Warp is currently closed-source and is not accepting contributions from external developers at this time, though we plan on open sourcing our app in the future.
I would need more details on their plans to open source it before I would even consider using this app.
Although I’m not a FOSS purist (I’m typing this on a Mac), I’m gradually moving everything I can towards open software and open hardware because I’ve been burned far too many times by proprietary crap being abruptly and arbitrarily discontinued with no recourse (among many other proprietary problems). I’m not willing to shoulder the switching costs when I learn to love this app and then it’s inevitably bought out by Facebook or @#$%ing Yahoo or something, and turned into an ad platform (ads in your terminal! innovation!) or just deleted (thanks for joining us on our incredible journey!). The right to fork is essential for any software my workflow depends on.
Open sourcing our app and UI framework is definitely on our short term roadmap. We want to make our app more stable and cross-platform first, but open sourcing is something that will be done before Warp is available more generally!
What is the thought process behind keeping it proprietary for any period of time? I can’t understand this mindset… for any project I publish I push the git repo first, write any announcements later.
In another post you’ve said “an engineer at Warp” – does this mean Warp is a business? What would the business model be? Is there any initial external investment? Terminal emulators of all things are the absolute last thing I would expect anyone to base a startup around.
Yes, our hope is to build a business around Warp. Our position on this is that we are trying to build a terminal that is useful enough that developers and teams would (eventually) want to pay for some parts of it. We are not building a business around selling data or anything else nefarious. We have taken VC funding, which is helpful for supporting a group of engineers to work on Warp as their full-time jobs.
If you’ve already taken the VC funding, it’s probably too late, but I have to say it anyway: venture capitalists aren’t interested in lifestyle businesses or sustainable businesses. They don’t want you to grow slowly and carefully while investing in the future and making sure you can serve your community indefinitely. They aren’t interested in you finding a small niche and perfecting your fit for that small market. If you’re making enough money to fund your current operations forever, that won’t be enough for them, they’ll demand more. Their model is to bet on a bunch of companies with the hopes that one of them will hit it big and make all of their money back, and anything that doesn’t look like it will take over the world they don’t care about. They want your business to see explosive growth, and they will apply pressure to make that happen. The only way the VCs make their investment back is if you get bought out, or achieve world domination.
If you get bought out, there’s no reason to expect that you will be able to continue making the product, or that it won’t be transformed into some evil version of itself that betrays everything you stand for. Corporations often say they’ll let the new purchase continue operating independently, and it always eventually is proven to be a lie. How many times are “entrepreneurs” going to fall for that? Or do they always in their heart of hearts know the truth, and lie to themselves to secure the bag?
If you’re under pressure to achieve world domination, what ethical boundaries will you cross in order to get the returns they demand? If you refuse to compromise your morals, how quickly will the VCs replace you with someone who does not have those compunctions? Your terminal emulator probably can’t become a universal standard if people have to pay to use it, they’ll just use Kitty or Alacritty or the terminal that comes with their OS instead, so how will you screw people over to make VC-satisfying profits while giving away the product? In what way will you be selling your community if you can’t sell the terminal?
Venture capitalists are bad. I hold them responsible for the centralized, brittle, surveillance-obsessed, unconscionable internet of today. They take good people and good ideas, suck out the profits, and then destroy the communities that assembled around them. They are capitalism at its worst and the systems they build are going to kill us all. Get out if you can.
I’d rather support and work on improving things that I trust not to vanish, instead of getting excited about a shiny new thing that turns out to not be reliable.
I’m a technophile and a neophile, I am generally quite excited about trying new things.
But I bought a Google Daydream headset, only for them to discontinue the entire Daydream platform literally before I could open the box. (Anyone want a Daydream headset?) I’m not worried about this happening with open hardware like, say, Pine64 products, like the PinePhone + Phosh. If Pine64 the legal/financial entity died, there’s no reason the community couldn’t continue.
I was an avid LiveJournal user, but when they were bought out by Russians and started enforcing Russian law, including laws discriminating against LGBTQ people, it was trivial to move to Dreamwidth. The founder may not have had the foresight to build an organization that could last for the long term, but they did have the foresight to build on open source software and open protocols, which allowed the remaining community to move on. Dreamwidth is much less popular than LJ was in its heyday, but I still keep in touch with a few friends from college through it who are still consistently posting there, as well as following some public accounts such as Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries. Perhaps more importantly, all of my data is still online and available, the way I want it.
I was also an avid user of MySpace, and del.icio.us, and thesixtyone, and a dozen other proprietary web services which did not have similar happy endings.
Trust me, I try plenty of new things, I was just learning to use the Foot terminal emulator in the Sway window manager this week, on my new MNT Reform. I’m learning to copy my configuration / dotfiles between my computers using chezmoi, which I just installed a couple of weeks ago. I’m just trying new FOSS things… they might be better than my old things, proprietary or not!
UPDATE: Or to put it another way, this is not a case of me avoiding new things, this is a case of me avoiding red flags.
