Dark pattern #1: Allowing the user to download the app and only then requiring the user to login/signup. This is because you know very well almost nobody will bother to try your terminal if you make it clear you require a login up front. But if they've gone to the trouble of downloading it, dragging it to Applications and running it, then maybe they'll go all the way.
Dark pattern #2: On sign-up, you "agree to our terms of service" but then you have the gall to say, on unsubscribe: "you are currently subscribed to our opt-in messaging. Do you want to remove yourself from opt-in messaging?"
Agreeing to a 17 page terms of service document might be technically "opting in" to messaging (spam), but it sure isn't in spirit. Opting in is when you click on a, previously unchecked, check box that has "I'd like to receive marketing from you".
I'm sure there's plenty more but I uninstalled it already.
If you're on Apple iTerm solves most of the problems outlined in this blog post. Option+click moves cursor wherever you want, cmd+click on any url or path to open it. Plus tabs, panes, and a bunch of other neat stuff. Free, open source, no login required, but it'd be cool if you donated to them.
I've heard of warp but knew nothing about it. I thought you were responding to the post, so I was honestly stunned to realize this comment is about warp itself. That's when I noticed the "pricing" link at the top, and... they want companies to pay per month for a terminal emulator..? They must, because they don't put any actual pricing on that page. That, to me, means rent-seeking. For a terminal emulator.
Agree. When I stared reading the article I was exited at first. I generally agree that terminals have a lot of legacy issues from the past and could definitely use some innovation. But I don’t see the point why a terminal should require internet-connection at all. There is absolutely no reason any of the features Warp mentions, couldn’t be implemented in a way to work completely offline.
Good luck, but I don’t think any people using terminals as their daily drivers will ever use a product like this.
As much as I'd like to encourage the rethinking of input methods, any terminal with a "Pricing" page is an instant nope from me. My current terminal is Open Source and while it's not perfect, it's also Free. That matters more to me than mouse input or IDE autosuggestions. If you're going to treat Linux users as a second-class citizen and charge for corporate usage, who are you hoping your target audience will be? Frankly, I don't ever see this replacing iTerm 2 for most Mac developers.
I wish you luck, but your product in it's current state is confusing to me. fish solves most of these issues for me and it runs on all my devices, free. All I'll say is that your competition is stiff.
The app is 100% free for any and all individuals. The business plan is to create collaborative and cloud-based features that businesses will be willing to pay for. Please check out our pricing page to learn more.
Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data.
This terminal could be good for people learning a new commandline tool. Can fish shell show inline the documentation for the command flags during completion?
Tools with better DX (developer experience) are a market that's been tapped into heavily in the past few years, personally I'm not surprised there's a pricing page. Would I pay for something like this? Probably never; I don't feel like I need to optimize my terminal workflow even if I have to reach for the manpage of a command from time to time.
I like the idea of Warp, but I just can't get past the whole "login required to use a terminal" thing. If you force a login to use your closed-source app, beta or not, I'm sorry, but I can't take any commitment to privacy you make seriously whatsoever. No matter how well-intentioned you may be. That well's been poisoned beyond redemption by far worse people than you and there's just no going back.
Now if that login required barrier was removed, I'd at least be willing to give it a try. May not switch, but I'd be willing to give it a chance. But as it stands? Hard pass.
... and they should already know all that, and there is really no believable excuse for not knowing all that already, and I don't for a second believe they don't.
So, really there is not even any doubt to give any benefit of the doubt like "even if you're well intentioned". Passed that already.
Guys, it doesn't matter if you can edit terminal input in vim. If there's a way to do it in an even more ergonomic / user-friendly way, that's not intrinsically a bad thing. This entire comment thread makes us sound like tech-grognards.
Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.
It isn’t a bad thing that somebody is trying to find an alternative to the standard terminal. Good luck to them!
But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems.
If warp didn’t want it to matter, they could have not brought it up I guess.
The problem with the whole article revolves around this paragraph:
> In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way.
They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.
