[steveklabnik]

It seems like you’re grouping a bunch of things together and saying I have opinions about them that I don’t. Let’s break them out:

workflows I would assume to be portable, yes. It is an assumption. I generally expect program configuration to be mostly cross platform by default.

I’m not sure what a program written for a particular terminal would be, so I’m not sure if I’d assume portability or not.

Shells are not ubiquitous, even if they are available across platforms technically.

Python is truly cross platform and largely ubiquitous.

[colonwqbang]

Ok, maybe I misunderstand what a "workflow" is. Since we are talking about replacing shell scripts with "workflows", I assumed that they are a kind of programming facility of about similar power as shell scripts. But that may be incorrect.

> You aren't the one porting Warp, but you are the one porting the shell script.

It sounds like your are saying somthing like "Warp scripts/workflows require almost no effort to port, compared to the shell scripts they replace". I was interested to learn how this can be the case. Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.

[steveklabnik]

I may also be too; like I said, I haven't used Warp yet. Just read their docs. "Workflows" are described in their docs as effectively 'aliases with better docs that integrate with a search bar', and are defined in a YAML file. They don't actually show said YAML file, so I don't know how complex they are. If they give you the full power of the underlying shell, then yeah, you're back at the exact same problem, but if it's stuff like "invoke this program with this set of arguments," which is what their examples seem like, then I'd expect it to work with any shell as long as that program is installed.

> Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.

And perhaps mine is. The docs aren't in-depth and I don't own a Mac. But really, ultimately, "are workflows more portable" isn't a question I personally am wed to; it's that "shell scripts are only portable via UNIXes and there's a much bigger world out there" that I am, and I am hoping that workflows are more portable than shell scripts. In practice, they may be, or they may not be, but since they're in a layer above the shell, it's possible that they're not shell-specific.