Regarding Terminals, our developers are susceptible. We love our terminal as it's our home base.
So whenever a new terminal pops up, I have to try it at least.
I love and use iTerm2 for almost everything. But Warp is the new kid on the block, and although it comes with some downsides, it's pretty slick!
The good
This new terminal is made from scratch, not based on what we already know about terminals.
This, to me, is what makes it so cool. The whole terminal experience changes and makes it feel like a native app.
It's super quick to autocomplete and separate commands, so it's easy to understand which output belongs to which command.
Besides these apparent wins, it's also super fast and comes with Intellisense for npm and git. You'll never forget a command this way.
The bad
To be honest, there are always downsides, aren't there.
It's only available for Mac, but the team seems to be working hard on a Windows and Linux version.
It's not open source, this might not be a bad hard point, but for some people, that's a deal-breaker.
No concrete business model so far, so that brings us to the ugly.
The ugly
You need to log in, which seems weird to use a terminal.
I'm not sure about the side effects of this, but it might come with its downsides later on.
I hope they are not using this personal data to keep track of our terminal usage, as it's now connected to a user profile.
Conclusion
Worth a try if you're on Mac. It's pretty awesome to use.
At this point, I'm unsure about the business model or ethics of why a login is needed. Let's see if this clears up in the future.
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Top comments (2)
It's worse than you think - when someone talked about it here a couple of months ago, I found I couldn't even download it, they put you on a "waiting list". That's a massive red flag for me. Why would you make people wait for something that doesn't cost you anything to provide a download link? Is it to create artificial scarcity and "buzz"? Is it because you expect a lot of pushback about bugs and want to keep the flood of bug reports under control?
Sure, you can download it now but it was a really suspicious policy before.
In my experience, most software creators who aren't open source, work on Mac, and make claims about working on other platforms, "soon", well, soon never comes.
I think a couple of features look interesting, and with a bit of luck they'll get copied into genuinely free, cross-platform terminal software in the future.
I'm also disturbed by the non-features they're listing, like, "Backwards Compatible: Warp works out of the box with zsh, fish, and bash." It's a terminal emulator. If it didn't work with the most common terminal applications it'd be unfit for purpose. Those shells (except maybe fish) don't even use cursor control beyond line-feeds. It might sound like a feature to someone who had never used a terminal before, but terminal users are their target audience.
Pretty much everything it does could be done with in-shell applications, with the exception of...
things that need shaders? We're in bat country now. Besides being weird and unnecessary, this is a good indicator that versions for other OS will be difficult to complete. Either they'll have to target specific Linux distributions or they'll end up with variations with more or fewer features depending on the target platform, which means more to maintain and a non-uniform experience when switching machines.
I hope it works out for them, or that if it doesn't, people take up their ideas and incorporate them into shell apps like fig perhaps (full disclosure: I haven't used that either).
Thanks for this add-on Ben.
And I agree with your points, to me it's good to see some change in terminal word, finally!
It's been too long that it's been what it is today, and some change would be welcome.
Let's hope this sparks some other creators, or warp pulls trough in the end.