Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal (opens in new tab)

Wanted to give it a shot but got disappointed when I launched it and the following happened:

- Outgoing request to googleapis.com

- Outgoing request to segment.io

- Outgoing request to sentry.io

- Requires sign up (only via Github, mind you)

I understand the first request is probably to get some dynamic configuration, even though I'd rather my terminal ship with static configuration. But then you have segment and sentry: not interested in sending telemetry from my terminal. Finally having user accounts for a terminal is such as strange concept.

I really wanted to like it, too. The screenshots look great

If you want to use a terminal that is actually open source and doesn't have telemetry, much less only available via signing in with GitHub, use Alacritty, also written in Rust and cross platform.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

This is perhaps slightly orthogonal to the main discussion here on this thread, but I have a question for Zach (and the various engineers posting on this thread):

Did you guys talk to real-world users while building this and before this launch?

This whole blow-up re: your telemetry / open sourcey'ness seems like it could have been avoided. I'm curious if you actually floated these ideas with real world users and a) everyone else is cool with it but the HN crowd is super put off by it, b) everyone is super put off by it but you decided to launch anyway, or c) you didn't actually check with real-world users and hoped for the best.

Sorry if that sounds snarky - it's not my intent. I'm genuinely curious here as a product person / entrepreneur / builder, etc.

This is neat, but I'm not convinced it's going in the right direction.

It's not open source, and "maybe it will eventually be" is unacceptable for such a core component of an engineer's workflow. Most of the features on the front page are "coming soon," not actually available. There's no timeline for support for non-Mac OS systems, and it's built using Metal rather than any cross-platform API, so it will be at least moderately difficult to port. (Isn't the whole point collaboration?) It is "blazingly-fast" but has no benchmarks for latency or startup time.

The team raised money because "[b]uilding a terminal is hard," and the business model seems reasonable - build a terminal people like, and then get businesses to pay for it - but I'm hard-pressed to find a use case that would benefit from the upsides of this tool which isn't also utterly hamstrung by its shortcomings, at least currently.

Yeah, maybe you can justify it at an all-Mac dev shop, but at the last all-Mac place I worked we did everything this currently does with iTerm (free) and Tuple, and frankly I don't see this obviating the need for Tuple in that use case. (EDIT: Tuple also works fine on Linux, and of course there are myriad excellent terminals for Linux.)

Perhaps most importantly, though, this FAQ entry concerns me:

> Every session you work on your desktop can be backed by a secure web permalink. It opens into a browser tab that shows your terminal state and allows readers to scroll and interact with the read-only elements. You might use this for yourself: so you can view and run commands on it while you're away from your machine. Or you might share it with a coworker for debugging.

First of all, is this actually available at the moment? I think not, since "Web (WASM)" is still on the roadmap.

Second, "secure" is doing a lot of work here. What's the threat model Warp considers themselves secure against? How are these sessions allocated? Does every terminal start in a connected state, or is the connection only made once the user opts in? Are the terminal sessions E2EE? Are they exposed to Warp's internal systems? If so, what is stopping any attacker who makes it into Warp's network from remotely monitoring and controlling user machines? If Warp says it _is_ E2EE or otherwise secured in this manner, how can we trust them when it's not open source?

This seems too risky to be worth using seriously, and perhaps too risky to even try out.

It looks nice but I'd never use a shell that phone's home. Period.

I mean the CLI has been one of the last parts of my system that I really still trust is working on my behalf only.

This product made me rethink that assumption.

As for capturing the output from a command line on the mac (and also on linux IIRC) just use pbcopy/pbpaste.

My opinion: It's not worth giving your privacy away for features like this.

Anyone know how this lines up to other terminals performance wise. I’ve been pretty happy with alacritty, but would be willing to try a terminal with more features.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

They’ve raised $23m?!? Uhhh

There are some legitimate concerns about Warp throughout these comments (telemetry, business model, etc.).

But the one thing that really excites me is to have a full team working full-time on building the terminal that developers want to use. They're doing real user research, talking to developers, and taking feedback in forums like HN seriously - and using up millions of VC-dollars building a new version of this fundamentally important core utility. I'd much rather have that VC money go toward an attempt at a better terminal than some ML or web3 startup.

I think this doesn't usually happen? All the terminal emulators I've used usually open-source projects developed in someone's free time. Don't get me wrong, projects like Alacritty, urxvt, xterm, Terminator etc. are amazing for the funding they have (I think mostly $0?), but I'm super excited to see what a cohesive terminal based on real UX research can look like.

Congrats on your launch, though it seems you are getting slammed here and it may not be the reception you anticipated. I'm genuinely curious if you talked to your target demographic prior to this or only postulated that this would be a viable product with the proposed revenue model? The HN crowd is brutally candid and honest. Hopefully the criticism you are currently receiving can be structured into a revision of the product.

This is really interesting. I have been annoyed for a long time on how ssh, the terminal emulator, tmux, and the shell don't know anything about each other. I also started writing a native terminal emulator (no electron, of course) to fix these problems. I kind of thought I'd do the slow burn over 4 or 5 years of using it myself (being a shell sadly means writing a programming language, and you don't make a good one over the weekend), then maybe stick it on Github and get a Patreon going if other people want to use it and could be convinced for something they can get for free.

Warp has taken a dramatically different approach; they got millions in funding and just made it a company. I am shocked because I never considered there was a market for these things. Developers hate having their tools taken away when their credit card expires, and it's kind of hard to compete with free, which clearly works well enough to have created all software and systems currently in existence. But I guess there was a time when you only got a UNIX shell with a commercial UNIX license, and people did somehow get access to those, and they did become very popular.

