Hacker News Reader

Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

People on HN are so ludicrously out of touch. Yes we all wish we could live in Hackerville and spend all day tweaking config files to customize our ultra fast rendering OSS terminal emulators. In the real world most people are not using terminals for the sake of fooling around with config files, they are trying to accomplish real tasks. For these people, paying for a terminal or using something that is login-gated is completely fine and acceptable if it makes you even 1% more productive. This is Warp's market. If you don't like it, go back to Wezterm or iTerm2 or whatever. Nobody has a gun to your head, those tools will always exist.

View on HN

Western config takes like 2 seconds. And out of the box it's pretty, easy to use and fast.

Also let's be real. All the default terminals are great and fast enough for typical use cases, the only ones that really care about GPU accelerated terminals are the ones that use editors in the terminal, so they're going to be customizing everything anyway.

Yes, absolutely. I personally use Wezterm. I also use the VS Code built-in terminal pretty heavily. Do I use it out of some ideological hard line against applications that require a login or cost money? No. Would I be open to a terminal application that made my life easier in some ways? Sure. I'm not sure they'll get my money, but it's pretty easy to imagine there would be a market for it.

The config is in lua, so the potential for sinking time into customization is much higher

The potential is there for sure, but to change font, theme, window decorations and most other "basic" configuration is 1 line apiece. But yeah, Lua is a full programming language so you could go off the deep end. But default behaviour is so good I doubt most people will spend more than 5 minutes customizing it.

If that were true they wouldn't have made a desperate move like this.

Ah yes they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts!

Not because they aren't attracting enough users or something. No you see because that might require you to be at least a little wrong. So that can't be true.

Also most people have really good metrics and telemetry to measure their productivity and are really good at telling what makes them productive and how to invest in it.

No you see, don't worry, it is HN that is out of touch, not you.

> For these people, paying for a terminal or using something that is login-gated is completely fine

Those people don't use a terminal.

Yes they absolutely do. If you think otherwise you are mistaken - the HN commentariat is not representative.

The Dropbox fallacy doesn't really apply here. What user is technical enough to use a terminal but not technical enough to configure it, especially since the main ones on Apple machines are configured with a nice GUI that takes a few clicks to customize?

And even if config files were involved, do you think people configure their terminals (editors, whatever) not to increase productivity? Do you think we use vi as a sort of fidget spinner, and just edit our configs for the sake of editing them?

The other commenters are right: Warp has no real target user base. This, I believe is by design because their business model is Juicero for bash. They exist to farm VC money.

Those people just use Terminal.app or Windows Terminal. They're not installing alternative terminals emulators.

Exactly right. Warp have defined their market as vanishingly small here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com