Looks functionally neat and aesthetically pleasing, but my terminal emulator is definitely something that I want to be open-source. Also, I get the need for it for this particular software, but a privacy policy for a terminal emulator? Pass.
I’ve been a happy kitty terminal user for a few years now. No Windows support but on Mac and Linux I think it provides a good balance of out of the box simplicity and configurability. It’s configured with a config file, which I love because I can check in the config to my dotfiles.
Seems like a custom shell prompt is still visible in these screenshots. Is it using Semantic Prompts within a regular shell session?
Also curiously absent is any mention of how well full screen apps like text editors work in there.
I think the primary sales point of Warp is the Sharing functionality
That… that’s just a pastebin?
Plug: Wezterm is the real deal! I don’t know why I’ve stuck with Alacritty for so long. Wezterm is focused on features and usability rather than some abstract “simplicity”. It’s really good.
The prompt is fully controlled by Warp currently (we render it with information that we wire from the shell, more information here: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/).
Just checked out wezterm and I’m definitely going to try it out for a bit. Thanks. Feels nicer than the windows terminal, I think maybe the latency on windows terminal is more noticeable than I realized.
I’m very curious how they managed to make a Rust GUI application on the Mac. I’d love to see if there is some Swift UI or AppKit code in there or…
The Warp blog has a post on this. They’re using their own UI library that renders with Metal:
After a very brief experiment with Electron, we quickly pivoted to building in Rust and rendering directly on the GPU using Metal (Mac’s GPU API).
Rust UI framework that was loosely inspired by Flutter. We use this UI framework to build an element tree for our app that we can then render using various rendering backends (for now just Metal, but we plan to add OpenGL and WebGL as we support more platforms).
Hi there! I’m Aloke, an engineer at Warp. Happy to answer any questions.
One thing I wanted to clarify from the original blog post is that we do support custom fonts (any monospace system font) and themes (https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes for more information). We’re working hard on adding more customization pieces, including custom keybindings.
Under what situations do you think it is reasonable to use a terminal emulator that is expressly allowed to connect to online things, collects telemetry, and doesn’t let you see the source? I enter sensitive stuff into my terminals all the time, and I can’t imagine a terminal that’s so good that I’d type my passwords into it but not be allowed to disable its telemetry or at least build that telemetry from source so I could be confident it’s not shipping my sensitive stuff off by accident.
I didn’t see an add font option, only a list of monospaced fonts. Does it pull from Library/Fonts? I didn’t realize custom themes were supported based on the docs: https://docs.warp.dev/features/themes. Glad to hear it’s supported, but maybe consider throwing a link in the docs. Thanks for clarifying and I’ll add these details to the post.
– https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp#contributing
I would need more details on their plans to open source it before I would even consider using this app.
Although I’m not a FOSS purist (I’m typing this on a Mac), I’m gradually moving everything I can towards open software and open hardware because I’ve been burned far too many times by proprietary crap being abruptly and arbitrarily discontinued with no recourse (among many other proprietary problems). I’m not willing to shoulder the switching costs when I learn to love this app and then it’s inevitably bought out by Facebook or @#$%ing Yahoo or something, and turned into an ad platform (ads in your terminal! innovation!) or just deleted (thanks for joining us on our incredible journey!). The right to fork is essential for any software my workflow depends on.
Open sourcing our app and UI framework is definitely on our short term roadmap. We want to make our app more stable and cross-platform first, but open sourcing is something that will be done before Warp is available more generally!
What is the thought process behind keeping it proprietary for any period of time? I can’t understand this mindset… for any project I publish I push the git repo first, write any announcements later.
In another post you’ve said “an engineer at Warp” – does this mean Warp is a business? What would the business model be? Is there any initial external investment? Terminal emulators of all things are the absolute last thing I would expect anyone to base a startup around.
Yes, our hope is to build a business around Warp. Our position on this is that we are trying to build a terminal that is useful enough that developers and teams would (eventually) want to pay for some parts of it. We are not building a business around selling data or anything else nefarious. We have taken VC funding, which is helpful for supporting a group of engineers to work on Warp as their full-time jobs.
If you’ve already taken the VC funding, it’s probably too late, but I have to say it anyway: venture capitalists aren’t interested in lifestyle businesses or sustainable businesses. They don’t want you to grow slowly and carefully while investing in the future and making sure you can serve your community indefinitely. They aren’t interested in you finding a small niche and perfecting your fit for that small market. If you’re making enough money to fund your current operations forever, that won’t be enough for them, they’ll demand more. Their model is to bet on a bunch of companies with the hopes that one of them will hit it big and make all of their money back, and anything that doesn’t look like it will take over the world they don’t care about. They want your business to see explosive growth, and they will apply pressure to make that happen. The only way the VCs make their investment back is if you get bought out, or achieve world domination.
If you get bought out, there’s no reason to expect that you will be able to continue making the product, or that it won’t be transformed into some evil version of itself that betrays everything you stand for. Corporations often say they’ll let the new purchase continue operating independently, and it always eventually is proven to be a lie. How many times are “entrepreneurs” going to fall for that? Or do they always in their heart of hearts know the truth, and lie to themselves to secure the bag?