Anyway, seeing this really made me rethink the world and I'm still reeling a little bit. (I think my thing will be better though ;)

While it's entertaining to see Warp get excoriated for telemetry, keep in mind that they're doing what everyone else is. The new Windows Terminal has opt-out telemetry, as does PowerShell 7, .NET Core, and well... pretty much everything Microsoft ships these days has telemetry on by default. Last I checked, a fairly basic Windows + Office setup has 200+ individual sets of telemetry.

To get this veritable torrent of information past those "pesky" secops people, they resort to underhanded tricks like using host names like "microsft.com" to bypass firewall rules blocking "microsoft.com".

It is borderline impossible to stop telemetry in a typical corporate environment without heroic, ongoing vigilance from a rabid sysadmin foaming at the mouth about privacy.

This is the new normal. Get used to it, or do something about it.

I assume Warp is fundamentally incompatible with GNU screen or tmux.

That's a shame because terminal multiplexers like GNU screen and tmux such a core part of my terminal usage that I'm hesitant to discard them, even for something that looks really useful like Warp.

I'm not sure how many people actively use terminal multiplexers like GNU screen and tmux, so maybe I represent only a tiny minority of users.

Like others here, I'm leery of replacing my terminal with a VC-backed, maybe open-sourced eventually product, and a bit annoyed it claimed a name already in use in the Rust world.

But...it is exciting to see someone reimagining the terminal a bit. People frequently talk about wanting a better GUI interaction model for everyone, but the actual ideas to improve it seem to be missing, I think because the desktop status quo is really not that bad for low-learning curve systems. (In fact, I think many of the changes in the name of desktop/mobile convergence have been for the worse.) I'm way more interested in the idea of creating a hybrid text/graphic command interface for programmers. There's a much better interface waiting for someone with the vision and (more importantly) ability to create an ecosystem around it. Some ideas:

* Warp's more visual completion is super welcome. Does it work with the shell's standard completion scripts?

* Warp's blocks look like a nice step in the right direction. How do they work? I'd guess it's ANSI codes like iTerm uses to distinguish the ends of commands, although that has the downside that a broken/hostile command can impersonate the shell saying the command has ended. It'd be nice to work out some compatible yet more robust protocol. (Maybe the shell takes responsibility for piping subcommand's output through it and filtering, or maybe something else.)

* It'd be interesting to further extend blocks with some protocol that allows programs to output within their block using richer elements: non-monotype fonts, adjustable tables, etc. A little like a Jupyter notebook, maybe. Even better if it works with some richer way for programs to pipe information to each other.

* Likewise, when launching alternate-screen terminal stuff, to allow them to do more with the rectangle than a grid of text. Closer to embedding an arbitrary cross-platform network-transparent GUI, launched from the shell, occupying its rectangle.

* And at first glance, looks like it's missing tmux-like features (whether integration with tmux proper like iTerm has or its own thing). I'd want that in any richer terminal app—most of my work in terminals is on remote machines, often over flaky network connections.

> I’m ___, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal

To be honest - it feels weird seeing a company launch a free terminal, in 2022. How will the company make money? How long will this tool be around for? How will this company degrade the experience, or my privacy, so they can make money?

I also don't know how to square my thoughts on the above with the need to have sustainable open source development which no one seems to pay for?

---

Anyway, neat to have a new terminal that isn't Electron, but I'll stick to MS Terminal. At least they already have all my telemetry data.

It's unfortunate that the name conflicts with an HTTP library in rust already: https://crates.io/crates/warp

Otherwise, it looks neat.

I've been loving Warp since discovering it on HN a few months back. I was originally drawn in by how it treats text input like a regular text input field out of the box, so I don't have to configure anything and my normal text editing shortcuts just work.

But the other features of it have been really great too. I like the terminal splitting, the history searching, the command palette, and no performance issues I've noticed either. It's made my terminal a joy to use for once. Keep up the great work!

One feature that’s missing from a surprising number of Mac terminals is a hotkey-bound non-activating dropdown (think Quake console) or HUD window (imagine a floating, frameless terminal window in the vein of the Alfred or Spotlight window).

The best implementation of this to date was in TotalTerminal/Visor, which was a mod for the Apple terminal that added this feature but naturally went the way of the dodo when macOS added SIP. iTerm2 has a feature that kinda does this, but that implementation is comparatively janky and half-baked feeling.

If Warp gained a polished version of this there’s a good chance of it becoming a mainstay on my systems.

I love the idea of mixing terminal and documentation, kind of like a terminal notebook. I wish there was an open source project that was basically just a shell/bash jupyter notebook and nothing more. So many little scripts, makefiles, project setups, etc. would be way easier to understand and maintain if they were mostly markdown documentation with some big "Run this" buttons next to the code blocks.

What is your monetization plan?

I use configured zsh which has majority of features mentioned above. It is integrated with fzf and also has autcompletions(with help description), autosuggestions,hints, file completions and more. You can see my zsh dotfiles below.

https://github.com/varbhat/dotfiles/tree/main/dot_config/zsh

I could even have enabled real time type ahead completions with this plugin but i haven't (because i don't need this feature) : https://github.com/marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete

i use my current configuration on foot terminal (which itself is blazing fast and boasts fastest vtt parser) in linux and kitty terminal (which is very feature rich, even has terminal graphics protocol so that you can even run glxgears(opengl cube demo: https://github.com/michaeljclark/glkitty) on it) on linux and macos.

i am sure that other shells such has fish also have these features.

So, what benefits do i get on switching to warp? currently,i don't see any except few marketing words which aren't enough for me to start using warp.

I might be missing something but i am all ears.

This is bullshit.

> The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive

bullshit

> user accounts to just run a terminal?

bullshit

> collaboration

bullshit ...