Yes, regardless of the motivation/the author pimping his product, fundamentally he's right about the maddening nature of command input. It's terrible.
Tab completion is a half-designed solution, and not exactly portable across shells.
Terminals need to stop pretending they are dumb 8" CRTs from the 1970s. Virtually all interactive terminal input is through GUI applications at some point, and if it's not, it's not by choice.
And performing stdin input in scripts for programs that need it? Don't get me started, and don't say "expect" with a straight face. The fact that scripting languages have no provisions after 40-50 years is nuts.
They fail to understand that this isn't a problem of the terminal at all... The terminals only job is to display output and to pass through input.
They could write an "interactive shell" with mouse support that implements all those features and it would run in any pre existing terminal.
They could even make this work with existing shells and it would work over ssh ect.
Nothing against innovation but this is the wrong approach imo.
I also disagree with this article's approach, but it seems pretty disingenuous to say that they don't understand terminal input because they didn't mention readline. After all, this is a blog post on the site for a terminal implementation. They'd have to be unbelievably ignorant to not be aware of the role of readline here.
They're not writing a technical deep dive, they're presenting their vision for a different approach. I think that vision is flawed but I'm not going to grade them on how deep they get into implementation details.
> This post is about why terminal-based input seems stuck in the 80s
It's actually more 60s/70s, when the first terminals, command-line prompts, and shells were built. The reason why it's stuck there is technology has only improved iteratively rather than revolutionarily. The "lets add another layer of abstraction" form of innovation, rather than outside-the-box thinking and reinvention.
The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me. It's not that far removed from punch cards.
> The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me. It's not that far removed from punch cards.
Well, it wasn't hard to beat punch cards in terms of convenience (BTW did you use them once?), but apparently it's very difficult to beat text editors because they've survived for 50+ years despite the fact the mouse was available in the 80s and that people have been saying that sort of thing once in a while for at least 3 decades.
> The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me.
Agreed. This makes some changes that could be simple unnecessarily hard. Formatting shouldn't even be a thing. FWIW though, having an auto-formatter on save has solved a big chunk of that pain for me.
A lot to be said about this - setting aside the privacy/login/pricing stuff, I think the problems and solutions here are vastly overstated.
Yeah, terminal input is odd at times. Doubly so if your main prior experience is entering text into HTML textareas. There's a learning curve, but there's a benefit to tackling that curve. For one, you get readline editing, which is _far_ more powerful than the textarea comparison, and it's customizable. For another, if you need to use your editor to manage a larger command, you have that exact option (see Ctrl-X Ctrl-E in bash/readline). That editor can be vim, or it could be your pimped out VSCode with Copilot. Bash doesn't care.
When you think about it, that's a good 70% of the article's complaints resolved. Trouble navigating through lines of command input? Learn your readline keybindings, or just pop it open in your editor of choice, which also grants you syntax highlighting and whatever else.
The other 30% of what article proposes are pretty decent ideas. Why _isn't_ there a way to hover over a command and see a snippet from its manual page, or to hover over a command-line flag or option, and see the data from the manual page? We have bash-completion which can provide us command-specific completion, what about docs? Many new features can be added to the current architecture. For example, OSC 52 allows terminal apps to send data to the clipboard so long as the terminal emulator supports it. I don't see why similar extensions couldn't enable applications to annotate text with documentation, etc. But that doesn't require the terminal to take over all the line editing: it's just incremental improvement to the current system.
And that's where I think this article and approach are wrong. Maybe it works with the user's shell, but what about Python? GDB? Or the myriad other command line tools I use on a daily basis? As it is now, my terminal is responsible for being the best "terminal emulator" possible. It handles input, draws to my screen, and does it fast. It doesn't need to concern itself with supporting GDB: it is a terminal, and that's that. I'd rather not see these layers get smooshed. Let's focus on improving the current system so that GDB, readline, and the other pieces of the puzzle can incrementally improve the situation.
