I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.
I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.
I wish there were an in-between solution out there.
We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.
In all honesty, the people who want to turn off AI won't be downloading Warp in the first place. I know Warp has interesting terminal innovations because I've been familiar with it since before the AI boom, but new users can't really tell.
Homepage header is "Warp is the agentic development environment", only screenshot on the homepage shows what appears to be a product similar to cursor/antigravity/etc AI IDE. Fair if that's your product direction but there's nothing there that tells new users about your terminal UX improvements. Honestly even if I was in the market for a new AI tool, there's nothing on your website that really tells me why I should pick Warp over any of the many competitors.
Fwiw I think Warp is quite cool, I just mean this as hopefully useful feedback from a new customer perspective.
> trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features
I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.
Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty
They have interesting features, their initial release had snippets, team sharing, time-saver stuff with a nice UX. Same reason one might use Raycast. I was a paying customer for that release, but when they pivoted I cancelled.
we have a lot of users who like warp as a place to run other coding agents (e.g. claude code, codex) and have tried to improve the experience for those beyond what a typical terminal offers (e.g. code review, file tree)
We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!
same with me, it looks more or less too flat with just maybe 2 main colors and just one font variant, feels like big pile of flat text - hard to see what is header what is footer and sometimes what is button.
I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.
May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?
Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.
The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.
Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.
Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.
Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.
They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3
Yeah I don't understand why people are acting so hurt by this. If you want to be paid for something, don't make it open source. If you want to force users to keep the source open, make it GPL/AGPL/whatever. If you want to prevent commercial use, use an appropriate license. This company didn't do any wrong from my limited knowledge of this thread.
Sure it would be great for them to give back, and they absolutely should, but I don't see why they deserve any hate (unless they hide what they did or engage in otherwise shady practices, but based on the comments I'm not seeing that).
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.
I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
There's an interview that got scrubbed from the internet with Zach on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. This comment and its lack of self-awareness exemplify what was on display for 60 minutes.
Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.
I mean, if they have a working relationship with each other then I guess the alacritty folks don't hate their guts. That's meaningful from my perspective.
Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
> They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
It's bit more nuanced. The company management have fiducial responsibilities to the investors but also have responsibility to the company itself and its employees. E.g. Milton Friedman's shared-holder primacy is a crap philosophy and one of the most damaging ones to actual healthy free market economies. For example, in corporate bankruptcy in the US workers get paid before shareholders.
The courts have also tended to favor the company management as long as they're acting reasonably, so I've read. IANAL, but it shouldn't be too hard to say hey this support contract for a core piece of software reduces risk for us by X, Y or helps get Z feature.
So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter, I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them? Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people, let alone businesses.
If you use them for free to spawn a 50M business, yeah, give back a little. Nobody's saying every user should open their wallet, let alone "empty" it as you hyperbolate.
People are upset they raised 50 million, how many employees? How long does that keep their lights on? Maybe if they were raking in hundreds of millions I would be inclined to be outraged but if I make a startup tomorrow I cant just donate my VC bucks to every open source project I like until I have some real income coming in or my investors will want my head.
You once again drag things in a wildly hyperbolic direction. Nobody's talking about throwing money around wildly at unrelated projects. When there is a single project that sits at your very heart, without which your entire startup is a nonstarter, yes, donate.
I don't have particularly strong preference for copyleft (I use the Apache license for my personal projects), but these don't seem like particularly compelling arguments.
> So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter
Vim and emacs both use licenses that require you to share any source code modifications if you distribute binaries that you change, so that's kind of a strange comparison. You literally couldn't do the things that Warp did with Alacritty. As for VS Code, it seems pretty disingenuous to compare a single solo developer to a multi-trillion dollar company.
> I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them?
I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
> Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people
Most "normal people" do not have access to $50 million of VC money
> let alone businesses
Paying the developer of the one piece of software that they forked for the entire basis of their business $100,000 of the VC money would not meaningfully have hurt their ability to succeed. They could have just as easily reached the same level of success they have now with $49.9 million.