"We started with the open source product Alacritty, though for now we won't be sharing our source code. ..But depending on the telemetry we receive we might decide to make the source available at some undetermined point in the future! Maybe."

Talk about a bad taste. This is basically the Elasticsearch licensing fiasco waiting to happen again.

So many red flags, I don't have time to list them.

Bottom line: The company attitude is not open, and bears the whiff of the aggressive Docker-4-Desktop fiasco and financial investment recoupment strategy.

Lots of things can change, but organization DNA doesn't.

See also: Microsoft, Uber, Apple. Things don't really change.

((Record scratch sound))

Looks really neat. But there's a dissonance between the positioning here vs. the audience it is intended for. The community of folks interested in using a terminal is largely one of grizzled veterans that significantly overlap with security (conscious) folks.

Overlap with Instagram influencers living their best life in public is approximately nil. :)

I suppose there are newbie developers that don't know better, but are already using vscode and use the built-in term if they even bother. I could see cloud features and telemetry being useful however as an opt-in separate install.

So, I'd dial back the idea that "modern" means giving in to the surveillance dystopia.

Bonus points if you get it running under OS/2.

Also, was just reading about how Flynn couldn't get funded, that made me a bit sad.

Not much new to say, just my $0.02.

- Love the idea overall of a fresh, new shell. I love novelty, features, ergonomics, and this pushes all the right buttons

- Looks gorgeous

- The mandatory Github login is...weird. I don't mind logging in, but it seemed unskippable, and conceptually that leaves a bad taste.

- Mandatory telemetry...ehhh. Like I get it, I use Sentry and OTEL, I love the visibility, and I get exactly why you want it in the beta, but ehhhh, really bad look. Especially in this community. Also the privacy policy doesn't seem to be linked from the app. I can get to it, but would be nice to just go there right from the about page. On the whole...I find it tolerable, but I don't work in a highly sensitive field at the moment. At $LASTCO, that would be a complete nonstarter. Between the squick factor and compliance, it would be good to at least allow some amount of opt-out on the phone home.

- I would easily pay $20-50 for a souped-up terminal (I spend all day in it), even a closed-source one, but the "we raised tons of money to build a free terminal and haven't figured out how to monetize it yet", again, understandable, but not the best look, given the mandatory data collection. Hey, dev's gotta eat, but I'd rather pay for OSS and transparency, rather than free-but-you-are-the-product, and I hope they go for the former route.

Excitedly downloaded this, launched it, and then was met with a login screen. wop wop. I closed it and deleted it.

I don't understand. Why is login a requirement to even use it?

Why not have an excellent free terminal as a way to get people using your tools, and then add the collaborative/audit features as paid features? That way many devs would not only start using this, but can make it a part of their daily workflows.

As someone who uses the terminal a lot and is not allergic to closed source tools or even telemetry necessarily, I'd be in your target market, I think.

But one thing that your landing page has left me confused about: you have two examples like this:

    cargo +stable fmt
    cargo +stable check
    cargo +stable tests/

presumably to show off multi-cursors. But in neither example does the person appear to hit "Enter", which is the part I'm really wondering about. Like... what happens? If you run three separate commands like that at the same time are they in separate subshells or implicitly `&&`'ed together or something else? What's the return status if either `check` or `tests` fails? If `check` fails but `tests` pass... is the check failure's exit status lost? What does (e.g. in fish) `echo $status` say afterwards?

Multi-cursors and multi-line editing is definitely cool, but the example there totally doesn't match my mental model of a how a shell works, so it leaves me perplexed and confused how warp actually works.

So, I was excited by the idea of a terminal that added new functionality and wasn't electron based. So I downloaded Warp.

And, honestly, I can't use it. They interfere with the operation of the shell to such a degree that I had to disable almost my entire bash configuration.

Add to that, that I already have the following features native to bash shell (and I'm sure they're in zsh too):

- history of commands: easily searched by pressing ↑ or ⌃+r - completion: via the awesome bash-completion project - split panes: both terminal.app and screen do this for me - session sharing: screen + ssh does this for me - "workflow" sharing, I can and do write shell scripts that can be used by others

I've seen comments trying to defend this that REALLY make me doubt that the devs even understand how a terminal + shell work. A shell script will run in it's interpreter regardless of what shell you happen to use, shared commands will inherently be in the flavour of shell-script that the sharer is used to, and so i have to know how to use their shell as well as mine to translate between them, which again isn't a problem when running a script. They claim that people don't document their scripts, but the same people who won't document a script won't document stuff they share in warp. They claim there's no way to find documentation natively from the terminal or to search for scripts based on what they do, apparently they haven't heard of apropos and man pages?

"[we want a restrictive license that] prevents another company from starting a commercial enterprise off of it"

versus

"our terminal model code is based on Alacritty’s model code."

Well done. Sorry guys, that's where you lost me.

Like almost everyone else, I really want to like this product.

I imagine if it was open source, didn't have a bunch of strange network calls built in, and most importantly a third party audited the source code to make sure you're not doing anything wrong, then I'd be open to trying it.

The issue here is you have a black box, which will have complete control over my system. I have no idea what happens the moment I give you my sudo password, do you install a bunch of weird stuff in the background? How do I know this isn't just a keylogger?

I can't imagine any company approving this for internal use.

Equally concerning, what's your business model. Are you selling my data ? Will you deliver ads straight to the terminal ?

At the same time, I would absolutely love to see you. Someone do this, but as a transparent open source project. I'm just not sure how you can create a business from that.

> Warp is a fully native, GPU-accelerated, Rust-based terminal. No Electron or web-tech.

I understand that this probably appeals to most readers there, but I don't like the negativity. I like Rust and Web tech, sometimes together, and I don't want my tools to shit on what I like.