Seventy-five to one hundred percent of the author's complaints are addressed by the `fc` command and I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet. Fc opens $EDITOR and upon exiting executes the saved contents. It's great for editing a complex command, but perhaps a tad obscure.
If using iTerm2, you can also press Shift+Cmd+. and it will open a small window/prompt where you can type your command while still interacting with the terminal.
Although I don't like terminals, I think the article overstates the problems to significant degree. The fact that text editors running in terminal still manage to have "ide-like" experience (including mouse input!) proves that you can do a lot with terminals. I still think that trying to move beyond terminals is good idea, but it's important to distinguish what is impossible, and what is just ugly/hacky to do.
Aloke from the Warp team here--you're totally right that some of these features (syntax highlighting) can be accomplished within the terminal using an editor. In a traditional terminal--you'd have to spend time configuring your shell to get this to work instead of getting these features by default.
Some of these features are near-impossible given the current terminal-shell abstraction, however. For example, a traditional terminal has no concept of command input/output, which means that it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command.
The developers seem to be proud that their shell is “Rust-based”, they write it several times on the main page. But why would I care what a closed-source application is made with? Sorry if it’s blunt, but I just don’t get it.
I think it's signaling that it's probably modern, fast, and that the authors care about correctness. I think the customer has to have bought-in to the Rust hype for that to work, but since it's a developer tool, I can see how it might attract some.
whats hilarious, is on their discord, they want this upvoted. I dont think they realize this is bad marketing for this article to be upvoted.
" We're launching our new and improved input editor. We just posted our article on the history of the terminal input, and how we could innovate on it.. We would appreciate if you could show the post some love. "Why is the terminal input so weird?” (navigate to HN and go to the “new” page and vote / leave a comment - we aren’t linking to it here because that can trigger HN’s moderation filters)"
"nobody is using this warp terminal as long as it's closed-source"
Lots of developers use Terminal.app, so that clearly isn't a real problem. There's no obvious reason why developers would be willing to buy a closed source IDE, operating system or cloud services but not a terminal emulator. I think people are reacting more to the login requirement than anything else.
I can edit the terminal input line with full vim-mode in my shell (zsh). In fact, in normal mode I can even hit 'v' and edit the line in a full vim session to zip around however I want, do completions, etc. It's pretty close to the platonic ideal method of input I could imagine.
$27 million in A round funding for a terminal emulator, folks. And it's written in Rust! For Macs only! All it needs is to detect and respond to the state of your gut bacteria and it'd be truly peak Hackernews.
Good thing they got that funding a few months ago instead of now, when there's far less VC money sloshing around and the Juicero of the command line looks like a far less enticing proposition.
A lot of those complaints are non issues with the default terminal in MacOS.
Option + mouse click moves the cursor to where ever, control+a|e move to the beginning or end of the line, option+arrow jumps words, and the arrows navigate up and down lines just fine... What am I missing?
Emacs's term-mode already solves all of these supposed problems.
I say supposed because they're really not all that big of a deal. OK, bash making it difficult to go backwards to previous lines is... annoying, at least until you press C-x C-e and do what you want anyway.
The use of a mouse for something text-centered is pretty much foreign to me, too.
And of course for anyone who doesn't like term there's always shell and eshell. And if neither of those will suffice vterm is readily available from MELPA.
Let me mention MPW - The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop for classic MacOS. The shell was a text editor, just like the text editor for editing code. When you hit enter (or command-return) it evaluated the current line or selection. Command results were included in the document. (This was strictly a dumb terminal so there were no vt100 escape codes or such to mess up the display)
If you were confused about the command arguments you could run commando (or use … as an argument) to bring up a GUI to select the flags.
The Eddie text editor for BeOS and now MacOS X/XI/XII/XIII has a similar text-editor/shell hybrid.
I bit and was curious to try Warp. Downloaded it and it immediately made a request to a Google domain and then forced a sign-up window on me. I clicked their "why do we require an account" FAQ and the answer is "we think there are features that are better with a login."
Absolute no from me, even if their terminal truly is better and innovative.