If you’re under pressure to achieve world domination, what ethical boundaries will you cross in order to get the returns they demand? If you refuse to compromise your morals, how quickly will the VCs replace you with someone who does not have those compunctions? Your terminal emulator probably can’t become a universal standard if people have to pay to use it, they’ll just use Kitty or Alacritty or the terminal that comes with their OS instead, so how will you screw people over to make VC-satisfying profits while giving away the product? In what way will you be selling your community if you can’t sell the terminal?
Venture capitalists are bad. I hold them responsible for the centralized, brittle, surveillance-obsessed, unconscionable internet of today. They take good people and good ideas, suck out the profits, and then destroy the communities that assembled around them. They are capitalism at its worst and the systems they build are going to kill us all. Get out if you can.
This is not a great way to live life, I think.
I’d rather support and work on improving things that I trust not to vanish, instead of getting excited about a shiny new thing that turns out to not be reliable.
I’m a technophile and a neophile, I am generally quite excited about trying new things.
But I bought a Google Daydream headset, only for them to discontinue the entire Daydream platform literally before I could open the box. (Anyone want a Daydream headset?) I’m not worried about this happening with open hardware like, say, Pine64 products, like the PinePhone + Phosh. If Pine64 the legal/financial entity died, there’s no reason the community couldn’t continue.
I was an avid LiveJournal user, but when they were bought out by Russians and started enforcing Russian law, including laws discriminating against LGBTQ people, it was trivial to move to Dreamwidth. The founder may not have had the foresight to build an organization that could last for the long term, but they did have the foresight to build on open source software and open protocols, which allowed the remaining community to move on. Dreamwidth is much less popular than LJ was in its heyday, but I still keep in touch with a few friends from college through it who are still consistently posting there, as well as following some public accounts such as Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries. Perhaps more importantly, all of my data is still online and available, the way I want it.
I was also an avid user of MySpace, and del.icio.us, and thesixtyone, and a dozen other proprietary web services which did not have similar happy endings.
Trust me, I try plenty of new things, I was just learning to use the Foot terminal emulator in the Sway window manager this week, on my new MNT Reform. I’m learning to copy my configuration / dotfiles between my computers using chezmoi, which I just installed a couple of weeks ago. I’m just trying new FOSS things… they might be better than my old things, proprietary or not!
UPDATE: Or to put it another way, this is not a case of me avoiding new things, this is a case of me avoiding red flags.
Looks functionally neat and aesthetically pleasing, but my terminal emulator is definitely something that I want to be open-source. Also, I get the need for it for this particular software, but a privacy policy for a terminal emulator? Pass.
I’ve been a happy kitty terminal user for a few years now. No Windows support but on Mac and Linux I think it provides a good balance of out of the box simplicity and configurability. It’s configured with a config file, which I love because I can check in the config to my dotfiles.
A terminal. Not open source. Hard pass.
Seems like a custom shell prompt is still visible in these screenshots. Is it using Semantic Prompts within a regular shell session?
Also curiously absent is any mention of how well full screen apps like text editors work in there.
That… that’s just a pastebin?
Plug: Wezterm is the real deal! I don’t know why I’ve stuck with Alacritty for so long. Wezterm is focused on features and usability rather than some abstract “simplicity”. It’s really good.
The prompt is fully controlled by Warp currently (we render it with information that we wire from the shell, more information here: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/).
Full screen apps like Vim work like they do in any other terminal emulator. There’s a screenshot of Emacs and Nano in Warp in one of our blog posts if you’re interested in seeing an example! https://blog.warp.dev/fantastic-terminal-programs-and-how-to-quit-them-2/
Just checked out wezterm and I’m definitely going to try it out for a bit. Thanks. Feels nicer than the windows terminal, I think maybe the latency on windows terminal is more noticeable than I realized.
The Warp blog has a post on this. They’re using their own UI library that renders with Metal:
Hi there! I’m Aloke, an engineer at Warp. Happy to answer any questions.
One thing I wanted to clarify from the original blog post is that we do support custom fonts (any monospace system font) and themes (https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes for more information). We’re working hard on adding more customization pieces, including custom keybindings.
Under what situations do you think it is reasonable to use a terminal emulator that is expressly allowed to connect to online things, collects telemetry, and doesn’t let you see the source? I enter sensitive stuff into my terminals all the time, and I can’t imagine a terminal that’s so good that I’d type my passwords into it but not be allowed to disable its telemetry or at least build that telemetry from source so I could be confident it’s not shipping my sensitive stuff off by accident.
Hi Aloke!
I didn’t see an add font option, only a list of monospaced fonts. Does it pull from Library/Fonts? I didn’t realize custom themes were supported based on the docs: https://docs.warp.dev/features/themes. Glad to hear it’s supported, but maybe consider throwing a link in the docs. Thanks for clarifying and I’ll add these details to the post.
Great point about updating the docs! We’ll make sure to get that updated.
And we support any fonts that MacOs considers “installed” – essentially any font that appears in the “Font Book” app