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by blopker 1289 days ago
There's a lot of negativity in this thread and being the good contrarian I am, I wanted to see what's so bad about this. I went ahead and installed it. Sure, the login part is annoying, especially since I don't see any killer features that really need it yet. However, there are some great ideas in this.

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?

2 comments

I've been using Warp since it was announced on HN, and it is great. May favorite terminal yet. Fast, features such as autocomplete so much better than iTerm.

There is a lot of negative thoughts on this thread - would love to hear from the people who actually have tried out Warp and not those waxing on about the indignity of being asked to login to a free product.

Note that it's not hard to be faster than iTerm2: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Warp is built on alacritty which is firmly middle of the road in that chart.