> I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money. Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
If you're actually asking the question, I'll give you my answer: I was lucky enough to go to a nice spa resort earlier this year, I just handed a few bills to an attendant who had laid out a towel for me when an older man sitting next to me chuckled and shook his head saying "You don't actually have to give them them anything, they have to do it anyway." Super nice resort, nobody here hurting for a few dollars in tips.
I guess it's valid to take everything you legally can, but personally, I'm saying it's fucked up move not to pay even a token amount. That's their only consequence, (some) people thinking it's a fucked up move.
Not saying its not, I guess the core of my argument is that people are outraged that these guys raised 50 million… how much of that is going to employees and infrastructure? Is the owner sitting on 50 million in his personal bank account? Because the outrage feels very premature, not to mention they just open sourced the project when they really did not need to under any obligation. Far as I can tell they also did a lot of custom work on top of Alacritty, so its not 100% Alacritty.
The charitable read is that the original project team willingly worked with Warp, knowing the direction they were going. I don't know any background on the drama FWIW.
that's the correct read - we shared what we were building and they helped us integrate alacritty. it's similar to how mitchell h reached out and asked today if we wanted to integrate ghostty.
we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them
I thought the negative sentiment being shared here was hyperbolic, but you look absolutely ridiculous in these comments.
"Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
> "Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
Have you ever contributed to open source?
Not everyone is doing it out of the expectation of a paycheck. For all the open source code I've worked on, my goal has unironically been for those using it to achieve whatever positive end they were trying to use my software for, and that's it.
The one time I did go further and agree to do some one-off changes for money it actually caused me a hassle that year as I had to account for it under the right tax treatment, I was nearly outside the "hobby" exception you can get.
I have no skin in the game for either side of this, but I looked pretty hard at his comment history and couldn't find anything even remotely sounding like that. All he does is express gratitude for the projects they collaborated with. Alacritty folks themselves are saying as much here.
There's some undercurrent of something that seems to be driving a lot of the rage in the comments here. Anti-AI/OpenAI/"VC money"/"the rich"?
I think a conversation about the ethics and morals of forked software hitting it big, and how/how much they should give back to their upstream, is a good one to have, if the tone wasn't so personal and aggressive.
I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.
I have absolutely no hard feelings.
Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.
Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.
thanks for the support here. we are very grateful for the help you all provided initially, and if you are interested in sponsorship for the repo, we are also happy to provide some. alacritty is awesome
This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.
you shouldn’t be surprised though. most people in tech only care about money and you already know if you align yourself with Altman, your morals already aren’t in the right place.
This should be banned on this platform. If you are against Altman or his values or morals, that is fine, but calling others who do feel aligned with him immoral… well that kind of hate leads to attempts on Altman’s life of which we have already seen one. You better stop with this behaviour before you encourage others to do actions that you will regret
You don't understand why people are upset at an individual that is proudly proclaiming that 100s of millions of Americans will become unemployed and there is nothing to do be done about it? In a country where being unemployed is a literal death sentence?
What kind of responses do you expect in return? I'm sorry but everyone in his orbit needs to be publicly shamed as well. These people are ghouls and we're seeing them create the next generation of ghouls in real time.
lol you’re a moron. Altman actively promotes neofeudalist ideas and has shown time and again he does not care about safety or human wellbeing. Sociopathic narcissists like him will be the downfall of our species.
Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.
But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.
And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.
It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.
The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.
It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.
The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.
Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.
Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.
genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?
Personally would love to give back, if I ever make it there. I contribute to large open source communities and also benefit from the contributions of many others, but have never personally been in that situation. Curious what best practices have been historically.
Why doesn't it answer the question? If you are a selfish individual that doesn't believe in giving back. there simply isn't much to discuss.
These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses.
These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race.
Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.
Every tech company could not exist without the internet, developed by the US government/universities and released for free. Should they all be nationalized? Are they all "raping public resources"?
Open-source developers have plenty of ways to make money from their work. You can even stipulate in your license that companies who use the code to make more than a certain amount of money pay a fee. If developers choose not to do that, that's fine, but it means nobody is obligated to pay them.
