ACP Clients & Compatible Coding Agents
A client is the user-facing host. An agent is the coding intelligence. ACP is the JSON-RPC contract in the middle. Listings change fast — verify capabilities on the pair you actually run.
Client
The host you look at
Editor, IDE, terminal, desktop app, web UI, notebook, phone, or chat bridge.
Agent
The coding process
A native ACP binary or a maintained adapter such as claude-agent-acp or codex-acp.
Protocol
The shared contract
initialize, sessions, session/prompt, session/update, permissions, elicitation, and negotiated capabilities.
ACP clients: editors, IDEs, and other surfaces
Support is much broader than a single editor. The official directory also tracks terminal, desktop, web, notebook, mobile, messaging, framework, and connector projects.
- Zed — First-class external agent support
- JetBrains IDEs — Built-in ACP client in AI Assistant
- Visual Studio Code — ACP Client, ACP Pro, Multicoder, Poolside
- Neovim — CodeCompanion, Avante, agentic.nvim, hermes.nvim
- Emacs — agent-shell.el
- Obsidian — Agent Client, Agent Console, Copilot, Harness
- Qt Creator — Official ACP Client plugin
- Sublime Text — ACP plugin
- Visual Studio — Poolside Assistant
- Unity — Editor plugins for in-engine agent sessions
- CLI / TUI — acpx, Toad, Hydra, Martty, Nori, Hash
- Desktop & web — Kepler, Superlite, Capsule, Devin Desktop, Codeg, Panda
- Mobile — Happy, Agmente, Runmote, Shellular, VACP
- Messaging — Telegram, Discord, Slack, WeChat, QQ, Lark, Matrix
- Notebooks — Jupyter kernel, marimo, DuckDB, Alchemy
- Frameworks — LangChain Deep Agents, Koog, Mastra, LlamaIndex, ACP Kit
ACP-compatible agents & adapters
Some agents implement ACP directly. Others wrap an existing CLI. The registry only lists agents that advertise authentication methods during the handshake.
- Claude Agent via the maintained claude-agent-acp adapter (v0.76)
- Codex CLI via the official codex-acp adapter (v1.11)
- Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cursor, and Grok Build
- Goose, OpenCode, Junie, Cline, Qwen Code, Kimi CLI, Factory Droid, Devin, Amp, Auggie
- TypeScript SDK (@agentclientprotocol/sdk) 1.0
- Rust SDK (agent-client-protocol) 1.0, with opt-in draft v2
- Official Python, Java, and Kotlin SDKs
- Advertise capabilities instead of assuming every client has files, terminals, or elicitation
How to check ACP compatibility
A directory listing is a starting point, not a guarantee that every method you need is implemented.
Pick the client surface
Editor, IDE, TUI, desktop app, or chat bridge — capability support differs.
Check how the agent ships
Native binary, npx/uvx adapter, or a bridge that translates another protocol.
Read advertised capabilities
Look for loadSession, session/list, session/resume, session/fork, terminals, and auth.
Stay on stable v1
Use protocolVersion 1 in production. Treat protocolVersion 2 as experimental.
Client & agent FAQ
Quick answers for choosing or building an integration.