We can also discuss the full nativeness. To me, the menus don't even try to look native. Is it native because it doesn't use a virtual machine or an interpreter? Almost all computers use a microcode, I think this argument is a bit obsolete. Performances matters, not how many layers or virtual machines you have.

I prefer some marketing about this terminal being fast, backed by proper benchmarks in which you can compare it against electron web-based terminals, and faster ones such as alacritty.

Well I think this looks really cool! I’d be interested if it just had Blocks and nothing more, but the other headline features for individuals sound great too. I’m not sure how much value I’d get out of the team features, but I’m certainly open to being pleasantly surprised.

And I don’t mind using my GitHub account or contributing to telemetry during a private beta. I understand why others here find that problematic, but I’ll probably just use another terminal if I need to use/access sensitive data during that period.

Looking forward to trying this out! Thank you for sharing.

If the business model for this was: 1) fully open source 2) ~$2.99 per user per month 3) more for team features 4) paid plugins and themes 5) opt-in and inspectable telemetry

They’d probably get their million paying users in the first year.

For this crucial part of this target market’s (engineers) toolkit, it HAS to A) be open source and B) have the option for zero telemetry.

Inb4: “if it was open source why would people pay for it?!?” Because at the right price people are happy to pay and support something they love and get low-effort trustworthy updates built in.

I think that Blocks are the most interesting feature here as it seems to fix the biggest issues with terminals that make them feel broken and out of date.

I am concerned that they will only work for simple workflows and not work with ssh, or docker attached shells, unless extreme effort is put into this area.

I think there is a lot of potential for creativity in the terminal space, and warp has some cool ideas. I'd honestly even be willing to pay directly for a terminal if it went above and beyond in terms of efficiency and functionality. Unfortunately I cannot try warp, as I don't have an osx machine. I understand that cross platform (in particular Linux ports) is a challenge, and I usually don't expect that from consumer products or open source projects. But a VC backed product made specifically for developers should have a Linux port imo, especially if your business model is to impress developers and get them to convert their teams.

I want to like this, and clearly a lot of work went into it, but the existing tooling here has gotten so good lately, without losing any of the power user affordances.

WezTerm is crazy fast with GPU-accelerated ligatures, mcfly has an NN in it that startles me, fzf, rg, bat. Everything has bash/zag/fish autocomplete in it now. tmux customization has become a high art form, VSCode has forced all the best language tooling features in vi and emacs.

There’s definitely a renaissance of the terminal happening, I just think it’s fueled more by the Rust community having found its first killer use case/thin end of the wedge into all our lives by pimping our ride on the terminal experience than corporate backing.

Best of luck to these folks, but I hope they’re aware of Lucid and have its outcome incorporated into their plan. They did great stuff but a bunch of GNU people with something to prove built it in the bazaar.

Really appreciate that Linux support is on the roadmap. Was going to flame for yet another mac-only app, but looks like cross-platform support is on the horizon so appreciate it!

I've been using Warp on and off since it got released and I was under the impression that it was Electron-based as it didn't feel as responsive as iTerm. At one point, with just one open tab (in the early days), it was using over 10GB of memory, but I will definitely give it another fresh try.

Oh boy, a terminal that I have to pay a monthly fee to use. Can’t wait.

Hello, your product looks cool and I don't care about telemetry as it looks here. However, what is your ultimate business model? For tools like this I would prefer either a single purchase or a Jetbrains style annual-pay-with-fallback-licence.

What a coincidence, I wonder if this other dude got $17 mil: https://github.com/spolu/warp

> warp lets you securely share your terminal with one simple command: warp open. When connected to your warp, clients can see your terminal exactly as if they were sitting next to you. You can also grant them write access, the equivalent of handing them your keyboard.

> warp distinguishes itself from "tmux/screen over ssh" by its focus and ease of use as it does not require an SSH access to your machine or a shared server for others to collaborate with you.

> Despite being still quite experimental, warp has already proven itself useful especially in the context of:

> - Interaction with remote team-members

> - New engineer onboarding (navigating code in group without projection) Installation

There's already a major Rust project named warp with over 6,000 stars on Github:

https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp

It seems like you're going to confuse people and crush someone's established project with your $17m. "Warp" + "Rust" is a web framework.

Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal multiplexer with my free UNIX shell.

There is absolutely zero chance that I'm going to do all of this using a proprietary closed-source telemetry-sending terminal emulator no matter what visual niceties or fancy UI frameworks it may offer.

I'm going to go against the general negativity nancy grain and say: this looks nice. I'd use this. The basic terminal experience is _fine_, but it could definitely be a lot better, and this seems to improve a lot of the warts that I have using the terminal.

Telemetry for a beta? Sure, whatever, y'all are being transparent about what is being collected and, as a developer, I can definitely understand the desire to collect information about usage to improve the experience.

I pay for apps that I use once a months or once every other month, why not for something that I will use everyday for long hours. However:

- Collecting telemetry - Requiring sign up (and associating telemetry wit it)

Are flags for me.

If you want to collect feedback fast and easy, the best would have been letting it be taken for a spin by folks in HN and and you could have probably benefitted from a good deal of input on improvement or bug-hunting.

A terminal with a dedicated well funded company, I welcome and can pay for such terminal. But collecting too much data these days is at least frowned upon by almost everyone.

> I’m Zach, founder and CEO of Warp

You started a company to write a terminal app? I'd say that's either misguided, or you have something underhanded planned.

> any Mac user can download it.

Any _Mac_ user? Sounds fishy.

> The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive.

Isn't that an anti-tautology? Hmm.

