Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> At this time, Warp continues to require login.

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.

Thanks for responding, it's good that you're thinking about these problems.

> I feel pretty strongly that the terminal ought to be cloud-native

This seems like an oxymoron to me. A terminal is not cloud-native; it does network with the host machine, but a local shell is inherently local. If you've built the cloud part first, then you're building this product in reverse.

You're welcome to explore whatever avenues please you, but I'm not convinced there's much business to be found in cloud-native local shells.

> configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them.

No sweat, I don't actually use Warp. This isn't a legitimate concern for me to level, just an example of the infinite treadmill of issues that you need to solve in a closed-source project. If alacritty has a configuration issue, the community fixes it. The way you've structured your project makes it extremely hard for your community to help you here.

> We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.

I wish you luck, it's hard work carving out a market segment of your own. I look forward to how your future features stack up against other terminals.

> If alacritty has a configuration issue, the community fixes it

Coincidentally, Warp is based on Alacritty

https://github.com/warpdotdev#open-source-dependencies

Hi - I am trying out Warp at a job that defaults to the MacOS ecosystem. But as a Linux user in all other domains I’m glad to hear that you’ll be going cross platform.

I vacillated for a long, long time before registering for an account. The distrust of cloud centralization, especially among developers who would otherwise be impressed by the “built in Rust” marketing, runs deep. Even if your intentions are totally beneficial right now, companies can change hands to people who aren’t aligned with user interest. Users who are developers are frequently in privileged positions at their workplaces, and being compromised at the level of their terminal could be catastrophic.

I’m the type of person who will take on many extra hours of configuration hell because I spurned Docker Desktop for its account requirement. So why did I end up signing up for a Warp account? Because yes, you are actually innovating in an area that desperately needs modernization. You recognize the risks and importance, at least in words, and in actions such as you have taken today. But because of the account requirement, I can’t let myself become locked in to Warp, so I’m not sure how deeply I’ll be able to explore it. And if a competitor arises that can innovate without any potential for lock in, I would jump ship without hesitation.

Thank you for your efforts and please, please, please take all the feedback here with utmost seriousness.

~99% of people are not going to be interested in the collaboration features, and will not log in. The ~1% who are interested in collaboration will want to first know whether it's a good shell, and ~50% won't log in to try it if they need to do that first. Maybe you don't care about that, but for most products that would be a lethal problem.

> collaboration

While it is possible to share a session with tmux, I have never used it for collaboration - in my 20 years in the industry, no such need has arisen. I'm not saying it's not a useful feature, others probably use it, but still, it's hard to see it as a selling point. And yes, mandatory registration discourages me from trying Warp.

You should make users CHOOSE to provide their login/identity by giving them features that improve the experience: e.g, synchronized settings across all terminal sessions.

It should be optional.

That seems quite similar to allowing developers to SSH into a development server. That option is highly mature, allows users to use a variety of tools, and is not very expensive. How does your product improve on that?

One can have identity without centralization; look at PKI. I don’t need to create an account with some website in order to use SSH.

Yeah look at how things like Brave and DuckDuckGo do it.

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.

Warp got $23M from folks like the CEOs of Figma, Salesforce, and LinkedIn - they all expected this fruit fly to turn into a unicorn.

Looking at the product page, guessing the money is in making deals with crappy IT departments to adopt it across whole orgs for the enterprise "advanced security and compliance features". In that case i would also expect to see a bunch of submarine blog posts on how terminals are a liability due to "shell scripts are shadow it", "disgruntled employees exfiltrate data with curl commands", "iterm2 lets users bypass MDM" etc. idk thr whole thing just seems gross

If I bet $1 for a 1:10 chance to win $15, do I expect to win $15?

If you actually place the bet, you believe the $15 payout is not only “possible” but even “more likely” that other bets available to you. If we define “expect” as 50%+ odds then no, if we define it as “I can see how this could happen” then yes.

A $20M Series A requires those investors to believe the startup can get to $1B for the math to work out for a typical fund.

> If we define “expect” as 50%+ odds then no, if we define it as “I can see how this could happen” then yes.

Nobody has ever defined or proposed defining "expect" as "I can see how this could happen" until just now. Not only does "expect" imply 50%+ odds, it implies something like 90%+ odds. It implies that you would be surprised if it didn't happen (because you were expecting it to happen).

Then the expected outcome would be $1.50, statistically.

I'm not drawing equivalence between products here, but rather tempering trust in the opinions of investors. How much money was invested into FTX? How many renowned investors swore, and continue to swear, by that sham? Saying that "all these investors think it is good" is also just an appeal to authority.

The target market is developers, and developers are spooked out by this kind of thing. Seems risky.

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.

If you're just looking to pimp your terminal and sand off some of the edges, fish is a great shell replacement to try: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell

A lot of Mac users either don't know they're using zsh by default now or simply don't take advantage of it's scripting language/featureset. For those people, I think fish makes a compelling upgrade. No log-in, just a slightly nicer interactive terminal prompt.

Fish is a shell, warp is a terminal emulator. So even if someone uses fish they still need a terminal emulator; e.g. iTerm2 or Terminal.app. Am I missing something?

Warp goes a bit beyond a normal terminal emulator and blurs the line a bit in order to support multiple shells without the user having to configure it in their shell by editing .bashrc or whatever. Eg Clickable position for text entry, which most other text boxes have supported since the 80's. I'm sure there's a readline setting somewhere out there but Warp overrides whatever settings are needed in order to get that to work out of the box.

Wow it looks like it's possible but hard to get readline to take the position from a mouseclick: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55437976

Yep! fish and iTerm2 make a wonderful pair on MacOS, it's my go-to combo. My larger point is that you can add nice features to your terminal without adding cloud logins or shady proprietary clients.

Don't forget https://starship.rs/

As someone who previously used a very customized zsh, switching to fish was great: reliable, fast, low config, etc

I'm in the same boat. My zsh setup was much fancier, but fish gets me 80% of the features with 0% of the configuration.

Same.

Warp team: I watched the demo and it looks great, and I downloaded it while going through this thread. I didn't install. I think you're boxing yourselves out.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com