Warp currently requires a login to enable cloud-based features, like A.I. Command Search and Block Sharing, along with team features on the roadmap.
In case there was any confusion, Warp never sends the contents of terminal commands and outputs to our servers (unless a user explicitly chooses to use the "Block Sharing" feature).
Wow. The intent and the idea is so cool. But it's so clearly been touched by VC funding, it almost makes me wonder if this is a (really expensive) gag.
Requires an account? Check.
Crashes IMMEDIATELY upon opening? Check.
Doesn't support any tool I use (e.g. FZF, key-bindings, etc)? Check.
Spammy "iS tHe tErMiNaL oN lIfE sUpPoRt?" blog post? Check.
Do they even know their target market is mildly allergic to all of the above? Yikes.
What I don’t like is the non-ergonomic way that text scrolls. If three lines appear then the cursor is moved down three lines. I’m always craning my neck to try and find where the input cursor is just to reset it constantly to the “top” of the screen. I’d love it if I could just “glue” it to the bottom or top so output doesn’t change its location constantly.
I have one question about terminal input that I cannot work out how to work out.
The setup: I'm on a Mac, I use iTerm for my terminal, Fish for my shell, and most often I'm inside a docker container also running Fish and using iPython.
The question: When I Ctrl+W to delete a word in a Fish prompt, what counts as a word is different to what counts as a word in iPython. For instance, Ctrl+w at the end of this string `test.func('param1', 'param2')` produces...
Fish: test.func('param1', 'param2'
iPython: test.func('param1',
Hit Ctrl+w again, and you get...
Fish: test.func('param1', '
iPython: all gone.
This causes me to over delete in iPython many, many times per day. I'm guessing that the rough flow of the delete word signal is iTerm -> Fish -> iPython and that iPython is the thing that's being overzealous?
> I'm guessing that the rough flow of the delete word signal is iTerm -> Fish -> iPython and that iPython is the thing that's being overzealous?
Almost correct. Once you launch iPython, Fish is out of the picture until you quit iPython. However yes iPython does handle Ctrl-W differently from your shell
That bothered me too, the default function for Ctrl-W in ipython is unix-word-rubout from python-prompt-toolkit [1], which uses spaces for word boundaries. You can rebind it to backward-kill-word so it uses "not a letter nor a digit" as a word boundary.
At the simplest level, this reminds me of input in C64 BASIC. You could hit RETURN anywhere on on any line and that line would get parsed as if you'd just types it in. You could cursor around, edit previously-entered lines, and so on. It was pretty neat.
Thank you for your kind words! We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client. We want to make sure we get this right, both for our users and for Warp.
Our current best-guess on how we'd do this is a more restrictive license that
* allows for verifying security and privacy
* allows individuals to build and tweak Warp
* prevents another company from starting a commercial enterprise off of it
A lot of the complaints here can be solved by knowing that C-x e will drop you from bash into emacs to edit your current line, which then gives you any bells and whistles you’ve configured in emacs. Bonus is that this is generally available and doesn’t require a newfangled set of tools.
As a casual terminal user, I have found Warp to be a nice improvement over standard terminals. Although most of the issues raised in this article can be addressed with various shortcuts, it is nice to not have to remember these when I only pull up the terminal a couple times a week.
Didnt read their article. I have used warp to try it out like an idiot and realized that many of the things people have mentioned here were just things I did not know. Such as ALT + CLICK to bring my carot where I need it and CTRL+X and CTRL+E to use vim to edit more advanced stuff. I always use CTRL+A and CTRL+E on any shell to jump to front or back but I think I have enough information from this hackernews thread to uninstall warp.
Founder of Fig here. For context, Fig integrates with your existing terminal and shell.
A few things we've found:
1. Developers are understandably opinionated about their terminal/shell setup. It's a matter of personal productivity.
2. We have noticed a general trend of more terminal use happening in IDE, not a standalone terminal.
3. Most terminal "collaboration" happens asynchronously not synchronously (e.g. shared scripts, CLIs, secrets etc as opposed to live terminal sharing)
4. Most of the collaboration happens at the shell level not the terminal level
Given the above, we made the conscious conscious decision not to build our own terminal.