Imagine Warp donated $1000 to Alacritty. Would you be happy then? What about $10k, or $1 million? What would be the appropriate compensation? Sure, Warp wouldn't exist without Alacritty, but they also wouldn't exist without the ARPANET. At the same time, Alacritty's developers didn't raise $50 million in funding, pay developers to build Warp's features, or do any of the marketing. How do we know how to compensate them? Answer: we look at Alacritty's licensing terms, which explicitly permit free use of the software as long the license is included in all copies (which the Warp devs have complied with).
Seems silly to bash a company for using open source exactly in accordance with the license. If they expected to be compensated, they picked the wrong licensing terms.
I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.
So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.
If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. IMHO it's dishonest/immoral to freely give something away with no expressed expectation of reciprocity and then get upset when someone doesn't reciprocate.
>> If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it.
Definitely and the Alacritty devs have never asked for anything in return for using their software and code. It's mainly others in the community looking at a commercial company forking and then raising $50M and not even contributing. I've seen huge companies, or their higher ups, Github sponsor developers who are building code they use. It's not unheard of.
And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)
The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.
(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)
Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.
I was iffy on it at first but they released an update a week or two ago to make it much more "bring-your-own-coding-agent"-driven, where they facilitate you having lots of tabs with Codex and Claude Code rather than trying to shove theirs down your throat. IMO it's quite a good terminal now, even if they do still have a few other remaining throat-shoving dark patterns in the UI they need to strip out. (The big one being that pressing "+" tries to encourage you to start a new Warp Agent rather than just create a new terminal tab, with no way to change/override it, currently. If they fix that I'd say it'd be stellar.)
I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.
I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".
Have you given any thought to a webui, and a "warp" server I can install on a VPS and interact with it via the webui? I believe this paradigm/approach is the real future.
I loved using Warp. I used it daily for over a year. Setup workflow scripts and customizations, it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to.
Then one day, I opened it up to find the command bar was replaced with a natural language prompt. It changed the behavior subtly, and changed how the prompt looked.
I uninstalled.
I don’t care that you can opt out. My gripe isn’t about AI. I don’t want my tools and workflows changing at random. If you have a new feature, mention it in the “what’s new” log and suggest I opt in.
Not to get meta but I loathe how this sort of thing is commonplace these days. I would pay so much money for app developers to just fucking stop shoveling. Constantly chasing new audiences only stands to ostracize your own. Maybe you care and maybe you don’t. I bounced tho.
My mini vision for Warp when I got really into it was keeping it lightly AI flavored, but leaning into the workflows. The way it multicursors to fill variables was awesome. I don’t care about agents, but I would want to see agents exist as workflows (tools) rather than ephemeral beings like opencode or cursor 3
I agree that was/is an absolutely horrible feature (and it took me way too long to realize I could/should turn it off) and always should've been opt-in, but the current version is honestly quite nice to use. I would not have recommended it a few months ago but I would recommend it now.
Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.
My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.
In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.
It had a simple UI with a clear button / key combo to toggle the “agent mode”. That, plus the fact it could “warpify” my SSH connections made this a useful utility.
Then a couple months ago they completely changed the UI. It doesn’t work as it once did. My saved prompt templates didn’t work as they did before, the agent toggle was gone (you can now start some ‘/agent’ command but it is much less intuitive) and they seem to be focusing on these cloud agents and code editing.
I want none of these things. I loved a simple terminal that let me still execute sudo, let me ssh into remote machines but still bring Claude and OpenAI models to interact with my session.
argh, sorry that we made it worse for you, that definitely was not the intention. we were trying to make the modes clearer.
You can still basically get back to the same way of working if you set new terminal sessions to be "agent sessions" and enable natural language detection. that's how i use it.
Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.
Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.
I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.
Looking at the headline "Warp is now Open-Source", I really hoped that OS/2 3.0 Warp was open-sourced. :-(
There are dosens of us !
Yeah, apparently this is a different Warp.
I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.
I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.
I wish there were an in-between solution out there.
I feel similar. I have been using cmux over the last few weeks: https://cmux.com/
Seems to fit a good balance for the way I want to use my terminal
We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.
