If you want to use a terminal that is actually open source and doesn't have telemetry, much less only available via signing in with GitHub, use Alacritty, also written in Rust and cross platform.
It's free, does not spy on me, comes by default with Kubuntu and has great themes out of the box (including the Solarized themes).
Same. But boy to people really like tools "written in Rust".
We think the two products are meant for two different audiences.
Alacritty has a very minimalist philosophy that suits some terminal power users very well. It’s geared towards folks who are familiar with more advanced tools like tmux, and who are comfortable doing advanced configuration in the shell. For instance, Alacritty has no tabs: users are expected to use tmux.
With Warp, you get similar performance to Alacritty (we are both Rust-based, GPU-accelerated native apps, and Warp leverages some of Alacritty’s model code) But you also get many more built-in features that we think make all developers more productive, like:
- Blocks (grouping commands and outputs together)
- A modern text editor for your input
- Features like Workflows and AI command search that help you perform tasks faster
- Tabs, native split panes, and menus
That said, it’s not perfect. For example it lacks font ligature support, and there appears to be no prospect of that being implemented. I don’t care about ligatures that much anyway, so no big deal for me, but for others it is.
My experience using terminal emulators is that they are all flawed in at least one way. Whether it’s lack of true colour support; lack of ligature support; weird text rendering; weird colours; confusing configuration; etc. I feel like a terminal supporting all of those things must be possible, but I haven’t come across it yet.
Nothing wrong with that of course and a valid business model. But it can become a problem when they choose to switch license or withdraw their product from the OSS market entirely (like Elastic did this last year). OSS where the individual contributors retain their copyright are much more robust. For example, Linux will never change license. It would be a legal nightmare to do that. They'd be chasing tens of thousands of copyright owners for their permission, or in some cases their surviving relatives. Every single one of them would have the power to say no. It would probably be cheaper to build a completely new OS kernel from scratch than to do that. Some companies that take issue with the license conditions actually are doing that. It's probably a big reason why Google is working on Fuchsia for example.
A lot of Apache software has distributed copyright ownership. Particularly everything hosted by the Apache Foundation. Nothing wrong with that license. Great software. Has existed for decades, will continue to exist for centuries.