TO better understand the architecture, how will this work if I want to use the shell in vi mode? IIUC that would not be possible with their setup, right? Warp would need to implement a vi mode, correct?
You can launch vim within Warp without any problems, but vi/vim mode for the line editor itself isn't supported in Warp just yet. You're correct that this is because we'd need to implement VI mode ourselves (tracking issue here [1] if you are interested).
This is the tradeoff of building our own editor instead of using the shell's--we can build features that wouldn't be possible in the shell directly but it requires us to build features that already exist in the shell from scratch. So far, this tradeoff has been well-worth it to build what we think is a better experience when using the terminal.
I have been using Warp for the past couple of days and the autosuggestions when I'm working over SSH are pretty nifty, it probably saves me a fair amount of time everyday.
Making a login required is absolutely unnecessary, though.
A lot of macOS users are suckers for any sort of themed-up applications that can be replicated in their normal setups without any extra software, had they just bothered to RTFM.
If you're using Warp it's likely you're not taking your privacy seriously anyways. It only supports MacOS, which has telemetry like OCSP that is impossible to disable.
Bro please stop shilling your stupid terminal replacement. Nobody here wants this. Almost everybody here believes you need to get comfortable working in the STANDARD TERMINAL
In zsh (vi mode) I simply press shift-v and I am dropped into my $EDITOR with my current input loaded into a buffer. Of course I rarely need to do this because zsh vi mode covers 99% of my requirements.
So, my tldr for an article I didn't finish reading: someone doesn't know how to use their tools and instead of learning they jumped on the internet to complain, and/or sell me a solution or something, idk.
Interestingly for me this dont work with .zsh out of the box on my mac(i run a deliberately minimalist .zsh) what did you actually do to enable it.
esc -> v does work both with bash and mksh on ubuntu with stock config but not out of the box with zsh on my macbook so i suspect there is something missing im my one line .zshrc file.
Capital V is an actual vim command btw triggering linewise visual mode and that does somewhat seem to actually seem to be the functionality of shift-v by default in zsh.
What's the point of this comment other than being snarky/attempting to show off? You should reflect on it, because this would be a better place if people like you just didn't bother replying.
Maybe you don't find it valuable because your setup and mad vi skills offer you an alternative (which I'm very sure is just as feature-rich as what is described in the post, which you didn't read). Isn't it obvious how a more accessible solution might be useful to some people?
I for one welcome the efforts of the Warp team to improve terminal UX.
shric|3 years ago
Dark pattern #2: On sign-up, you "agree to our terms of service" but then you have the gall to say, on unsubscribe: "you are currently subscribed to our opt-in messaging. Do you want to remove yourself from opt-in messaging?"
Agreeing to a 17 page terms of service document might be technically "opting in" to messaging (spam), but it sure isn't in spirit. Opting in is when you click on a, previously unchecked, check box that has "I'd like to receive marketing from you".
I'm sure there's plenty more but I uninstalled it already.
quesera|3 years ago
Think about all the things you type into a shell, via a terminal!
itslennysfault|3 years ago
waynecochran|3 years ago
sli|3 years ago
alexruf|3 years ago
waynecochran|3 years ago
smoldesu|3 years ago
I wish you luck, but your product in it's current state is confusing to me. fish solves most of these issues for me and it runs on all my devices, free. All I'll say is that your competition is stiff.
danny_warp|3 years ago
Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data.
https://www.warp.dev/privacy
cosmotic|3 years ago
mhitza|3 years ago
Tools with better DX (developer experience) are a market that's been tapped into heavily in the past few years, personally I'm not surprised there's a pricing page. Would I pay for something like this? Probably never; I don't feel like I need to optimize my terminal workflow even if I have to reach for the manpage of a command from time to time.