In all honesty, the people who want to turn off AI won't be downloading Warp in the first place. I know Warp has interesting terminal innovations because I've been familiar with it since before the AI boom, but new users can't really tell.
Homepage header is "Warp is the agentic development environment", only screenshot on the homepage shows what appears to be a product similar to cursor/antigravity/etc AI IDE. Fair if that's your product direction but there's nothing there that tells new users about your terminal UX improvements. Honestly even if I was in the market for a new AI tool, there's nothing on your website that really tells me why I should pick Warp over any of the many competitors.
Fwiw I think Warp is quite cool, I just mean this as hopefully useful feedback from a new customer perspective.
> trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features
I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.
that's fair. we try to be opinionated on the default experience but allow a lot of customizability.
> You can turn off they AI if you want
Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty
They have interesting features, their initial release had snippets, team sharing, time-saver stuff with a nice UX. Same reason one might use Raycast. I was a paying customer for that release, but when they pivoted I cancelled.
we have a lot of users who like warp as a place to run other coding agents (e.g. claude code, codex) and have tried to improve the experience for those beyond what a typical terminal offers (e.g. code review, file tree)
check out my yaw terminal. iterm2 was absolutely an inspiration.
Check out kitty if you haven’t yet.
having to kitty-ssh or whatever to set appropriate terminfo otherwise it breaks was really irritating when i was trying it out. has that been fixed?
I really like Warp.
I’ll admit the UI has changed a lot recently and I find it more intimidating than when I was using it a year ago, so I mostly use Ghostty now.
Hey, Aloke from Warp here.
We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!
Hey Aloke!
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try and see how it goes.
I noticed that too. I’ve been using cmux (based on ghostty, has a more basic UI) and have been happy with it: https://cmux.com/
same with me, it looks more or less too flat with just maybe 2 main colors and just one font variant, feels like big pile of flat text - hard to see what is header what is footer and sometimes what is button.
I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.
Congrats on open-sourcing warp.
May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?
Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
> Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.
this make sense, thanks
Makes sense but doesn't explain why open sourcing it, therefore doesn't directly answer the question.
look at zach's reply below.
> OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open-source Warp repository.
Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.
Wondering if additionally OpenAI afraid of Cursor being bought by xAI
Warp founder here. Great question.
I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)
But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.
The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.
Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.
make sense, thank you for your response.
They made a blog post about it [0]. I haven't read it yet, but it might answer your question.
[0]: https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source
> Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product
Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.
Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.
They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3
(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)
I didn't suspect you were a bot; I'm a fan of the semicolon and ()'s myself.
If you expect payment then put that in the license. Yes it's a dick move, but those are the terms the original developer chose.
Yeah I don't understand why people are acting so hurt by this. If you want to be paid for something, don't make it open source. If you want to force users to keep the source open, make it GPL/AGPL/whatever. If you want to prevent commercial use, use an appropriate license. This company didn't do any wrong from my limited knowledge of this thread.
Sure it would be great for them to give back, and they absolutely should, but I don't see why they deserve any hate (unless they hide what they did or engage in otherwise shady practices, but based on the comments I'm not seeing that).
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
This is such an HN take. "If you want money you have to force people into it"
What a shithole society is
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
Then tech leaders suddenly act shocked when society violently starts rejecting them.
Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.
I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
There's an interview that got scrubbed from the internet with Zach on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. This comment and its lack of self-awareness exemplify what was on display for 60 minutes.
Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.
Found it here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-e3n2c-28221400
The host is absolutely insufferable.
I attempted to listen and couldn't get over the "Wolp" pronunciation of warp.
> free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
It's almost the "success" definition in the business language, isn't it?
I mean, if they have a working relationship with each other then I guess the alacritty folks don't hate their guts. That's meaningful from my perspective.
Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
> They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
It's bit more nuanced. The company management have fiducial responsibilities to the investors but also have responsibility to the company itself and its employees. E.g. Milton Friedman's shared-holder primacy is a crap philosophy and one of the most damaging ones to actual healthy free market economies. For example, in corporate bankruptcy in the US workers get paid before shareholders.