> An input area that works just like a code editor

Why wouldn't I just use a code editor? We are talking about an app for graphical desktop environments, right?

> ... with GPU-accelerated graphics

That you wrote especially for this app? I don't know...

> We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client.

A _closed-source_ terminal app? Nuh-uh. You're up to no good.

----

And after noticing those red flags, I read @orastor's post about the app connecting to all sorts of servers.

The telemetry is concerning, but I'm much more concerned about whoever else decides to use your telemetry hooks to exfiltrate data.

I'm 100% on board with trying out a new terminal that is fast and has features, but there's an implicit expectation of the simplicity of the communication channel, and... this is not it.

Looks snazzy and I'm sure it's fast, but raising capital to fund a terminal emulator? Making a bunch of network requests on startup without asking? No thanks! I'll stick to open-source terminal emulators like foot, alacritty, gnome-terminal, or a dozen others. I guess I'm not the target market.

Odd naming choice. "Warp" is already a rust crate and it's sitting at many more stars than this product https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp

A login-required terminal that sends telemetry to multiple sources is on the front page...why? Is it just because it's written in Rust? I don't see any other reason. It's not even fully open source.

> After 20 years of programming, I still find it hard to copy a command’s output; I always forget how to use `tar`; and I always have to relearn how to move my cursor.

Huh? I think if it takes you >20 years to do basic stuff like that, you need to revisit your approach to learning new things. If I play chess for 20 years and still don't know how to move the pieces, it's not the game's fault, it's mine.

This is really awesome Zach & team, congrats on the awesome work. I just installed it and I already replaced my default terminal (it was iTerm before).

I wonder if you thought of adding plugins a-la Fig [1], but using WebAssembly instead of being restricted by Javascript?

Some projects like Lapce [2], Dprint [3], Fiberplane [4] are already using this strategy to extend their ecosystems and I really believe it could be incredibly useful to extend usability on the terminal side!

Please feel free to reach to syrus@wasmer.io, I'd love to help as much as possible on that path!

[1] https://fig.io/docs/getting-started

[2] https://lapce.dev/

[3] https://dprint.dev/plugins/

[4] https://fiberplane.dev/blog/announcing-fp-bindgen/

Why would I care that it's written in Rust if I can't even download the source code? I have a Rust compiler but I can't run this terminal. This is a stupid project and false advertising.

> Our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features. We will never sell your data.

So, don't collect it to begin with, so even if you get bought the data can't be sold, because there is none?

Ah wait...

Who'd have thought a terminal app is worth a $17m series A? No surprise its loaded to the hilt with spyware. Gotta pay for that VC money somehow.

This has me reconsidering my usage of iTerm. What could be lurking in there? Maybe it's safe for now, but will the next update include spyware so iTerm can get its piece of the pie?

Mac's builtin terminal is quite good. Nothing fancy. It's good at what it does and doesn't try to be something it's not.

The name collides with a web framework (also in Rust)

https://lib.rs/crates/warp

Confusing name, as warp is a Rust crate for web applications: https://crates.io/crates/warp

A terminal that requires me to log in. No thnx. Uninstalled.

> The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive.

CLIs are available on every OS.

> I always forget how to use `tar`;

You can increase the amount of command history you keep. Or keep a file with oft used commands.

> Our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.

Hard to believe. But good luck.

> We will never sell your data.

Define never. What if apple offered you $10 billion for the data? Even then? Also, why would you be collecting our data in the first place? Why does a terminal need to collect data?

Is there any new development or any product today that isn't collecting data? When's the last new product or upgrade or anything that didn't have data collection.

I think it's absurd to put a Terminal behind a login and collect telemetry data. You don't need any of these to "develop a good product by listening to your users". It just makes your whole effort look like a scam.

Excited to see this launch! I think there is a lot of opportunity for a terminal that is aware of the fact that the one-computer-per-dev model is not really how it works anymore. That, and a terminal that can help me avoid big mistakes, help me remember commands, and more. It's great to see innovation take place in this space.

I could mildly ignore the invasive telemetry on my terminal (of all things), but making me sign into the terminal to use it is really bizarre behaviour. You make it a point on your web page that it isn't "yet another Electron app", but damn does it behave like one.

I've been using this for personal projects (I use Linux at work -- which isn't yet supported). It's really nice, actually. It just kinda brings the terminal more in line with what you'd expect from a modern application. I can't wait to see where it goes.

I think they are planning a lot of work for teams. Some people hate IDEs, but I love them. I see this as IDE-izing the terminal.

I tried it. It’s nice to be able to interact with the text input in a more familiar way. Tab completions are good, but not much better than what I had with zsh in Terminal.

Like others have mentioned, I am confused about why I have to sign in, why telemetry is recorded, etc.

From the comments, seems the team is well-meaning. Time will tell. The privacy blowback reminds me of Kite’s first post on HN.

Unfortunately, I can't see this as anything other than a solution in search of a problem.

Everything you'd want to do in a terminal that is worth sharing would be version controlled, which is vastly superior in everyway.

You've all done some cool work here, and I can complement that, but I think this is a really weird idea with no real world evidence to justify its existence.

Saw that advertise a 17M Series A, ok cool. Download the terminal - first thing is Github Login to use the Terminal.

The world is in trouble when your putting 17M into a Terminal designed to track and make money off of us? ie. Facebook. ie. we are the product?

No thanks, deleted. I'm a programmer, don't need a corporation in my terminal.

For me this shows kinda narrow thinking. Terminals have been around forever and adding more colors or gpu accelerations is not doing anything for it. What we need is more innovative ideas how to get rid of terminals, not how to accelerate text output. Also Mac-only as if Mac users need terminals that much.

What bothers me is that it blends the lines between shell and terminal. A lot of the functionality could be exposed in a more terminal-neutral way.