MrWiffles|3 years ago
Now if that login required barrier was removed, I'd at least be willing to give it a try. May not switch, but I'd be willing to give it a chance. But as it stands? Hard pass.
shric|3 years ago
[1] https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/501
Brian_K_White|3 years ago
... and they should already know all that, and there is really no believable excuse for not knowing all that already, and I don't for a second believe they don't.
So, really there is not even any doubt to give any benefit of the doubt like "even if you're well intentioned". Passed that already.
lordleft|3 years ago
Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.
bee_rider|3 years ago
But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems.
If warp didn’t want it to matter, they could have not brought it up I guess.
zokier|3 years ago
> In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way.
They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.
AtlasBarfed|3 years ago
Tab completion is a half-designed solution, and not exactly portable across shells.
Terminals need to stop pretending they are dumb 8" CRTs from the 1970s. Virtually all interactive terminal input is through GUI applications at some point, and if it's not, it's not by choice.
And performing stdin input in scripts for programs that need it? Don't get me started, and don't say "expect" with a straight face. The fact that scripting languages have no provisions after 40-50 years is nuts.
Arnavion|3 years ago
password1|3 years ago
ploum|3 years ago
The post manage to analyse terminal input without having acknowledging readline. So yeah, they have no idea what they are talking about.
https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-ev...
sureglymop|3 years ago
They could write an "interactive shell" with mouse support that implements all those features and it would run in any pre existing terminal. They could even make this work with existing shells and it would work over ssh ect. Nothing against innovation but this is the wrong approach imo.
brenns10|3 years ago
They're not writing a technical deep dive, they're presenting their vision for a different approach. I think that vision is flawed but I'm not going to grade them on how deep they get into implementation details.
0xbadcafebee|3 years ago
It's actually more 60s/70s, when the first terminals, command-line prompts, and shells were built. The reason why it's stuck there is technology has only improved iteratively rather than revolutionarily. The "lets add another layer of abstraction" form of innovation, rather than outside-the-box thinking and reinvention.
The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me. It's not that far removed from punch cards.
maximus-decimus|3 years ago
astrobe_|3 years ago
Well, it wasn't hard to beat punch cards in terms of convenience (BTW did you use them once?), but apparently it's very difficult to beat text editors because they've survived for 50+ years despite the fact the mouse was available in the 80s and that people have been saying that sort of thing once in a while for at least 3 decades.
solarkraft|3 years ago
Agreed. This makes some changes that could be simple unnecessarily hard. Formatting shouldn't even be a thing. FWIW though, having an auto-formatter on save has solved a big chunk of that pain for me.
brenns10|3 years ago
Yeah, terminal input is odd at times. Doubly so if your main prior experience is entering text into HTML textareas. There's a learning curve, but there's a benefit to tackling that curve. For one, you get readline editing, which is _far_ more powerful than the textarea comparison, and it's customizable. For another, if you need to use your editor to manage a larger command, you have that exact option (see Ctrl-X Ctrl-E in bash/readline). That editor can be vim, or it could be your pimped out VSCode with Copilot. Bash doesn't care.
When you think about it, that's a good 70% of the article's complaints resolved. Trouble navigating through lines of command input? Learn your readline keybindings, or just pop it open in your editor of choice, which also grants you syntax highlighting and whatever else.
The other 30% of what article proposes are pretty decent ideas. Why _isn't_ there a way to hover over a command and see a snippet from its manual page, or to hover over a command-line flag or option, and see the data from the manual page? We have bash-completion which can provide us command-specific completion, what about docs? Many new features can be added to the current architecture. For example, OSC 52 allows terminal apps to send data to the clipboard so long as the terminal emulator supports it. I don't see why similar extensions couldn't enable applications to annotate text with documentation, etc. But that doesn't require the terminal to take over all the line editing: it's just incremental improvement to the current system.
