I don't want to stoke the flames again, but even VS Code doesn't force you to log-in. Microsoft knows that blocking you from using basic functionality of a free app is a bad user experience. It's good that you're letting people opt-in to a more private experience, but that was hardly the largest problem I could see the last time this was brought up.
From where I'm standing, it looks like you're trying to build a terminal for a pretty small audience; people who own a Mac, but don't want to use iTerm2 or the builtin terminal. That leaves a markedly tiny audience of people who don't use custom shells/incompatible configurations, want to log-in to your application and don't care about any of iTerm2's extra features. It's a bit of a pipe-dream to be honest, and you're not helping yourself by delaying your versions for other platforms.
My intention is not to discourage you, but I think this project needs a little tough love. You might be optimizing for the wrong users.
Zach from Warp here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.
Re: login, I get the concern and we are exploring product options that let folks preview warp without login.
From a product perspective our goal is to make the terminal cloud-native and have a way of facilitating collaboration, and it's not really possible to build that without user identity. Specifically, login allows us to build cloud-oriented features that make the terminal have a concept of “your stuff” and “your team’s stuff” – for example Block Sharing. This is the same reason other collaborative apps like Figma and Github require login. We do get the concerns though and understand that this is not traditionally how a terminal has functioned and that it will make some users uncomfortable. But on the whole we feel like it's the right way to push the command line experience forward.
Re: configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them. It's hard technically to both innovate on the command-line and maintain complete backwards compatibility, but that is our goal.
Re: Mac only, this is also really just a limitation of eng bandwidth, not a product strategy. We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.
I agree, this is fruit fly startup which will eventually fail. I can’t believe anyone could think this would be successful. It might do something interesting before it dies, though.
Thank you for the very thoughtful comment. The required login I think is enough to scare me off. Which is a shame. It’s the first time I’ve heard of this terminal and the features listed intrigue me enough to want to explore more.
I agree. I installed warp and uninstalled it as soon as I saw the login screen. I understand this might be good for a business but it brings no value to me and wastes my time.
I don't think something as fundamental a developer tool as a Terminal makes sense as a proprietary software. That doesn't mean nobody will use it, obviously, but it does mean that you guys are sacrificing a lot of potential users for...I have actually no idea why Warp isn't open source. What's the issue? What are you afraid of?
There's a lot of negativity in this thread and being the good contrarian I am, I wanted to see what's so bad about this. I went ahead and installed it. Sure, the login part is annoying, especially since I don't see any killer features that really need it yet. However, there are some great ideas in this.
The first thing I noticed is that it is fast. Noticeably faster than iTerm, which I use daily. Printing a large file doesn't stutter at all. As a test I printed (cat) a large video file. Warp finished in half a second, where I had to kill iTerm because I got bored watching all the garbled text fly by. Now, I'm not often printing video files to my terminal, but boy is it annoying when I do something dumb like that on accident. Sometimes iTerm just stops responding.
Other than that, there's some great feature innovations, like keeping the prompt visible even when scrolling or treating every command as a block. The block idea is nice because I can pin (bookmark, I guess) the output, so I can easily refer to it later instead of constantly scrolling around to find it. Maybe other terminals do this, but I've never seen it.
Also, aside from turning off telemetry, I didn't have to do any configuration to get it in a usable state. With iTerm I spend at least 30 minutes poking around the hundreds (thousands?) of settings to set everything up.
Now, there are some features than need a bit of work, like the AI stuff is pretty basic. It can't really do complex commands, like anything involving pipes or xargs. Tab completion is a bit clunky, like it will try and cd me into a text file.
Anyway, it's clear to me now that I've become complacent with iTerm and there's still a lot of innovation on the table for terminals. I think a new generation of developers that care less about open source and privacy will like this. However, I'm mostly happy that there seems to be real innovation here. Maybe we'll see some of the best ideas make their way into other products?
I've been using Warp since it was announced on HN, and it is great. May favorite terminal yet. Fast, features such as autocomplete so much better than iTerm.
There is a lot of negative thoughts on this thread - would love to hear from the people who actually have tried out Warp and not those waxing on about the indignity of being asked to login to a free product.
Might draw some people in. I'm of the opinion that my terminal is one of the most important things to keep safe - a closed source terminal is not safe to me.
Hi - thanks for the comment. We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now. You can see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400
As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go.
Have enough developers really been conditioned to accept surveillance and pervasive centralized control that someone thought this was a good idea? The fact that the telemetry code even exists is a problem - both in case of a bug that turns it on, and what it says about the proclivities of its developers.
It's utterly inappropriate to refer to this as "the Rust-based terminal", as if the language is its distinguishing feature. More like "the obscene SaaSification of a basic foundational utility". I'd be very much interested in trying a new terminal written in Rust, which could presumably be quicker and have a smaller chance of hiding latent parsing bugs, but this most certainly is not that.
