Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.
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.
Not really, those are problems with current workflows.
>People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems.
They do, they just work around them or are used to them.
That's trivially true for any "problem" that people "don't suffer from," and it's not that interesting.
Problem: Input editing in the shell is hard if you can't remember the appropriate keyboard shortcuts and don't use the relevant features.
Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them.
Blog-proposed workaround: Download our app.
If people want to use their app then that's fine and dandy, but I don't think it's reasonable to frame my experience as being hampered by a problem that the app would solve when my workflow is not in fact hampered by it. It's acceptable and normal for a tool to not have a universal audience.
Yes, and it's called denial and compromise.
>Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them.
Notice how that's not a "workaround": it's resigning to the problem and suffering the limitations of the system. The very opposite of a workaround, which is finding an alternative easier solution to something being hard.
> 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.
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.
That's not the definition of rent-seeking.
"Rent seeking [...] is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity."
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp
The "reciprocal contribution of productivity" provided by the Warp developers is increased functionality of the software.
You can argue that you'd rather pay once for a particular version of the software (I would), or that you don't want to pay for a terminal emulator in the first place (I don't either), or that the Warp devs could stop improving the software in the future (and they could), but "rent-seeking" is still an incorrect description of their business model, and is only used by people who have an agenda trying to slander Warp for some reason.
But implicit in "reciprocal contribution of productivity" is "compared to what." After having installed a barrier across a river, productivity increases by charging a fee and lifting that barrier. In that same vein, Warp spending extra development effort to block continued use of something you've already paid for and downloaded to your machine unless you keep giving them money is textbook rent-seeking UNLESS there's some value they're adding by doing so. Admittedly I should have referenced that value rather than their costs, but in practice the two are related because organizations aren't inclined to incur costs without adding value somewhere.
> and is only used by people who have an agenda trying to slander Warp for some reason
That seems like an unnecessary ad hominem. I don't even particularly care that they are rent-seeking. I just don't want to see that term redefined so far that we have to come up with some other name to refer to the same bloody concept, and especially not for the purpose of needlessly bolstering the profits of artificial SAAS. We're all adults here, and anyone who cares is presumably capable of making a proper argument for why rent-seeking is acceptable here rather than trying to redefine the word to brush their payment model under the rug.