And that's where I think this article and approach are wrong. Maybe it works with the user's shell, but what about Python? GDB? Or the myriad other command line tools I use on a daily basis? As it is now, my terminal is responsible for being the best "terminal emulator" possible. It handles input, draws to my screen, and does it fast. It doesn't need to concern itself with supporting GDB: it is a terminal, and that's that. I'd rather not see these layers get smooshed. Let's focus on improving the current system so that GDB, readline, and the other pieces of the puzzle can incrementally improve the situation.
kelseyfrog|3 years ago
frankjr|3 years ago
Arnavion|3 years ago
davesmylie|3 years ago
bitwize|3 years ago
Galaxy brain: M-x eshell. Use regular Emacs commands from the shell! Define functions in Emacs Lisp, use them as shell commands!
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
zokier|3 years ago
alokedesai|3 years ago
Some of these features are near-impossible given the current terminal-shell abstraction, however. For example, a traditional terminal has no concept of command input/output, which means that it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command.
AndriyKunitsyn|3 years ago
dack|3 years ago
VWWHFSfQ|3 years ago
To the warp terminal developers:
I'm sure your terminal program is great, but stop posting this content-marketing stuff here. It's not your audience.
golang-gopher|3 years ago
" We're launching our new and improved input editor. We just posted our article on the history of the terminal input, and how we could innovate on it.. We would appreciate if you could show the post some love. "Why is the terminal input so weird?” (navigate to HN and go to the “new” page and vote / leave a comment - we aren’t linking to it here because that can trigger HN’s moderation filters)"
Upvote this!!!
origin_path|3 years ago
Lots of developers use Terminal.app, so that clearly isn't a real problem. There's no obvious reason why developers would be willing to buy a closed source IDE, operating system or cloud services but not a terminal emulator. I think people are reacting more to the login requirement than anything else.
forgotpwd16|3 years ago
qrio2|3 years ago
apetresc|3 years ago
terminal_d|3 years ago
`v` is also available in vi input mode.
puffoflogic|3 years ago
But, like, this is obviously an entirely different class of problem from TFA, which is a skill issue.
ploum|3 years ago
bitwize|3 years ago
Good thing they got that funding a few months ago instead of now, when there's far less VC money sloshing around and the Juicero of the command line looks like a far less enticing proposition.
biftek|3 years ago
Option + mouse click moves the cursor to where ever, control+a|e move to the beginning or end of the line, option+arrow jumps words, and the arrows navigate up and down lines just fine... What am I missing?
wmf|3 years ago
chungy|3 years ago
I say supposed because they're really not all that big of a deal. OK, bash making it difficult to go backwards to previous lines is... annoying, at least until you press C-x C-e and do what you want anyway.
The use of a mouse for something text-centered is pretty much foreign to me, too.
tmtvl|3 years ago
ksherlock|3 years ago
If you were confused about the command arguments you could run commando (or use … as an argument) to bring up a GUI to select the flags.
The Eddie text editor for BeOS and now MacOS X/XI/XII/XIII has a similar text-editor/shell hybrid.
http://www.el34.com
robterrell|3 years ago
mostlysimilar|3 years ago
Absolute no from me, even if their terminal truly is better and innovative.
danny_warp|3 years ago
In case there was any confusion, Warp never sends the contents of terminal commands and outputs to our servers (unless a user explicitly chooses to use the "Block Sharing" feature).
What Warp currently sends in regard to telemetry is listed here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel....
bhauer|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
blitz_skull|3 years ago
Requires an account? Check. Crashes IMMEDIATELY upon opening? Check. Doesn't support any tool I use (e.g. FZF, key-bindings, etc)? Check. Spammy "iS tHe tErMiNaL oN lIfE sUpPoRt?" blog post? Check.
Do they even know their target market is mildly allergic to all of the above? Yikes.
ed25519FUUU|3 years ago
kevin_thibedeau|3 years ago
drcongo|3 years ago
The setup: I'm on a Mac, I use iTerm for my terminal, Fish for my shell, and most often I'm inside a docker container also running Fish and using iPython.
The question: When I Ctrl+W to delete a word in a Fish prompt, what counts as a word is different to what counts as a word in iPython. For instance, Ctrl+w at the end of this string `test.func('param1', 'param2')` produces...