It makes no sense in using a terminal that is not open source, has outgoing requests, telemetry, et al; requires login and is VC-backed: what's next to please the VCs? Track user input? Ads in your terminal? Subscription based?

Besides many on the pain points / motivations you mention, like "Developers work in teams, but terminals don’t support collaboration" just make me think that what you want to develop is a productivity and collaboration tool, but don't want to call it that.

I do enjoy someone is looking into the terminal but not this way...

Terminal need to be instant. This kind of stuff seems like it will make it painful to use.

All you who require flashy bs in every single application are to blame for the abomination of a proprietary terminal which phones home.

Great work on launch! I have been using the private beta and it's a true step function improvement over standard terminal

I don't want my terminal to look and feel like a react app. My terminal is where I go to escape from the modern world.

Does this pass the vt100 torture test (http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/vt100test.txt)?

Been keeping an eye on this for a while now. Will test on Mac soon. Congrats on the launch!

Just a heads up: on Pixel 6 on Firefox, the homepage is not smooth at all and feels sluggish.

Damn, i knew it was a mac-first product but i really hoped for a linux release. Guess it does makes sense to attack the market with more money, but still.

This seems to be more like an IDE or ISE and not like a terminal emulator and a running CLI shell.

At first I thought it was a sh-compatible replacement, but it wasn't, and then I thought it was a terminal emulator, but that's not really what it is either. And then came the intrusive pop-ups all the time and now I don't really know what it is. A teaching tool perhaps? A "use it once a year" tool?

I live in the terminal. If that is not open source then I am not using it.

This is a hill I will die on and it sets terrible precedence for other core workflow tools.

For all the people that complain about phoning home. You are using macos or windows right? Isn't that what most apps do on those platforms? Chrome, firefox, your image viewer (macos), explorer (windows: the recent ad fiasco), docker, most electron apps, siri, cortana. Even login (windows). So now your terminal will do it too.

To make myself clear: I completely agree with you. Just pointing out the fun.

Aside from the $23m investment, telemetry, whiff of Rust fanboyism, the core claims made are questionable for me: Terminals are hard to use. Complex commands. Arcane key shortcuts. Abstruse commands. Every productivity application is more powerful when it is collaborative - true 100% of the time. Fixing a problem that doesn't really exist in my book - but good luck!

Why do I get the sinking feeling that the comments here are going to turn out to be like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."; and despite looking like the Juicero of terminal emulators now, Warp will be table stakes for any upcoming developer 10 years from now, who will be unable to fathom using a bare shell in xterm or even something like Kitty?

Just tried it too.. Justified worries over closed-source & telemetry/github sign-in, but holy cow it's good. I especially like the just right minimal amount of settings – nothing extra, nothing missing – and fantastic minimalistic docs that gives understanding of all features and all hotkeys in like 10 mins. Impressive.

correct me if i'm wrong, but it sounds like the monetization strat here is to sell this to companies for their teams to use to increase collaboration. it would follow then that most-everything (?) i'm doing is being mirrored to a remote server. presumably, your target market would be engineers.

if true, as an engineer, i'm a hard pass.

I'm using Fish with vim mode and something seems to have gone wrong, where the prompt displays the currently mode of vim (here [I] for insert) your terminal seems to interpret this as a command, so nothing works unless I delete the [I] at the start of the line.

  [I] [I]ls
  fish: Unknown command: '[I]ls'

I feel like an outcast whenever someone tries to reinvent something that has worked fine for ages now. I would happy use gnome-terminal or urxvt or windows terminal or whatever and it basically works the same for me. Can't I set a font and maybe color scheme? Then who cares just grab iTerm2 and get work done.

I've been enjoying an alternative approach to a Rust terminal called Starship and the performance improvement is tangible. It is also cross-platform. https://github.com/starship/starship

Heard about Warp from Twitter and the rustacean station podcast. I don't think I'm the target audience (uses Linux and wouldn't use a proprietary terminal), but it's nice to see you try to improve such a fundamental and commoditized tool. Wishing you all the best!

I see a lot of cool tech here all around. It's inspiring! Thanks!

At https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp How did you achieve to have the folders /keysets and /themes to be linked to the other git repos https://github.com/warpdotdev/keysets and https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes I wanted to do this for a long time but all tutorials pointed to all alternatives one more difficult than the other.

So what sort of valuation does a terminal raise $23m at

It purely my opinion (probably a biased one), I feel there is something off about sentiments in general in hacker news lately. Here [1] some of the big VC and angels are praising this tool whereas sentiments in this thread is sounds very negative. It might just be me. I know everyone points to dropbox thread where it does not mean that product will be a failure. In general, I feel there is some sort of disconnect between this community and VC, investments, angels community.

[1] https://twitter.com/anshublog/status/1511553856487845892?s=2...

Feels strange that I have to sign-in to a terminal

I realize how much effort is going into a project like this and I do hope you find a way to monetize on it, but until it's open sourced and auditable, I personally could never see me using it. The risk is simply too high.

> Otherwise, sign up here to be notified when Warp is ready for your platform.

Uh... Sign up where?

I believe that they can turn this around with more transparency going forward. I also see value in how it can help a tech company, being able to onboard people into specific workflows (dev,ops..etc) using a combination of docs and team capabilities.

I'm sure some people wouldn't like what I'm about to propose as it again "phones home" but I encourage the team to take a look at GPT models for converting text to commands, I have a simple fine-tuned model that does wonders when I'm in the terminal.

As for me at home, all I need are those sweet blocks with text-editing mode in any open source terminal.

