Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't crazy about the proprietary nature of Warp, but I tried it and was sold almost immediately. I can use the same modifier-key commands to select and manipulate text that I'm used to, which feels super nice. They also provide such good sessionization out of the box that I don't really feel the need to install tmux or anything like that.

View on HN

The problem is that Warp is closed source, requires a log in, has extensive telemetry, promised to go open source but never did and has raised 78M from VCs including 50M from Sequoia, the FTX people.

Indeed, VCs will want a return on their investment at some point, and it doesn't seem like simply sharing some terminal commands in the cloud with your team will be enough to justify that valuation. This is especially true as the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon of the last 15 years is now over.

Personally I'd never use something VC backed for something so critical to my productivity.

Having never heard of Warp and wondering what would get VCs to give that much to a terminal project I just took look at their website and it’s obviously the AI/LLM aspect.

With that said does anyone know which open source projects are looking at LLM integration. It’s not a bad idea.

I took a look before this year and it used to be that their value proposition was more so geared towards sharing terminal inputs and outputs easily. Now they seem to be leveraging OpenAI APIs instead as their main value prop.

However, I still don't really see why someone would pay 12 bucks a month for that when they could just pay a little bit more for full blown ChatGPT and use AI for much more than terminal commands (and there are already terminal and vim plugins to directly query GPT with your API key, which is orders of magnitudes cheaper than Warp). It seems like a product that has no clear target market or target usage, seems more like a feature than a full product.

Having an LLM run terminal prompts sounds like a recipe for disaster

It’s more about sophisticated replacement for tab completion.

I can just run Llama locally for that, no VC required (and indeed there are plugins which do exactly this already). Llama and other local LLMs are being optimized to run on the CPU on less than 1 GB of RAM so it's not as if only those with beefy GPUs can do so.

Agreed and the part I’m missing is these plugins which do this. Any suggestions or recommendations would be interesting to hear. Which terminals and which plugins etc.

Thankfully it doesn't run it, it just inserts the commands into your prompt. It's kinda nice but I've also been using the terminal for like 12 years, so I don't find myself relying on it very often.

It's not at all a bad idea as something like "optional plugin," but it's definitely absolutely a bad idea if we're also mentioning VC's.

> I can use the same modifier-key commands to select and manipulate text that I'm used to, which feels super nice.

I know this is not a complete solution, but just in case you weren’t aware, the keybindings in GNU Readline are nearly entirely configurable[1]. Getting some of the keybindings to work could require digging into serial terminal arcana[2], unfortunately, but here a terminal emulator that supports either the Kitty keyboard protocol[3] or the (venerable if impressively badly documented) modifyOtherKeys feature[4] could make things easier (messing with the serial driver[2] seems an overreaction to me, and you can’t get acceptable Ctrl-C behaviour that way anyway). The “new” terminal emulators mentioned in this thread (alacritty, contour, kitty, wezterm) should be able to do the trick, and of course xterm as well (probably rxvt too?); tmux compat needs help, though[5].

[1] https://tiswww.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Bin...

[2] https://susam.net/blog/from-xon-xoff-to-forward-incremental-...

[3] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/

[4] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/modified-keys.html

[5] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/3335

Reply on news.ycombinator.com