The courts have also tended to favor the company management as long as they're acting reasonably, so I've read. IANAL, but it shouldn't be too hard to say hey this support contract for a core piece of software reduces risk for us by X, Y or helps get Z feature.
So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter, I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them? Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people, let alone businesses.
If you use them for free to spawn a 50M business, yeah, give back a little. Nobody's saying every user should open their wallet, let alone "empty" it as you hyperbolate.
> Not sustainable for normal people, let alone people
I hope you are aware of the fact a business makes way more money than a "normal" person?
People are upset they raised 50 million, how many employees? How long does that keep their lights on? Maybe if they were raking in hundreds of millions I would be inclined to be outraged but if I make a startup tomorrow I cant just donate my VC bucks to every open source project I like until I have some real income coming in or my investors will want my head.
You once again drag things in a wildly hyperbolic direction. Nobody's talking about throwing money around wildly at unrelated projects. When there is a single project that sits at your very heart, without which your entire startup is a nonstarter, yes, donate.
I don't have particularly strong preference for copyleft (I use the Apache license for my personal projects), but these don't seem like particularly compelling arguments.
> So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter
Vim and emacs both use licenses that require you to share any source code modifications if you distribute binaries that you change, so that's kind of a strange comparison. You literally couldn't do the things that Warp did with Alacritty. As for VS Code, it seems pretty disingenuous to compare a single solo developer to a multi-trillion dollar company.
> I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them?
I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
> Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people
Most "normal people" do not have access to $50 million of VC money
> let alone businesses
Paying the developer of the one piece of software that they forked for the entire basis of their business $100,000 of the VC money would not meaningfully have hurt their ability to succeed. They could have just as easily reached the same level of success they have now with $49.9 million.
> I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money. Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
> I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to?
The ones that a barely-informed stranger could easily identify as having made you 7+ figures.
Why wouldn't you throw them a few bucks? Especially if your multi-million dollar business is basically a vim clone entirely based on their source...
I would once profitable, but early stages where every dollar matters? I can see why they wouldnt just throw money left and right.
If you're actually asking the question, I'll give you my answer: I was lucky enough to go to a nice spa resort earlier this year, I just handed a few bills to an attendant who had laid out a towel for me when an older man sitting next to me chuckled and shook his head saying "You don't actually have to give them them anything, they have to do it anyway." Super nice resort, nobody here hurting for a few dollars in tips.
I guess it's valid to take everything you legally can, but personally, I'm saying it's fucked up move not to pay even a token amount. That's their only consequence, (some) people thinking it's a fucked up move.
This isn't left and right, this is one direction: upstream, to the project that forms your very heart.
Donating to the free software you use, even a little, is good.
Not saying its not, I guess the core of my argument is that people are outraged that these guys raised 50 million… how much of that is going to employees and infrastructure? Is the owner sitting on 50 million in his personal bank account? Because the outrage feels very premature, not to mention they just open sourced the project when they really did not need to under any obligation. Far as I can tell they also did a lot of custom work on top of Alacritty, so its not 100% Alacritty.
The charitable read is that the original project team willingly worked with Warp, knowing the direction they were going. I don't know any background on the drama FWIW.
that's the correct read - we shared what we were building and they helped us integrate alacritty. it's similar to how mitchell h reached out and asked today if we wanted to integrate ghostty.
we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them
I thought the negative sentiment being shared here was hyperbolic, but you look absolutely ridiculous in these comments.
"Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
> "Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
Have you ever contributed to open source?
Not everyone is doing it out of the expectation of a paycheck. For all the open source code I've worked on, my goal has unironically been for those using it to achieve whatever positive end they were trying to use my software for, and that's it.
The one time I did go further and agree to do some one-off changes for money it actually caused me a hassle that year as I had to account for it under the right tax treatment, I was nearly outside the "hobby" exception you can get.
I have no skin in the game for either side of this, but I looked pretty hard at his comment history and couldn't find anything even remotely sounding like that. All he does is express gratitude for the projects they collaborated with. Alacritty folks themselves are saying as much here.
There's some undercurrent of something that seems to be driving a lot of the rage in the comments here. Anti-AI/OpenAI/"VC money"/"the rich"?
