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Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.

Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.

Do I have that right?

I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?

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Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.

Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.

Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.

I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.

I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.

FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.

Is it Rust or Node/Electron? That’s one of the key considerations I have these days; I’m over bloatware.

I have this functionality bound in alt-backslash using this - https://github.com/CGamesPlay/llm-cmd-comp

You write your prompt in any terminal, press alt-backslash and it'll give you a command which you can either refine or accept (or esc/ctrl-c out).

I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.

If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.

Why do you need to have a whole fork to remove them when there is a single AI killswitch option already?

I really liked it, even though I didn't use any of the AI stuff. Then they just keep pushing the AI harder and harder, and I finally stopped and figured out how to configure the Win11 Terminal app "good enough" and dropped it.

It's not as good, but it's good enough.

What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?

edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.

https://thenewstack.io/developer-review-of-warp-for-windows-...

If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.

Off the top of my head:

- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly - The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky - The command prediction - The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)

The other thing I really love is the cross-platform support.

I don't have to tweak my usage of the terminal depending which platform I'm on.

I just have to remember to use Ctrl+Shift for copy/paste on Windows/Linux.

Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)

Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.

I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.

Also, great example of why you don't take a terminal that requires login as your daily workhorse. It never ends well.

That was a mistake they made initially, but iirc they got rid of it after a while.

If you block internet access to Warp, it refuses to start. That's all I need to know about it.

Warp is a terminal for people who don’t like the terminal.

can you please elaborate?

guessing it spits you out on Win11?

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