I was interested until I learned that the application is blazingly fast :/

This product gives me the same sketchy vibes as Mighty[1]. There's absolutely no way I'm going to give up one of my most sacred tools to a funded company whose going to expose my every click.

[1] mightyapp.com

It looks great. If I can live with sublimetext being closed source I’m sure I can live with my terminal also being closed source.

Heck the windows terminal and macOS terminal are closed source and I use them everyday.

> We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client.

That's pretty cool. I'll be interested in trying it once all of the source is available. A proprietary terminal program that connects to googleapis.com, sentry.io, segment.io, etc. is a *total* non-starter for me.

Good luck with the beta! I'm really interested to see a release I'll be able to try.

(FWIW, I think the model, in macro, sounds like something I'm glad to support. It reminds me of Bitwarden, for which I happily pay every year.)

It's interesting, but after getting burned by Hyper some years back. I am sticking with iTerm + zsh. I just need a terminal that is simple and doesn't phone home or gather telemetry.

Is your plan to open-source this or open-source its core in the future?

Just gave it a spin. Pretty cool, but I upvoted this issue: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/755

Not going to be usable for me unless that's fixed, or at least made into a setting. Certain directory structures are built deep into my muscle-memory now, and I feel crippled when the auto-complete does something different than what I'm used to.

I will put a reminder for myself to come back and test this in about 6 months. I hope by then I can pick and replace iterm2, for long I have been looking for a replacement.

Smooth scrolling with the Mac trackpad (especially at 120hz+) is something I've wanted for a long time, feels really good. Too bad about all the usage tracking...

I'm assuming the dig at 1978 is a reference to vim or emacs? Can you maybe rework your copy to not shit on the main tools your target market uses and loves?

1. Get excided, download 2. Open 3. See the mandatory login dialog... in a terminal! 4. Close, delete.

A terminal. With login. And telemetry. A terminal with telemetry.

A modern terminal == Login to use? Was super excited, followed by instant disappointment. I hope they can remove this asap -- a severe misstep imo.

Screenshots looked great, however I stopped as soon as it asked me to sign up. I happily returned to my existing terminal that does not have any strings attached. You are seriously going to have to have a paradigm changing product to make money and build a business on such a basic system utility where there are plenty of good options. The implementation language is not a selling point.

Having to sign on/sign up with Github and agreeing to send usage data and other telemetry is just a nonstarter for me, as I imagine it is for many other developers. I do basically everything in my terminal, there's just no way I can agree to beaming any of that back up to some server and essentially trusting there's no fuckery going on.

Looks like a cute terminal though.

Closed source, sends my personal data out on the network, exists in a space with tons of great options already like Alacritty, Kitty, Foot, (I mean if you’re on a Mac Terminal.app is actually nice albeit closed source). No reason for me to give you my data (which includes stuff I do for work) for whatever conveniences you’re shilling.

That’s a nope from me Dog.

You want to collect usage data from my terminal? I'ma nope right outta there.

And I don't want to tie my github to this thing, i have all sorts of github accounts for legitimate reasons.

I would be glad pay a lifetime licence fee (maybe with a 30 day money back guarantee?) to check it out, but no way am i going to do a subscription model for my terminal.

I got into early access and I really wanted to switch but there was a few major things blocking me:

1. this desparately needs multiple profiles where I can customize the command that is launched (ie. with iTerm2 I have keyboard shortcuts mapped to a profile which launches SSH instance to our various aws environments)

2. powerlevel10k doesn't work (dealbreaker)

Hello. Author of Next Generation Shell here. Good to see the attempt to fix the shitty user experience that is decades old.

More NGS perspective on the UI - https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs/wiki/UI-Design

Did I dream things up, or has the project never been clear about the fact it is macOS only when it was in closed beta? I have received countless e-mails from them (because signing up to the newsletter was required to be registered to the waiting list), but I would never have signed up if I had known it is macOS-only.

"All data encrypted at rest".

why does my terminal have any data besides a config file, and why does it need access to the internet at all?

next!

If you're looking for a good, ye olde terminal that is modern and fast, check out Wezterm. It's wonderful.

Early user (in the Discord). Been waiting for this one for a while. Excited to see it launch! Congrats, team.

this seems like brilliant tech that will unfortunately not succeed due to the business model. Cost/billing, forced outgoing requests, forced signup, and most of all, additional security risks. I'm not using a terminal with all my SSH keys if it is calling out to the internet.

Like others here I'm probably not your target user being too wedded to the many features of bash/zsh/tmux and the speed of my existing terminal emulator. But it's great to see new ideas and thought put in the space. Congrats on the launch!

For more discussions and insights -> https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/status/15113778758150840...

Appealing presentation but quite a bit turn-off with the on-boarding experience (the permissions for the outgoing requests and Github). On the side note, I'm unable to sign-in with Github, which I also don't understand why it's needed.

Have you seen https://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ from 2011 ? Comments from around this time on various site may give you insight.

For completions, I would recommend becoming compatible with https://fig.io/ ; perhaps investigating a partnership or even merger with them.

Check out https://github.com/nushell/nushell if you want an open, non-telemetry based shell that you can hack

This is certainly interesting, but I am struggling to sign up.

I clicked "Sign up with GitHub", it took me to the website where I authorized it. It was seemingly working until I saw this:

"Oops! We were unable to log you in."

It certainly looks interesting. I sincerely hope the plan is for eventual cross platform functionality if it's aimed and development teams. So many more devs seem to be using native linux these days.

I bit the bullet, gave them my social security number and my mother's maiden name, and tried it. Eh. Not too impressed at this stage, and nothing worth switching from my current (Kitty) setup.

Installed it and saw "Sign In" and deleted it immediately.

Cool but thanks. There are already way nicer terminals which do not try to extract money from me: Wezterm, Konsole, Alacrity, Yakuake and maybe Windows Terminal.

