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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I became a fan of Warp when they offered a terminal that treated the input as a normal text input field so I could use my normal keyboard text editing shortcuts.

But I understand that's not a viable business model. I'm back on iTerm2 now cause Warp isn't approved for use at my job (and never would be with all their AI pushing), and I've managed to pound iTerm 2 into something usable enough but I wish every terminal would copy Warp's text input style.

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I never used Warp, is the editing similar to PowerShell ISE's editing by chance? Powershell ISE is like a mix of a script editor and a PowerShell UI so you can script out some things or use the terminal directly.

The killer feature that got me into using it was the shell integration. Your prompt, input and command output are entirely separate entities rather than one single stream of text. It's like using a Jupyter notebook for the terminal.

That was also the thing that destroyed it for me, since navigating between history entries started getting more and more unreliable and sometimes clicking on the input box would randomly resize the entire window or move it between screens. I don't entirely know how they managed that one.

I can't compare to PowerShell, I've only ever used the Mac version of Warp (the Windows version is relatively new, I can't attest to the quality)

To be more specific about what I was saying, on Mac, in any standard text field I can hold Cmd and hit left or right to jump to the start or end of a line, or hold Option to jump a word at a time, and if I hold shift it'll select text. Option-delete deletes the last word, etc.

I've managed to get iTerm2 to do a lot of this stuff but, for example, Option-shift-left, instead of highlighting the last word, spits out the text ";4D"

does anyone know if the above experience and fluid vim-style behaviour can be replicated on something like ghostty? this was the killer feature of Warp imo and I saw no other benefits, but somehow not other terminal has been able to (or tried to) catch up

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it's not necessarily a terminal feature per se. Have you tried setting `vi` mode in your shell? There is a bit of lag going into normal mode in ghostty; maybe ghostty is configured by default to wait for a second keypress when you hit Esc and you can disable that.

Bash (also works in zsh): https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-...

I do use vi mode in the shell, but unfortunately it's not quite the Warp experience, which has full vim functionality with visual mode, multi-cursor, mouse selection, syntax highlighting, etc :)

Maybe try ghostel with evil-mode, if you're okay with Emacs? https://github.com/dakra/ghostel

I feel the same. I also really liked the text input. The suggestions and autocomplete where also easy to use. And the block-based approach, with easy copying and sharing (through a URL), were super useful at times.

And for the AI part, the AI command generation (from plain text) was great. Also the follow-up command suggestions were handy sometimes.

Too bad Warp entered enshittification (already some time ago). Any (open source) alternatives for the good parts?

Warp engineer here - Warp is open source as well if there's anything we can do to improve the default experience. Otherwise, it's available to fork and customize: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp

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