I remember seeing this terminal emulator, deciding to give it a shot to see what the deal is, and being asked to sign in. I have never uninstalled a program faster in my life.
Never understood why people use iTerm. I know back in the day it was because of the lack of tabs in Terminal.app, but tabs were added long ago and tmux was always a better option for that kind of functionality anyway.
Genuinely curious because I feel like I'm missing something. I tried it again a while ago and still couldn't see anything I couldn't already do.
I’m not sure if other terminals support this feature[0] because iTerm was the first one I discovered with it and I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I use it for the global, Quake-style[1] terminal that slides down from the top of my screen as an overlay on top of whatever I’m doing.
> tmux was always a better option for that kind of functionality anyway
Not sure a lot of people would agree. Tmux is way less intuitive than tabs/split panes directly supported by the terminal emulator. Also tmux is dog slow compared to native tabs.
Less intuitive? Sure, but those who learn it tend to agree it's the better option. Not sure what "dog slow" means, but it's really fast for me, at least when using a fast terminal emulator.
As an example Alacritty+tmux feels wayyy slower than iTerm for tabs/splitting.
Tmux also comes with some limitations that make it annoying (to me) to use 100% of the time :
- scroll back is painful compared to native terminal emulator scrollback, so is mouse support
- rendering gets slowed down by tmux because it parses the output itself, the fastest terminal emulator with tmux will feel slower than iTerm without tmux
- some TUIs work badly in tmux, neovim for instance. I’ve also had issues with htop in the past
Tmux is a great tool, but I can’t conceive using it by default, it’s too janky for that.
For me, it's some very simple things. Like being able to set the alt behaviour separately for left/right alt (so I can have the meta behaviour while still being able to type funky characters)
Yeah. "Pay us a recurring fee so we don't make your experience worse" is a business model that flat-out doesn't work with power users, I think. Most of us are old enough to have seen our favorite paid software turn into bloated cloud-based subscription software - we don't want different flavors of the same moldy ice cream.
Warp is just something that will, quite honestly, never appeal to me. I don't think the UI is bad, I don't think their featureset is bad, but I also have no desire to use a proprietary terminal app. Tilix is open source and has worked fine for the past 10 years - I'm not giving it up for a chic frosted-glass background and some syntactic eye-candy for bash.
I personally will pay a subscription for literally every piece of software I use if it means the software makes me more productive. On an hourly basis my time is worth more than $100/hr. That means if a subscription tool is $10/month it only needs to save me 6 minutes of time, per month, to make it worth it.
Hah! I would never, but I guess that's why good options exist for the both of us. If someone pitched me a six-minute timesaver that costs as much as a cup of coffee, I'd gently remind them that I bought an espresso machine years ago.
My fear of paid software mostly stems from not actually owning what I pay for. I know people who are (horrifyingly) unable to use Git without a paid GUI that handles everything for them. If one day they update their computer and it's unsupported, or if the developer quits updating it, they've gotta learn a new UI. I'd rather just learn how to use the original tool quickly, and save myself a few hundred hours with 2 or 3 macros.
To each their own. I've paid for too much software that has gone to shit in the past, and I'm perfectly productive with free tools I can actually own.
I would love to pay for Arc, it makes me happy and productive. Unfortunately, it seems like the number of people willing to do is too small to support VC valuations and they are abandoning the product :(
Terminals don't take much effort to maintain compared to a browser. But most browsers rely on the ad revenue. The business models of the old Opera or Arc feel fresh.
fair criticism, and this is the reason we removed the login requirement.
just to clarify though, the point of the login is that we have features that cost money to provide like AI and collaboration, not anything more nefarious, but i get that it's a new behavior and reasonable devs might not like it.
I appreciate that you've changed it and truly wish you luck! An alternative that would've have made me immediately uninstall would be to just block those account-requiring features behind a login. Not even letting me get a local Zsh prompt without logging in was too much.
I don't know what subculture of developers they're targeting, but I'm definitely not part of it. They should have known that a login on startup is completely unacceptable and detestable to an important segment of developers. Not less how they launched without Linux support.
