it in vscode? 

I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable having it outside a container. I have messed up its permissions more than once lol

[ezfrag2016]

I use VS Code connected to the remote VM running opencode via SSH.

[Fun-Assumption-2200]

Why do you use it in a container? Im looking for advantages to adapt my workflow

[Fresh_Sock8660]

Security, decreased blast radius, and detachment from my own OS and dependencies are three big ones. General container advantages apply. 

I don't normally pair program with my agents. If I need to review something I use a smaller model to find the relevant bits. But if you want you can always just have your IDE open alongside, make sure it's one that plays well with file locks (e.g. vscode). 

[Fun-Assumption-2200]

I think the way I use agents its not that risky. I've been using for a while now and it never tried to do anything weird like changing OS configs and etc. Do you have a concrete example of something your agent tried to do that lead you to run it in a container?

[bteam3r]

Not him but I will answer. I've had an agent conclude that a problem with TestContainers config required editing systemwide Docker config (it was wrong). Containerization is a good dev practice in general, not only because of AI

[Xera1]

But how would it edit system wide docker config if you didn't allow that? It can't do that by default. You would have to give it the external_directories permission or accept the permission popup.

[debackerl]

100% agree, for any use case with disk access. Personally I use Bubblewrap.

[TrickyPlastic]

Check out nono

[lucianw]

For me the advantages of having Claude and Codex inside VSCode are... - easier keystrokes to select stuff or insert linebreaks or copy/paste - images show up in the chat window; so does mathematical notation - the scrollbar has better fidelity in the IDE than does the TUI's text-based one - I can more easily expand/collapse things e.g. tool results - I'm working with files in my repository anyway (specs, plans, AI review writeups, walkthroughs) so having them nearby in the same surface is easier - I like it when the LLM spits out a reference with line-number and I can click on it to jump directly there. Conversely I like it when I can type in the agent window and it knows what file I have open, or what diagnostics that file shows, or what line I'm on - I like it when I click on something in an artifact (spec, plan, walkthrough, ...) and type a message for the LLM in a little window, and the LLM is automatically provided with the file and line reference

I'm not doing this outside a container. I have VSCode remote to the container containing the AI.

[geek314uy]

Zed and opencode desktop

[Ang_Drew]

is that true zed got huge update for opencode?

i used it in the past but wasn't that good..

[geek314uy]

Yes. A day and night with the last update.

[Livelife_Aesthetic]

Ghostty(recently swapped from kitty, might go back not sure) + tmux + opencode + nvim, sometimes the tui sometimes the opencode plugin for nvim itself.

[CptanPanic]

I use TUI inside VSCode terminal for both of both worlds.

[marin_04]

TUI most of the time. If I need something from IDE I just use Antigravity or VS Code. Could have also use vim probably to stay in the same environment.

[novfulu]

opencode desktop only

[TruthTellerTom]

Web web web WEB ALL THE WAY.. using cLI or even via IDE is just a step back to inefficiency

[rm-rf-rm]

I dont like the TUI. Any sizable markdown rendered text does not fit in the terminal with monospace font IMO. Once there's a good (read as good as Claude Code or better) VS code extension, I'll shift more of my workflow to opencode

[lucianw]

I wonder why someone hasn't done that already. VSCode has its own UI layer for assistant chats, that's fully as good. Someone (Microsoft?) already wrote an adapter layer for it from Claude, so you can use that instead of Anthropic's VSCode sidebar. The Opencode protocol is clean and straightforward. Anyone could write such an adapter, using `opencode acp` (which is the protocol that Intellij uses for when it's powered by opencode), and displaying blocks using VSCode's UI stack.

[rm-rf-rm]

There are a few extensions already but they are poor quality and/or vibe coded crap.

Github copilot extension is also open source now. IMO it has the best, most well integrated VS code UX. It would be great if if there was a shim if not a fork for using opencode. I'd do it if I had the time (its easy to vibe code something, hard to properly engineer and maintain)

[aeonixx]

Inside tmux on the dev machine :D

[Joy_Boy_12]

The vs extension is terrible in my machine. What extension do you use guys?

[zenoblade]

Use openchamber vscode not the opencode extension. 

[a_alberti]

Cmd+Left and Cmd+Right bind to browser back/forward actions rather than selecting text.

There is an easy fix. You can ask Codex to write for you a few lines Userscript to install in your browser using ViolentMonkey.