I think a conversation about the ethics and morals of forked software hitting it big, and how/how much they should give back to their upstream, is a good one to have, if the tone wasn't so personal and aggressive.
if you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
Doesn't that make not supporting them even worse???
I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.
I have absolutely no hard feelings.
Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.
Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.
thanks for the support here. we are very grateful for the help you all provided initially, and if you are interested in sponsorship for the repo, we are also happy to provide some. alacritty is awesome
The takes in this thread are insane. There’s nowhere else to put this comment given the framing so I’m putting it here. OSS isn’t a charity movement.
Toss a coin to your Witcher
> Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support
So are you going to donate to them or not?
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.
It's disgusting behavior.
you shouldn’t be surprised though. most people in tech only care about money and you already know if you align yourself with Altman, your morals already aren’t in the right place.
This should be banned on this platform. If you are against Altman or his values or morals, that is fine, but calling others who do feel aligned with him immoral… well that kind of hate leads to attempts on Altman’s life of which we have already seen one. You better stop with this behaviour before you encourage others to do actions that you will regret
we can't say CEOs have bad morals now?
Altman has trash morals
You don't understand why people are upset at an individual that is proudly proclaiming that 100s of millions of Americans will become unemployed and there is nothing to do be done about it? In a country where being unemployed is a literal death sentence?
What kind of responses do you expect in return? I'm sorry but everyone in his orbit needs to be publicly shamed as well. These people are ghouls and we're seeing them create the next generation of ghouls in real time.
Lol, lmao, shut up idiot.
(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)
lol you’re a moron. Altman actively promotes neofeudalist ideas and has shown time and again he does not care about safety or human wellbeing. Sociopathic narcissists like him will be the downfall of our species.
talk is cheap ...
Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.
But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?
Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.
And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.
It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.
It’s not that complicated. Most of us program for work, and can’t use GPL stuff at work.
People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.
Alacritty is an application. Most of us use GPL applications at work.
Neither I nor the comment I replied to are talking about Alacritty
The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.
It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.
The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
KHTML was LGPL, just as with the rest of the KDE libraries. Otherwise Apple wouldn't have been able to fork it in the first place.
It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.
Without it, chrome would be closed source entirely.
Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.
Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.
genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?
Well do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?
Personally would love to give back, if I ever make it there. I contribute to large open source communities and also benefit from the contributions of many others, but have never personally been in that situation. Curious what best practices have been historically.
You didn't answer their question. Asking your own questions isn't an answer.
Why doesn't it answer the question? If you are a selfish individual that doesn't believe in giving back. there simply isn't much to discuss.
These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses.
These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race.
Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.
Every tech company could not exist without the internet, developed by the US government/universities and released for free. Should they all be nationalized? Are they all "raping public resources"?
Open-source developers have plenty of ways to make money from their work. You can even stipulate in your license that companies who use the code to make more than a certain amount of money pay a fee. If developers choose not to do that, that's fine, but it means nobody is obligated to pay them.
Imagine Warp donated $1000 to Alacritty. Would you be happy then? What about $10k, or $1 million? What would be the appropriate compensation? Sure, Warp wouldn't exist without Alacritty, but they also wouldn't exist without the ARPANET. At the same time, Alacritty's developers didn't raise $50 million in funding, pay developers to build Warp's features, or do any of the marketing. How do we know how to compensate them? Answer: we look at Alacritty's licensing terms, which explicitly permit free use of the software as long the license is included in all copies (which the Warp devs have complied with).
This is a shortcoming with permissive licenses (such as MIT).
If you want to prevent your own project from being taken from you, then AGPL3 is your best option.
If you don't want to stifle adoption then you can always offer bespoke licenses to companies who need them (at a cost to them, and a profit to you).
Until hackers understand the risk of permissive licenses, this will continue to happen.
Seems silly to bash a company for using open source exactly in accordance with the license. If they expected to be compensated, they picked the wrong licensing terms.
I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.
So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.
If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. IMHO it's dishonest/immoral to freely give something away with no expressed expectation of reciprocity and then get upset when someone doesn't reciprocate.
>> If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it.