Being able to set up a quake mode reliably with assigning a key. I never got this working in iTerm2 in a way where the terminal would always pop up and have focus, despite having spent really lot of time in preferences creating profiles etc.
Seriously, what's wrong with you, iTerm2? Feel free to keep your multilevel settings, but expose the important stuff up front as a single click preset to apply.
Honestly been a Mac user since I could be defined as a user and I'm still yet to install iTerm over Terminal.app, so I'm curious: who is this for, really?
Honestly, you're in a minority. Most Mac users install and use iTerm2, Alacritty, (my favorite) WezTerm, etc...
So obviously, there is a market for terminals. Warp though, definitely not for me.
I think Terminal.app is extremely good personally, I’ve been using it for 20 years at this point. The only thing that seems consistently faster is Alacritty.
I tried Warp and I wasn’t impressed at how it outputs text. I had some issues copying and pasting because it formats some things weird.
I thought I was who it was for: someone who doesn't have a dogmatic view of terminals, I don't care about telemetry or closed source, I'll take my IDE over vi any day, I've used Hyper which is an electron based CLI and that'd make most people shudder, etc.
I mean, it's ok? But I rarely feel like opening it.
Small things don't work for some reason. Like alt-clicking in nano doesn't move the mouse like it does in basic old Terminal.
And the tab completion is really aggravating for me. There's like 3 different actions it takes almost randomly that make zero sense, for example in a window I had open:
- If I type "na" and press tab it shows me a popup window with suggestions.
- If I type "nano", it shows the entire command I wanted to run based on history "nano test.log"... but pressing tab does nothing. You're supposed to know to switch to the right arrow.
- If I type "nano test.lo" there's only one possible completion and now tab does work like the right arrow
- But hold on! If got a selection window in an earlier step, and I decide to type to narrow down the selection so there's only one option left... tab doesn't work like the right arrow and will instead stupidly try to cycle the selection window even though only one option shown is still valid.
It's like the selection window ignores everything you typed after it opened, which plain old zsh solved, but they somehow unsolved
Have also had it break for me once and I'm not clear on how to reproduce, it involved SSH but somehow the order of "blocks" for commands went out of whack, so there was a block stuck underneath the "bottom" where I'm supposed to type, and it'd steal input from the prompt.
And there's this really minor but annoying thing where if you try and select some text then right click to copy, the entire command block gets highlighted, even though in order to select a piece of text you had to intentionally click twice to unhighlight the command block.
-
Having little moments like that just introduce enough aggravation that I don't want to bother.
To me iTerm is a happy middle ground. It's barely any different from Terminal, but on the few occasions where it adds some value (like being able to view a high quality image preview in your terminal, or share commands between SSH sessions) its completely unintrusive, the opposite of what Warp seems to be aiming for.
-
Also, semi-off topic, but after using it I get seriously stressed out about the fact that companies like this are hiring people who need to make a living.
There's no reality in which this actually becomes something to justify taking in tens of millions of dollars in funding, which are probably expecting 100s of millions in returns. Clearly their plan is that some companies will end up having this be the go-to tool for developers, but the most "hardcore" developers are the ones who would be most repulsed by this.
The more casual developers work at places that see developers as a cost center and will never spend real money on a terminal when they're barely ok with paying for a Keurig.
I imagine that the founder and maybe the core team know they can get cushy jobs with their technical skills and resumes so it doesn't bother them, but the problem is these things tend to scale up before falling apart.
Eventually they start to pull in people who don't have those kinds of luxuries just to function. People who didn't go to some top school or have a string of in-demand logos on their resume might not have what it takes to weather this all falling apart like they do.
Like yes, startups are inherently very risky, but again, the further away from the core team you get, the higher the headcount they have to show before hiring people, the longer they've been around, they'll start to attract people who can't reasonably be expected to think they're being hired onto the Titanic as it leaves port.
Is this your selling point? "Rust based"? That's how people in the "Rust world" advertise their products? That's how people refer to their work nowadays? Rust-based, there lies the value?
Maybe people do things with their terminal I don’t, but iTerm2 which is apparently slower than others is so fast at responding to my input that I can’t perceive the delay. Then it has 150 more features than I even use. I feel no need at all to replace it.
I see no benefits in using Warp over a regular (and more supported) GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
It's just "prettier" out of the box, and it seems to market quite a bit to people that either don't know how to configure their shells, or don't know what they're doing.
- If you want fuzzy command, history, file / contents search, use fzf [0] (you should probably be using fzf and ripgrep [1] anyway if you work daily in your terminal).
- If you want sessions, use a multiplexer like tmux [2] or zellij [3].
- If you need to have your own "cheatsheets" use navi [4]. If you want to sync them with your team, use whatever sync solution you like.