Fish: test.func('param1', 'param2'
iPython: test.func('param1',
Hit Ctrl+w again, and you get...
Fish: test.func('param1', '
iPython: all gone.
This causes me to over delete in iPython many, many times per day. I'm guessing that the rough flow of the delete word signal is iTerm -> Fish -> iPython and that iPython is the thing that's being overzealous?
theblazehen|3 years ago
Almost correct. Once you launch iPython, Fish is out of the picture until you quit iPython. However yes iPython does handle Ctrl-W differently from your shell
fratajcz|3 years ago
Here's a gist with my config (also binds shift-left/right arrow to move to previous space instead of visual select): https://gist.github.com/fratajczak/64e32421a43d3b8194d0409ce...
[1]: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit/blob...
beej71|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Brian_K_White|3 years ago
kevdoran|3 years ago
alokedesai|3 years ago
Our current best-guess on how we'd do this is a more restrictive license that * allows for verifying security and privacy * allows individuals to build and tweak Warp * prevents another company from starting a commercial enterprise off of it
We'd love more thoughts here though! Feel free to join the discussion at https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400 if you're interested.
einherjae|3 years ago
niemandhier|3 years ago
qbit42|3 years ago
golang-gopher|3 years ago
hprotagonist|3 years ago
forgotpwd16|3 years ago
CharlesW|3 years ago
brendanfalk|3 years ago
A few things we've found: 1. Developers are understandably opinionated about their terminal/shell setup. It's a matter of personal productivity. 2. We have noticed a general trend of more terminal use happening in IDE, not a standalone terminal. 3. Most terminal "collaboration" happens asynchronously not synchronously (e.g. shared scripts, CLIs, secrets etc as opposed to live terminal sharing) 4. Most of the collaboration happens at the shell level not the terminal level
Given the above, we made the conscious conscious decision not to build our own terminal.
Happy to elaborate more
vander_elst|3 years ago
Is it possible to work with vim in warp?
alokedesai|3 years ago
This is the tradeoff of building our own editor instead of using the shell's--we can build features that wouldn't be possible in the shell directly but it requires us to build features that already exist in the shell from scratch. So far, this tradeoff has been well-worth it to build what we think is a better experience when using the terminal.
[1] https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/159
deanmen|3 years ago
forgotpwd16|3 years ago
shadeslayer_|3 years ago
Making a login required is absolutely unnecessary, though.
aap_|3 years ago
terminal_d|3 years ago
wmf|3 years ago
otikik|3 years ago
raydev|3 years ago
smoldesu|3 years ago
eointierney|3 years ago
Literate programming in org-mode with babel and magit and () is
Still weird but so much more than a terminal
giantdude|3 years ago
nathias|3 years ago
qrio2|3 years ago
thefilmore|3 years ago
sbbr|3 years ago
? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ?
gtm1260|3 years ago
steve1977|3 years ago
puffoflogic|3 years ago
In zsh (vi mode) I simply press shift-v and I am dropped into my $EDITOR with my current input loaded into a buffer. Of course I rarely need to do this because zsh vi mode covers 99% of my requirements.
So, my tldr for an article I didn't finish reading: someone doesn't know how to use their tools and instead of learning they jumped on the internet to complain, and/or sell me a solution or something, idk.
Stranger43|3 years ago
esc -> v does work both with bash and mksh on ubuntu with stock config but not out of the box with zsh on my macbook so i suspect there is something missing im my one line .zshrc file.
Capital V is an actual vim command btw triggering linewise visual mode and that does somewhat seem to actually seem to be the functionality of shift-v by default in zsh.
nsdarren|3 years ago
Maybe you don't find it valuable because your setup and mad vi skills offer you an alternative (which I'm very sure is just as feature-rich as what is described in the post, which you didn't read). Isn't it obvious how a more accessible solution might be useful to some people?
I for one welcome the efforts of the Warp team to improve terminal UX.
motbus3|3 years ago