They have signalled to me, loud and clear, that their product is not for people like me, and I will never try it. Doesn't matter that they've removed the requirement, we've all seen what type of product this is.
And for reference, they acknowledged that this was a problem two years ago but didn't fix it until now. It speaks to either a very lazy development ethic internally, or an outright distrust of their own audience when they speak up. Either way, this is not a product that deserves my telemetry, much less my salary.
It’s a for profit company. Seems pretty obvious why they fought for two years on this. They probably had to convince themselves internally that free users will be lured into paying for it to capture more revenue or something like that.
there is a large segment of developers who find the command line hard to use or who just want a better, more productive experience using it. to be clear, you may not fall into that bucket, and that's OK.
the point of the login is that we have features that cost us money to provide like AI, and we need some concept of identity to prevent their abuse. i don't think that's detestable (e.g. it's very similar to cursor or copilot), but i get that's a new behavior in the terminal and am sorry it put you off.
The damage is done. You can't overthrow the king (whether you pledge fealty to iTerm2, PowerShell/WSL, Putty, Hyper ... ) if you have to sign up to get past the castle gates. And in the two years it took to remove the signup, the townsfolk have realized their kings are good enough for what they want to do anyway.
Deal breaker: I do not like normalizing the deviancy of sending shell input to a third party. F opt-out telemetry and a "trust us" privacy policy. They're pressured to deliver maximum profits in a short time, and having to use the internet to use your shell and paying for the privilege of handing over private work is absolutely absurd. It could all, and will likely, as most startups go, shutdown at some point in the future and then users will likely be left with nothing. It's a signal there's too much VC money available.
Fundamental error: It's an attempt to innovate in a crowded category inappropriately, like trying to make a physical proxy "phone" or security device that could've been an app, it's too tied to an app. It could've been reduced to a multi-shell, shell-oriented hook that would've been inherently multi-platform without the need for yet another desktop app and would've been portable to other environments without the effort or expense.
ha - never heard of this so I downloaded it. Still get presented with a sign up screen but I guess before you couldn't skip? There is a skip option and when you click it it says "are you SURE you want to skip?" - isn't this a technical product for technical users? If they're trying to rehabilitate their image, I certainly can't see being patronizing is the answer. Only thing I'll be skipping is this software.
> isn't this a technical product for technical users?
I would expect a technical user would be immediately skeptical at the value proposition. I can't even trust git to not break itself when I'm using it directly. Throwing in an LLM and natural language sounds like an express elevator to hell.
i am phenomenally skeptical of LLMs as tools that i can apply to my job, and so i say this only to offer a counterpoint - i actually think that warp is the only LLM tool that i like using. i've actually gotten real value out of it that didn't require me doing tons of cleanup or code review on its output.
they did a reasonable job of integrating it with the terminal, of giving you explanations and clear points of review before taking any specific actions on your system, and in general i reasonably trust it won't do anything i don't expect or modify anything critical without asking first - that's been my experience thus far (no guarantees, it's an LLM after all)
for my entire career i've never been much of a bash person, i learn just enough to slice up some text file or something as needed, or put together a build process, and then it all leaves my brain because it's just not something i'm interested in. i used to lean on the tldr manpages pretty extensively when i needed to do a bunch of bulk file processing in the terminal or something.
the case where warp shines is the case where i'd have a folder of text files, or some data i wanted to parse and process real fast, and i'd be thinking "god, i could pull out my little bash reference, or i could throw together a quick python script to get this data in the state i need." i'd say it has an 85% first-time hit rate as far as "i need to modify this file in this way" or "i'd like you to find all the html tags in it with this attribute and extract the values into a list in a text file" or "can you convert all the HTML lists in this document to markdown lists" or "i just downloaded a huge CSV of logs can you just return the count of a certain token on each line in a newline-separated text file." just fast little things i'd either build a utility for, install a plugin for, or poke around online for a website to quickly do.
it's saved me a LOT of time in those cases. i went from only opening it when i wanted to use it for one of those cases to using it full time over the course of a few months and i am cautiously optimistic about it. i was not thrilled about the login requirement, and i'm glad they dropped it.