- If you think you need a text editor in your shell's command line, reconsider. If you *really* want to edit and re-execute the last command in your editor of choice, use something like "fc $!" [5] or create your own shell solution for it.
- If you want a sexy prompt use starship [6].
- If you want terminal sharing use tty-share [7].
- If you want to ask GPT for help, don't do it in your terminal. Open up ChatGPT (or whatever future UI will exist), ask your question, and check that there's nothing harmful in what your about to execute. Sometimes friction is good.
For each of these ^ pieces of software there are tens and hundreds of alternatives.
If you want a terminal that's pretty out-of-the-box, where things are "clickable", you don't have the time or interest to invest your energy in learning tools that could massively boost your productivity for years to come, and you don't care about designing your own workflow and being able swap parts of it at any point, without depending on any single "app", and if you don't mind "logging into your terminal" (what the actual fuck, excuse the language) or the terminal adding its own SSH wrapper and doing things you don't know to the hosts you connect, then maybe Warp is OK for you. But then again, maybe you're not going in the right direction.
There are so many more awesome ways you could improve your shell experience than making things clicky. I don't understand what the market is for Warp, is it for wanna-be professionals that can't be bothered to become professionals? I completely fail to see how this could succeed as a paid product, especially with a subscription model.
smoldesu|3 years ago
I don't want to stoke the flames again, but even VS Code doesn't force you to log-in. Microsoft knows that blocking you from using basic functionality of a free app is a bad user experience. It's good that you're letting people opt-in to a more private experience, but that was hardly the largest problem I could see the last time this was brought up.
From where I'm standing, it looks like you're trying to build a terminal for a pretty small audience; people who own a Mac, but don't want to use iTerm2 or the builtin terminal. That leaves a markedly tiny audience of people who don't use custom shells/incompatible configurations, want to log-in to your application and don't care about any of iTerm2's extra features. It's a bit of a pipe-dream to be honest, and you're not helping yourself by delaying your versions for other platforms.
My intention is not to discourage you, but I think this project needs a little tough love. You might be optimizing for the wrong users.
zachlloyd|3 years ago
Re: login, I get the concern and we are exploring product options that let folks preview warp without login.
From a product perspective our goal is to make the terminal cloud-native and have a way of facilitating collaboration, and it's not really possible to build that without user identity. Specifically, login allows us to build cloud-oriented features that make the terminal have a concept of “your stuff” and “your team’s stuff” – for example Block Sharing. This is the same reason other collaborative apps like Figma and Github require login. We do get the concerns though and understand that this is not traditionally how a terminal has functioned and that it will make some users uncomfortable. But on the whole we feel like it's the right way to push the command line experience forward.
Re: configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them. It's hard technically to both innovate on the command-line and maintain complete backwards compatibility, but that is our goal.
Re: Mac only, this is also really just a limitation of eng bandwidth, not a product strategy. We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.
7e|3 years ago
0xdeadfa65|3 years ago
berjin|3 years ago
thecodrr|3 years ago
ibejoeb|3 years ago
rubberduckiee|3 years ago
As a response to your questions, please see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400
As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go.
The community has already been contributing new themes (https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes). And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. See: https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows
blopker|3 years ago
The first thing I noticed is that it is fast. Noticeably faster than iTerm, which I use daily. Printing a large file doesn't stutter at all. As a test I printed (cat) a large video file. Warp finished in half a second, where I had to kill iTerm because I got bored watching all the garbled text fly by. Now, I'm not often printing video files to my terminal, but boy is it annoying when I do something dumb like that on accident. Sometimes iTerm just stops responding.
Other than that, there's some great feature innovations, like keeping the prompt visible even when scrolling or treating every command as a block. The block idea is nice because I can pin (bookmark, I guess) the output, so I can easily refer to it later instead of constantly scrolling around to find it. Maybe other terminals do this, but I've never seen it.
Also, aside from turning off telemetry, I didn't have to do any configuration to get it in a usable state. With iTerm I spend at least 30 minutes poking around the hundreds (thousands?) of settings to set everything up.
Now, there are some features than need a bit of work, like the AI stuff is pretty basic. It can't really do complex commands, like anything involving pipes or xargs. Tab completion is a bit clunky, like it will try and cd me into a text file.
Anyway, it's clear to me now that I've become complacent with iTerm and there's still a lot of innovation on the table for terminals. I think a new generation of developers that care less about open source and privacy will like this. However, I'm mostly happy that there seems to be real innovation here. Maybe we'll see some of the best ideas make their way into other products?
gbourne|3 years ago
There is a lot of negative thoughts on this thread - would love to hear from the people who actually have tried out Warp and not those waxing on about the indignity of being asked to login to a free product.
Macha|3 years ago
Warp is built on alacritty which is firmly middle of the road in that chart.
juice_bus|3 years ago
rubberduckiee|3 years ago
As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go.