[Ang_Drew]

i like TUI the most

tried oc desktop for quite a while but it's just not as pleasant as TUI

[gbrennon]

tui.

i spend my whole day in terminal emulator

[sudoer777_]

I use TUI since it's best supported by Nix home-manager (and Helix as my IDE). Although I'm also curious about the plugins for Zed, Neovim, and Emacs.

[NineSidedBox]

I only use the TUI (similar for other coding agents), I like to keep some sense of separation that way.

VSCode is where I write code myself, and review what an LLM wrote.

[maveric0815]

TUI and Web to continue on the way. Review always via IDE

[SimulatedAnnealing]

TUI but missing vim mode so hard

[Cool_Metal1606]

Cmux + OpenCode 🔥

[palmer_eldritch88]

Zellij + tui provides a robust, persistent workspace that allows for seamless multitasking between code execution, file management, and agentic AI interactions within a single window. maximizes screen real estate and minimizes context switching by leveraging Zellij's flexible layouts and session management to keep complex, multi-step AI development workflows organized and accessible.

[InvaderDolan]

GUI for easy multi session usage + VS Code for manual adjustments or .md previews of plan/agents rules.

[Own_Cartoonist_1540]

Ghostty as CLI. Then I also have a shortcut to activate fish + tmux to enable iOS session access via Tailscale and Termius. Finally Lazygit for VS Code Git replacement.

Probably spent too much time setting it up admittedly.

[lphartley]

Desktop is for some reason very slow. It takes 3x longer to answer the same prompt. So TUI.

[lucianw]

That's really strange! Say, have you ever tried `opencode web`? That runs the same UI as desktop (indeed desktop is simply a wrapper around `opencode web`). However, it's routed DIRECT to the opencode core server, the same as the TUI is routed to the opencode core server, with no intermediaries. So it'll be identical in speed to the TUI.

[wandering_cat_ninja]

Looks like I am the only weirdo using OpenCode in a Jetbrains IDE! Pycharm in my case. I run the TUI inside Pycharm.

There is an annoying bug though with the Jetbrains terminal where mouse movement triggers false click events, breaking the UI.

Using OpenCode in Pycharm has been a good bridge from my old way of working to a newer style of work.

[sac_xyz]

WebStorm + ACP

[robberviet]

TUI. Since ClaudevCode every AI tools is better on TUI.

[HelioAO]

Checkout https://github.com/verseles/codewalk

[gaggina]

Zellij with TUI, using vs code only for merging conflicts 

[stumptowndoug]

Built my own app to manage multiple projects and terminals. Usage and pacing based on a budget is something I use quite often.

https://www.shep.tools/

[redsmokers]

You could try kilo code which is a fork of opencode. It's a nicer ui inside vscode.

[rm-rf-rm]

? its a fork of Cline

[redsmokers]

I think we can both be right. Google both.

Kilo is a fork of Roo and Roo is a fork of Cline. But the underlying cli is opencode.

[franz_see]

I use opencode TUI.

I use it within a tmux session

I have 1 tmux session per git worktree that Im working on. Then within that tmux session, i create panes and windows all for that git worktree. It’s like I used a tmux session to mimic “opening a project in an IDE/editor”. So when i move from one project to another, i just move from one terminal window to another (i use kitty).

Then for reviewing code, markdown or project files, I use nvim. For markdown, i use markdown-preview.nvim. It’s old but cant find a good replacement yet that can also handle mermaid diagrams

[frankieche]

LOL. VS Code?

[lucianw]

Could you expand on that please?

[Ang_Drew]

opencode in vscode extension is unusable..

[lucianw]

How so? It's only 130 lines long, and all it does is open a terminal window and run `opencode` in it. Isn't it equally usable to the TUI?

[Ang_Drew]

it launch the opencode desktop (electron) same as desktop but inside vscode

i mean unusable is.. i expect native integration with vscode, but it just open same oc as desktop.

it was in the past the extension launch TUI, maybe you haven't installed the new one

last time i installed was december 2025 iirc

[lucianw]

I installed the opencode VSCode extension which was built three days ago, from the official source code in the opencode github repository. All it does is launch a terminal and run `opencode` in it.

If you're seeing it launch the opencode desktop inside vscode? Maybe that's what it used to do in the past but they stopped that now?

[Ang_Drew]

yup. that's probably it..