it also enables justified laziness - i'm doing something in ruby and i haven't used it in a long time, i'm just popping in for a minute - what command do i type to activate a virtual environment? i already know what i want to do, i just don't know the specific incantation off the top of my head. i can just type what i intend to do, and it reminds me of the answer and does it. easy. it also detected which virtual environment tool i'd installed years ago for me, so i got the correct one on the first try.
i obviously can't say whether "optimizing annoying one-off text-munging tasks" is worth the various tradeoffs and sharing data with the company, but it's the only LLM tool i've kept in my workflow after trialing it, and applied specifically to the cases it shines at it does a good enough job to be a time-saver (not my experience with copilot, cursor, so on.) i also wouldn't trust its output in a build process or anything that would be frequently run or impact production data. those are all strikes against it, to be fair.
just my two cents. i'm not gonna hard sell you on this at all - i'm not that passionate about it and only use the free tier - but it's probably the best case i've seen for "LLMs can help you in your job" out of every case i've seen.
The fact that they even required a login in the first place is crazy for a terminal. I doubt this is going to convert users that previously didn't use Warp because it required a login.
For those that have to bounce between Mac and Linux for work/personal reasons, I cannot recommend Kitty terminal enough.
The main thing that's a big of a pain is you'll probably want to set up a scrollback pager (I use neovim as mine but vim works too) so you easily search the terminal output and copy/paste from it.
I looked at alacritty but I really like using terminal tabs and the alacritty dev is really really against them and I found the dev's attitude to be more than a bit abrasive.
Not that Kovid (kitty's dev) does not come off the same way sometimes, but I tend to agree with Kovid a lot more.
Do check out wezterm. I didn't want to go into comparing developers but wez the main developer is a huge reason I prefer wezterm. They have tabs, panes, sessions, a mux implementation among many many other features.
I was looking for a way to get a user prompt within wez and came across this page which has an example for what you asked for "Example of interactively renaming the current tab".
Recently I started using wave terminal [1] which has a somehow better ux and is also open source. It provides free access to GPT-4o mini (which is free for all without login I know) which ia handy for quick searches. It is working separate from your files and doesn't interact with it which is good compromise in my opinion.
Warp is still a development tool run by a VC backed company, and history tells us how this will end, despite positive intentions and promises of “we won’t be evil, seriously”.
Other terminals are free, open, and more than good enough, why would I use Warp? I’ll pay for good development tools, it’s not about that at all, it’s just that Warp is a… terminal. I pay for JetBrains because it’s that much better than the free options (my opinion). Is warp that much better than iterm?
I do have an open mind, convince me that warp is worth it, that it is irreplaceable. Convince that I need it even though it will be enshitified like Postman.
I like it. I pay for it. I expect it’ll go to shit when the money tap is turned off but I’m enjoying it while I can. I’d rather see a bunch of VC money subsidise destined-to-fail developer tool businesses than… not, because the technical founders of these companies are typically using VC money to pay for things they want to make and at least some of it is open-source.
Warp is good, it’s a step up from iterm for people who spend a bunch of time in the terminal but don’t want to invest their brain power into emacs or vim or whatever is real nerd software nowadays. $25/month is basically free for the amount of time I use it. I’d pay $25/month for anything that makes my life marginally easier.
Exactly. Not to me. Fuck subscriptions for every little thing without ownership. If BMW want to sell a license for heated seats or automatic headlight wipers, more power to them, but count me out.
From the absurdly CPU-intensive landing page it seems the novelty is mainly some network storage and an LLM-integration, things I already have several of in my terminals on my work computer. I switch over to them in the blink of an eye because my window manager is extremely responsive and keeping their output localised and not split up in a single pseudo-conversation in my current main terminal is a perk, not a bug.
I don’t care if a tool is free or paid, I care if it is going to make my life better. You can sit in the office laughing at me for paying to use software, I’m
not bothered, because I won’t be in the office to hear the laughter, as I’ll be using all the time I’ve saved to do something I want to do.