The community has already been contributing new themes (https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes). And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. See: https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows
Hope you find this helpful!
sshine|3 years ago
mindslight|3 years ago
Have enough developers really been conditioned to accept surveillance and pervasive centralized control that someone thought this was a good idea? The fact that the telemetry code even exists is a problem - both in case of a bug that turns it on, and what it says about the proclivities of its developers.
It's utterly inappropriate to refer to this as "the Rust-based terminal", as if the language is its distinguishing feature. More like "the obscene SaaSification of a basic foundational utility". I'd be very much interested in trying a new terminal written in Rust, which could presumably be quicker and have a smaller chance of hiding latent parsing bugs, but this most certainly is not that.
tomaskafka|3 years ago
Seriously, what's wrong with you, iTerm2? Feel free to keep your multilevel settings, but expose the important stuff up front as a single click preset to apply.
bitwize|3 years ago
wmf|3 years ago
tksb|3 years ago
selectnull|3 years ago
pram|3 years ago
I tried Warp and I wasn’t impressed at how it outputs text. I had some issues copying and pasting because it formats some things weird.
BoorishBears|3 years ago
I mean, it's ok? But I rarely feel like opening it.
Small things don't work for some reason. Like alt-clicking in nano doesn't move the mouse like it does in basic old Terminal.
And the tab completion is really aggravating for me. There's like 3 different actions it takes almost randomly that make zero sense, for example in a window I had open:
- If I type "na" and press tab it shows me a popup window with suggestions.
- If I type "nano", it shows the entire command I wanted to run based on history "nano test.log"... but pressing tab does nothing. You're supposed to know to switch to the right arrow.
- If I type "nano test.lo" there's only one possible completion and now tab does work like the right arrow
- But hold on! If got a selection window in an earlier step, and I decide to type to narrow down the selection so there's only one option left... tab doesn't work like the right arrow and will instead stupidly try to cycle the selection window even though only one option shown is still valid.
It's like the selection window ignores everything you typed after it opened, which plain old zsh solved, but they somehow unsolved
Have also had it break for me once and I'm not clear on how to reproduce, it involved SSH but somehow the order of "blocks" for commands went out of whack, so there was a block stuck underneath the "bottom" where I'm supposed to type, and it'd steal input from the prompt.
And there's this really minor but annoying thing where if you try and select some text then right click to copy, the entire command block gets highlighted, even though in order to select a piece of text you had to intentionally click twice to unhighlight the command block.
-
Having little moments like that just introduce enough aggravation that I don't want to bother.
To me iTerm is a happy middle ground. It's barely any different from Terminal, but on the few occasions where it adds some value (like being able to view a high quality image preview in your terminal, or share commands between SSH sessions) its completely unintrusive, the opposite of what Warp seems to be aiming for.
-
Also, semi-off topic, but after using it I get seriously stressed out about the fact that companies like this are hiring people who need to make a living.
There's no reality in which this actually becomes something to justify taking in tens of millions of dollars in funding, which are probably expecting 100s of millions in returns. Clearly their plan is that some companies will end up having this be the go-to tool for developers, but the most "hardcore" developers are the ones who would be most repulsed by this.
The more casual developers work at places that see developers as a cost center and will never spend real money on a terminal when they're barely ok with paying for a Keurig.
I imagine that the founder and maybe the core team know they can get cushy jobs with their technical skills and resumes so it doesn't bother them, but the problem is these things tend to scale up before falling apart.
Eventually they start to pull in people who don't have those kinds of luxuries just to function. People who didn't go to some top school or have a string of in-demand logos on their resume might not have what it takes to weather this all falling apart like they do.
Like yes, startups are inherently very risky, but again, the further away from the core team you get, the higher the headcount they have to show before hiring people, the longer they've been around, they'll start to attract people who can't reasonably be expected to think they're being hired onto the Titanic as it leaves port.
ZoomZoomZoom|3 years ago
chimen|3 years ago
blackthornyugen|3 years ago
user3939382|3 years ago
killingtime74|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
slig|3 years ago
rekoil|3 years ago
ibejoeb|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
imwillofficial|3 years ago
_andrei_|3 years ago
If you want a terminal that's pretty out-of-the-box, where things are "clickable", you don't have the time or interest to invest your energy in learning tools that could massively boost your productivity for years to come, and you don't care about designing your own workflow and being able swap parts of it at any point, without depending on any single "app", and if you don't mind "logging into your terminal" (what the actual fuck, excuse the language) or the terminal adding its own SSH wrapper and doing things you don't know to the hosts you connect, then maybe Warp is OK for you. But then again, maybe you're not going in the right direction.
There are so many more awesome ways you could improve your shell experience than making things clicky. I don't understand what the market is for Warp, is it for wanna-be professionals that can't be bothered to become professionals? I completely fail to see how this could succeed as a paid product, especially with a subscription model.