by zachlloyd on 12/8/22, 6:04 PM with 69 comments
by smoldesu on 12/8/22, 6:23 PM
I don't want to stoke the flames again, but even VS Code doesn't force you to log-in. Microsoft knows that blocking you from using basic functionality of a free app is a bad user experience. It's good that you're letting people opt-in to a more private experience, but that was hardly the largest problem I could see the last time this was brought up.
From where I'm standing, it looks like you're trying to build a terminal for a pretty small audience; people who own a Mac, but don't want to use iTerm2 or the builtin terminal. That leaves a markedly tiny audience of people who don't use custom shells/incompatible configurations, want to log-in to your application and don't care about any of iTerm2's extra features. It's a bit of a pipe-dream to be honest, and you're not helping yourself by delaying your versions for other platforms.
My intention is not to discourage you, but I think this project needs a little tough love. You might be optimizing for the wrong users.
by thecodrr on 12/8/22, 6:37 PM
by blopker on 12/8/22, 8:09 PM
The first thing I noticed is that it is fast. Noticeably faster than iTerm, which I use daily. Printing a large file doesn't stutter at all. As a test I printed (cat) a large video file. Warp finished in half a second, where I had to kill iTerm because I got bored watching all the garbled text fly by. Now, I'm not often printing video files to my terminal, but boy is it annoying when I do something dumb like that on accident. Sometimes iTerm just stops responding.
Other than that, there's some great feature innovations, like keeping the prompt visible even when scrolling or treating every command as a block. The block idea is nice because I can pin (bookmark, I guess) the output, so I can easily refer to it later instead of constantly scrolling around to find it. Maybe other terminals do this, but I've never seen it.
Also, aside from turning off telemetry, I didn't have to do any configuration to get it in a usable state. With iTerm I spend at least 30 minutes poking around the hundreds (thousands?) of settings to set everything up.
Now, there are some features than need a bit of work, like the AI stuff is pretty basic. It can't really do complex commands, like anything involving pipes or xargs. Tab completion is a bit clunky, like it will try and cd me into a text file.
Anyway, it's clear to me now that I've become complacent with iTerm and there's still a lot of innovation on the table for terminals. I think a new generation of developers that care less about open source and privacy will like this. However, I'm mostly happy that there seems to be real innovation here. Maybe we'll see some of the best ideas make their way into other products?
by juice_bus on 12/8/22, 6:37 PM
by sshine on 12/8/22, 6:42 PM
by tksb on 12/8/22, 6:53 PM
by ZoomZoomZoom on 12/8/22, 6:57 PM
by chimen on 12/8/22, 7:09 PM
by blackthornyugen on 12/8/22, 7:06 PM
by user3939382 on 12/9/22, 5:14 AM
by killingtime74 on 12/8/22, 7:13 PM
by slig on 12/8/22, 7:47 PM
by ibejoeb on 12/8/22, 7:45 PM
by imwillofficial on 12/8/22, 7:22 PM
by _andrei_ on 12/9/22, 8:53 AM
- If you want fuzzy command, history, file / contents search, use fzf [0] (you should probably be using fzf and ripgrep [1] anyway if you work daily in your terminal).
- If you want sessions, use a multiplexer like tmux [2] or zellij [3].
- If you need to have your own "cheatsheets" use navi [4]. If you want to sync them with your team, use whatever sync solution you like.
- If you think you need a text editor in your shell's command line, reconsider. If you *really* want to edit and re-execute the last command in your editor of choice, use something like "fc $!" [5] or create your own shell solution for it.
- If you want a sexy prompt use starship [6].
- If you want terminal sharing use tty-share [7].
- If you want to ask GPT for help, don't do it in your terminal. Open up ChatGPT (or whatever future UI will exist), ask your question, and check that there's nothing harmful in what your about to execute. Sometimes friction is good.
If you want a terminal that's pretty out-of-the-box, where things are "clickable", you don't have the time or interest to invest your energy in learning tools that could massively boost your productivity for years to come, and you don't care about designing your own workflow and being able swap parts of it at any point, without depending on any single "app", and if you don't mind "logging into your terminal" (what the actual fuck, excuse the language) or the terminal adding its own SSH wrapper and doing things you don't know to the hosts you connect, then maybe Warp is OK for you. But then again, maybe you're not going in the right direction.
There are so many more awesome ways you could improve your shell experience than making things clicky. I don't understand what the market is for Warp, is it for wanna-be professionals that can't be bothered to become professionals? I completely fail to see how this could succeed as a paid product, especially with a subscription model.
[0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
[1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
[2] https://github.com/tmux/tmux
[3] https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij
[4] https://github.com/denisidoro/navi
[5] https://shapeshed.com/unix-fc
[6] https://starship.rs/
[7] https://github.com/elisescu/tty-share