Pay me $250k/year to write code and I’ll spend $5k of that on a paid for editor and a paid for terminal and a paid for git client and a paid for database client and a paid for rest client and a paid for shortcut app so that I can go home at 3pm every day and spend my remaining $245k on the things I care about instead of being stuck in the office micromanaging my vim configuration so that the nerds will respect me.
It's the Starbucks over-commodification of features, apps, and ordinary products to extract money from a sliver of rich people and an increasingly impoverished nation where wages for the bottom 75% have been flat for 40 years while real costs as proportion of income have skyrocketed, including education and housing. There's a ~60% chance of recession around Feb 2025 and that means lots more tech layoffs and pullback in dev tool spending. The point is that such a controversial, narrow rented service in a crowded category competing with FOSS apps for such a small addressable market appears risky and unreasonable.
Look at their landing page. Instead of switching to a web browser or LLM-shell when you want to query out how to generate some boilerplate you can just type it into your terminal and you'll get responses there without having to resort to Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, like we troglodytes do.
> We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now.
Totally fair, Postman used to be good too. Postman still is a Pretty Good HTTP Client to be fair, it’s just that it is very clearly being used to extract cash from orgs that will pay for it.
Nice! I no longer have to send biometrics and my credit card to run `ls`! Thanks Warp!
On a more serious tone, how could this thing raise 73 million USD? I wish one could short startups.
Edit: Wow, it gets better.
Their terminal only works on Mac, do they need to raise more $$$ to bring it to Linux/Windows?
Also, at $15/mo, they'd need about 400,000 paying users to even recoup the investment. Will that many OS X users pay $180/year for something that is essentially free?
How does this make sense? Did they accidentally stumble into AGI and are keeping this a secret except for their investors? Are they laundering money? This whole scheme makes WeWork seem sane.
Couple of thoughts on Warp's feature for documentation of command line args... seems doable as open source.
Hypothetically if an LSP-server existed for command line args, it could be integrated at the shell prompt to create an autocomplete popover. Even cooler, generating LSP syntax should be doable en masse as an LLM can read every single man page in one pass and add what it learns to the supported syntax.
And for generating entire commands it's possible to create a desktop app: I'm imagining it having a text field to type what you need ("a command to double the speed of a video") and then it'd:
Hey there, this is Aloke from Warp here. We originally built custom tab completions in Warp partly because of limitations with how Warp’s input works. We think our completions can be better for a lot of common commands (git, yarn, npm, etc) but I totally hear you that when completions in Warp don’t work like they do in another terminal it’s very frustrating.
No ETA for this yet, but this is very much on our radar to fix asap.
It might be worth updating the GitHub Issue: the impression I got from looking at it was that it wasn't a priority (the most recent official comment is over a year old and comes across as quite dismissive of the request).
Warp is great - I use it as my daily terminal. The best features are being able to edit commands, chunking the output into blocks and AI generated commands at your fingertips.
My daily driver for a few months now, even after trying Rio/Ghostty/Wezterm...
Favorite feature is the notification when a long running command has finished. I wish I could hook any command there...
If I'm remembering correctly, I was using iTerm before Warp. I listened to some of the devs on the Changelog podcast and it seemed worth checking out.
At the time, iTerm was getting really heavy and slow for me and I was losing a day every few months tracking down the cause. Warp was immediately faster and prettier so I stuck with it. They're also super fast with updates and responsive on Github with issues.
I honestly don't use many of their features besides being able to ask the LLM for how to do something random in git and getting the answer without leaving the terminal. The way they organize each command+response into blocks is also cool for readability and copy/pasting.
Still using xterm, don't plan on stopping anytime soon. It's not the simplest terminal in the world, not by any means... but it's never blown my foot off and I can trust to just work.
Too late? I feel dirty because I went against my morals and did give you a fake email address the first time around, but now you do this, so what the heck?
I also have been trailing out waveterm [1], which is open source and can be used without telemetry or logins. Mike from wave was really nice to chat with and ultimately that's what I decided to use.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I think I'll just stick to iTerm.