The Terminal for the 21st Century | Hacker News Reader

The Terminal for the 21st Century

warp.dev

17 pointsahamez43 comments

Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921231 - April 2022 (726 comments)

Also:

Telemetry is now optional in Warp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910992 - Dec 2022 (68 comments)

We Built Syntax Highlighting for the Terminal Input Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33642513 - Nov 2022 (22 comments)

Why is the terminal input so weird? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628205 - Nov 2022 (178 comments)

Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal (waiting list) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27835057 - July 2021 (173 comments)

A terminal app for the 21st century is:

1. FOSS.

2. Portable, multi-platform.

This "warp" is neither.

Also... replying to some of their homepage quips:

> Our GPT-3 powered AI search will convert natural language into executable shell commands.

I'll grant you that _is_ kind of futuristic, but I would really rather not install your keylogger on my system.

> Along the way, we built our own UI framework, our own Rust-based CRDT editor and our own graphics shaders.

Did you now? Well, that sounds problematic. I expect the use of well-vetted common (if not standard) libraries. Also, why does a terminal app need graphics shaders?

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Edit: Oh, it looks like I was even more suspicious last time this was announced here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30925105

right? I don't know what "FPS" my "Terminal" displays out, I could care less, I am using it to emulate a VTE from long before I was born.

Oh, this looks interesting. Let me download it.

Weird, it looks like I already downloaded it before, but I have no recollection of using it. Let's start!

Ah... that's the one that required a mandatory sign in to use, now I remember. Bye!

Warp requires a sign-up before I can try the terminal. This can be a big no no for many users, or at least for me.

Why? You can now disable all their telemetry, so a login is kinda just meh.

Friction? Creating an account itself is quite a chore.

It's a matter of weeks before you're in a whackamole game with their marketing email unsubscription system

So there's 2 show stoppers with this thing.

Yeah, I see no reason a terminal should require an account. Turned me off too.

It appears to be a hand-hold terminal designed for developers rather than sysadmins.

That's fine - I'm sure there's a place in the market for that. But given that's the audience, I doubt sign-up is a non-starter for most.

Yeah, just what I wanted- a terminal program that I need an account with a third party to use.

Sorry, that’s actually a deal-breaker.

I expressed exasperation at the warping of a fundamental tool into a proprietary surveillance based monstrosity in another thread, where it was pointed out that this is an enterprise product to help new employees and the like.

But as long as the marketing copy continues to be phrased as if this thing is some generally-applicable good idea ("The Terminal for the 21st Century"), then I think it's wholly appropriate to continue calling it out for the freedom-destroying abomination that it is.

If the thing were released as Libre software and had a user-respecting fork, then perhaps I would hold my nose and give it a shot. But as it stands I can only hope this thing fails so spectacularly to repudiate the whole idea.

Definitely interested in this.

I'm a daily kitty user. I tried WezTerm but it was way too slow to load NeoVim for me over ssh.

Would need to play with it for some time - main things I can't live without at the moment are `ssh` + multiplexing across a remote session, and speed. It looks like Warp also doesn't support fish _well_ (most comments say it supports bash/zsh well). I am not necessarily attached to fish, but it is nicer IMHO.

Although, it looks like you have to login???? which is an immediate deal-breaker.

Before clicking I knew it's yet another Electron app that wraps JS terminal emulators but I was pleased to be proven wrong. Fully native GPU accelerated renderer was a nice line in the marketing material.

I've moved on from using a terminal app however. I am using the VSCode terminal and I'm content with it. It has a bunch of nice bindings between terminal and the editor like clicking on a path to open the file in editor.

I wonder if this can replace my VSCode terminal so I can actually use it. Otherwise I'll download it, play with it a little bit and forget about it when it comes to doing actual work...

It's the terminal with telemetry - so an instant no-go.

Have been using it daily for about a year now together with zag and starship and absolutely love it!

Fast, easy to use and remembers commands from previous sessions which has been incredibly useful a number of times

I don't mean to come off as a grumpy old greybeard, but how does this differ from other terminals?

Every terminal I've ever used as a daily driver has had command history, has been fast (it's a terminal) and has been easy to use (which is of course subjective).

Looking at the feature set, it seems like they're trying to squeeze some bastardized IDE into a terminal. What is the selling point for you over, say kitty or iTerm2?

It might not be for everyone, but I am pretty happy with https://termius.com/ (I use the freemium version).

I'll definitely give this a try once it comes to linux. I used to know my way around the standard linux tools better while I was still learning linux and its coretools. The CLI interface sucks for discoverability for the intermediate user, and there is definitely much room for a tool informed by modern UX research to offer a better experience.

Hardly the "Terminal for the 21st Century" if it's MacOS only.

That is unless you subscribe to the belief that Apple has an overwhelming tech dominance or are an Apple stan and any refuse to recognise any other platform.

I wonder how much this is parsing the output of bash and how much it’s actually got it’s own shell? It seems to me that there is reasonable room for a better shell to exist.

Cool, but I think I'll just stick with build into Bash binding Ctrl-X Ctrl-E (or v in vi mode) for editing the command in my $EDITOR

I have been searching for a replacement since iTerm is not the greatest on macOS. Will give this a try

Really? iTerm is rock solid. Even macOS Terminal is pretty decent. Both options are a lot better than anything I’ve tried on Windows.

Have you tried Windows Terminal? iTerm is very slow for me on M1.

A terminal with inbuilt keylogger, sending all my keystrokes into the cloud? No, thank you.

This looks interesting. Is it MacOS only? And how does it behave with tools like tmux or ssh?

Yep MacOS only for now. SSH works ok, it wraps the native SSH and does some magic so your milage will vary. For TMUX, don't know what you would need that for honestly.

>For TMUX, don't know what you would need that for honestly.

It's super useful for doing things on remote servers. Tmux can maintain a "session" between ssh connections. So I can start a long running process on a tmux pane and then log out and come back to it later to see how things went. I also generally do development over SSH so it's nice to not have to re-set things up each time I SSH into the VM.

https://docs.warp.dev/features/ssh addresses this. Tmux is not supported over ssh.

Deal breaker for me -- always run with multiple panes/sessions/windows.

Unless it has a password manager then there is no chance I will switch from iTerm2.

It’s not Electron so a positive.

I use Warp daily as a fang dev, they have constantly improved the product. I'm a believer.

What does being a "fang dev" have to do with the quality of this terminal?

fang devs like to think that they are somehow superior to the rest of us. So they think mentioning that they work for a fang company gives their statements greater importance.

That’s not what I was getting at. I’m actually half retarded when it comes to dev. What I meant was that warp went above and beyond to accommodate organizational enforced security policies that were breaking warp for me.

Okay fair enough

That’s not an apology.

So more than any place I’ve ever worked, FANGs have large organizational policies that make using alternative terminals like this more difficult. Warp does a lot behind the scenes to do its magic. This was being broken by organizational policy enforced config on my dev box.

The warp team went above and beyond to work around those restrictions and configurations, and improved their product as a result.

I really liked that and it earned trust with me.

That’s all I meant. I should have been more clear.

Any affiliation with the company making it?

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