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.

I think I'll just stick to iTerm.

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.

You also have to run it as admin. If you don't, it tries to auto-update every day and when it can't presents a big, obnoxious red banner.

[1] https://x.com/WarpSpeedDan/status/1811447481047097788

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.

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.

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 use

# https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/719#issuecomment-...

scrollback_pager nvim -u ~/.config/kitty/kitty-scrollback-pager.vimrc -c "silent write! /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer | te cat /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer -"

and the scrollback pager vimrc:

``` set nonumber nolist showtabline=0 foldcolumn=0" set clipboard+=unnamedplus autocmd TermOpen * normal G map # ^ map q :qa!<CR> "silent write! /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer | te cat /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer - ```

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.

[1] https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm

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:

1. generate the command ("ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "setpts=2*PTS" -c:v libx264 output.mp4"

2. copy the command to clipboard

3. display an explanation of each part of the command and what it does (raw markdown from the model should be fine)

4 (optional togglable preference setting) after paste is detected, restore previous clipboard content

This app could be created really fast now LLMs can code for us. And the command line generation could be done fully locally with ollama.

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 wished I could like warp, but customizing how my terminal looks and feels isn't negotiable.

Too late.

I've now tried Warp twice (once off the back of this post).

Switching back to iTerm2 again because of https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/1811

I like the sound of the other two features (rich text editing and automatic AI commands) but the muscle-memory cost is too high.

Spyware? In my terminal? It's more likely than you think!

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.

To people who are using Warp: what makes you choose it over the alternatives?

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...

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.

/r

Can I (yet) just press tab and have it inspect my PATH variable for completable items?

That is literally the only reason I gave up on it.

The older I get, the more appreciation I have for simple tools. Terminal is certainly one of those tools that I want to stay simple.

Good luck to the team, not for me.

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.

[1] waveterm.dev

your terminal should not have RPC . I've been going the other direction, even replacing BASH with DASH , it's 90% smaller

Great tool, daily driver for me and most of my team

I would like to know what folks are doing that requires a high performance terminal.

I don't think I'm much more productive at Terminal.app in 2024 than I was in 386 Linux console-connected to other computer via 14400 dial-up in 1999.

Yeah, I uninstalled it sharpish after being asked to set up an account. I have no compelling reason to dump iTerm2.

bind keys please!

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.