The "no more walls of text" thing is huge! Thank you! (I don't care about it phoning home to report I opened a new tab while it's in beta.)

Some features remind me of upterm.

https://github.com/railsware/upterm

I’ve been using this in private Beta as a daily driver for about 6 months.

The team has been responsive, constantly improving, and bringing real innovation to the space.

Highly recommend!

Another one riding the "Rust-based" horse.

what if you work in a company where they use this and you don’t want to share literally everything you type into your terminal?

hey Warp guys i love everything about it, already created my own theme with using simple-ever theme file with yaml. If you implement good powerfonts rendering like iTerm i'll be a forever user.

check the difference: https://imgur.com/a/GUTVaeF

It's nice, but a lot of what it does could be exposed to other terminals as well without being so tied to Alacritty.

Tab naming is working out of the box with 033]0;TITLE\\007, but I couldn't find a way to re-arrange opened tabs...

most devs just use the terminal in VSCode these days anyways.

Are there _really_ enough terminal users and companies willing to shell out $$$ to make more than 1 million gross per year?

This kind of reminds me of that prettification of the node repl fad a few years ago, but when they switched to pay only people were like "hard naw"

“ Writing code in your terminal shouldn’t feel like 1978. Edit your commands like in a modern code editor with selections, cursor positioning, and completion menus.”

That sounds a bit ageist :) also - can command editing integrate with my editor of choice? I don’t want to have to learn how to use another editor - I already know my way around bash keyboard shortcuts, having to learn a third thing sounds like a step backwards.

interesting how a terminal nowadays needs a whole company with career options and venture funds backing, unless you're trying to make a bloated product out of it ofc

don't get me wrong, it looks great as it is right now, but i'm very sceptical about it's future

Proprietary closed-sourced crapware.

Can you share a bit on pricing strategy and what parts of it will be free vs paid?

Another Mac-only terminal? ok!

Closed source terminal? Pass.

A terminal that makes you sign in? I think I'll stay away from this one.

I’ll stick with kitty for Max OS X. Still way faster and no privacy concerns.

Are you using an IMGUI library or some Electron-like solution for the GUI?

I recall when you could use a terminal and not once type 'git.'

Negatory. Go fsck yourself.

The A.I. Command Search feature is absolutely nuts, I'm blown away

Where's the Linux client? Srsly cater to your power users first!

In short: I'm gonna gather your personal info for profit.

This looks awesome. Would love Windows support, though.

These folks are taking katanas to the tech bubble.

My Feedback:

- Downloaded it - Saw the github login - Uninstalled it

I upvoted this earlier today, and just now came back to reading through the thread. Now I wish I could remove the vote, what a mess.

Some things only happen on HN. This is one of them.

What does it offer that vterm doesn't?

I've been using warp in beta for a while now. Once you start using it, you won't want to get back to anything else.

Your website is broken on mobile

Is it just me or this seems to be an overengineered product? I mean hear me out,

- Workflows - Ever heard of scripts?

- Block editing - That is just vi mode inside bash/zsh.

- Terminal sharing has existed since so long.

- Forming commands - We got tldr for that.

- Fast and GPU accelerated - Open source terminal emulators have cracked that already. See alacritty and kitty for instance.

And on top of all this, when you factor in VC money, I don't see how this product can truly beat its alternatives.

Where's the Linux version?

So awesome to see this ship!!!

Any image/video support?

Why is the mac binary 140MB?!

Looks absolutely disgusting.

Hello Zach, founder and CEO of Warp.

What makes you think its acceptable for you to spam HN with Warp every few months ?

Is it written in Rust?

This is the most HN thing I've ever seen

yikes

project is a huge yikes

so alacritty two?

why rust?

> Telemetry > When Warp comes out of beta, telemetry will be opt-in and anonymous.

> But for our beta phase, we do send telemetry by default and we do associate it with the logged in user because it makes it much easier to reach out and get feedback when something goes wrong.

This is a hard pass for me, it looks really amazing though. I'm so tired of telemetry, how do we quit our day jobs to focus on open source? ;-;

The terminal is where I input my ssh passwords, my sudo passwords, crypto stuff, ssh keys and much more sensitive data. The fact that you even considered collecting stuff from me while using it is insane. I don't trust your promise to never "sell my data" and I don't trust that the next one which will buy your company when you decide to "exit" will do the same (I will when it's fully open source but that's not the case is it?). We shouldn't be talking about telemetry and data collected on a terminal to begin with.

Good luck with your product but HN does take privacy somewhat serious, I know I do.

A company receiving receiving $23 million usd to build a terminal is about the dumbest thing I've seen this month. I would've figured it to be a April Fools joke if posted a few days earlier.

Why is a company building a terminal? How are they going to earn money at all when there are other fast, performant terminals that are open source, community run, and don't have interests at-odds with user freedom and privacy?

It seems like just about any tech project is being funded now.

edit: It's also sad that we're at the point of "no electron" being a selling point, when it should be the standard for CLI tools. And I'm so glad to see it supports other shells, like just about every other terminal out there.

> Sign In

> By continuing you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and that Warp can collect usage data.

lol, no

How to make me completely lose interest in a piece of software: Announce it as being Rust based as if that’s an important feature I should care about.

At least it isn’t a blockchain terminal I guess

When someone uses "re-imagined from the ground up" I expect that this terminal will not function like any other terminal I've seen before. Yet it looks exactly the same.

Just wondering how many critics here have social media apps on their Android or iOS devices.

LOL, no. "CEO of warp". I like my terminal because it's a dumb text terminal, not because it's smart. At least you'll reach the majority normie users and make some dollar there.