Definitely and the Alacritty devs have never asked for anything in return for using their software and code. It's mainly others in the community looking at a commercial company forking and then raising $50M and not even contributing. I've seen huge companies, or their higher ups, Github sponsor developers who are building code they use. It's not unheard of.
And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)
The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.
(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)
Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.
I was iffy on it at first but they released an update a week or two ago to make it much more "bring-your-own-coding-agent"-driven, where they facilitate you having lots of tabs with Codex and Claude Code rather than trying to shove theirs down your throat. IMO it's quite a good terminal now, even if they do still have a few other remaining throat-shoving dark patterns in the UI they need to strip out. (The big one being that pressing "+" tries to encourage you to start a new Warp Agent rather than just create a new terminal tab, with no way to change/override it, currently. If they fix that I'd say it'd be stellar.)
Warp is still a terminal, but it also has a coding agent.
no requirement to use it--and you can turn off all of the AI features if you don't want to use them at all
This is absolutely how I use it as well. Just the copy paste and search functionality is miles of any terminal I’ve ever used. He
I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.
I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".
My ESC key is wearing out.
Looking at Warp.dev, it looks exactly like Codex or Cursor. I thought it used to be a terminal?
It's still a terminal at its core, and you can use it to run any CLI coding agent or use our built in agent.
We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.
Have you given any thought to a webui, and a "warp" server I can install on a VPS and interact with it via the webui? I believe this paradigm/approach is the real future.
From the website it definitely does not look like a terminal anymore.
(note: I'm trolling)
Getting a Zawinski's Law vibe there, "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail"
Why would you name yourself Warp without any connection to OS/2?
I loved using Warp. I used it daily for over a year. Setup workflow scripts and customizations, it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to.
Then one day, I opened it up to find the command bar was replaced with a natural language prompt. It changed the behavior subtly, and changed how the prompt looked.
I uninstalled.
I don’t care that you can opt out. My gripe isn’t about AI. I don’t want my tools and workflows changing at random. If you have a new feature, mention it in the “what’s new” log and suggest I opt in.
Not to get meta but I loathe how this sort of thing is commonplace these days. I would pay so much money for app developers to just fucking stop shoveling. Constantly chasing new audiences only stands to ostracize your own. Maybe you care and maybe you don’t. I bounced tho.
My mini vision for Warp when I got really into it was keeping it lightly AI flavored, but leaning into the workflows. The way it multicursors to fill variables was awesome. I don’t care about agents, but I would want to see agents exist as workflows (tools) rather than ephemeral beings like opencode or cursor 3
I agree that was/is an absolutely horrible feature (and it took me way too long to realize I could/should turn it off) and always should've been opt-in, but the current version is honestly quite nice to use. I would not have recommended it a few months ago but I would recommend it now.
Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.
My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.
Glad the workflow is working for you!
In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.
Awesome to hear that the features are reasonating with you, thanks for the kind words!
Was briefly surprised to see IBM open-sourcing OS/2 after all these years. Alas, this appears to be some AI widget.
What does this mean?
It's a reference to an old OS made by IBM which was nicknamed Warp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS%2F2
TIL OS/2 is also called warp
I used to like Warp and was a paying customer.
It had a simple UI with a clear button / key combo to toggle the “agent mode”. That, plus the fact it could “warpify” my SSH connections made this a useful utility.
Then a couple months ago they completely changed the UI. It doesn’t work as it once did. My saved prompt templates didn’t work as they did before, the agent toggle was gone (you can now start some ‘/agent’ command but it is much less intuitive) and they seem to be focusing on these cloud agents and code editing.
I want none of these things. I loved a simple terminal that let me still execute sudo, let me ssh into remote machines but still bring Claude and OpenAI models to interact with my session.
argh, sorry that we made it worse for you, that definitely was not the intention. we were trying to make the modes clearer.
You can still basically get back to the same way of working if you set new terminal sessions to be "agent sessions" and enable natural language detection. that's how i use it.
Here I was thinking this was OS/2 Warp…
Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.
The thing that has kept me away from Warp has been support for bind keys and Atuin. Excited for this!
Came here thinking this was about OS/2.
Does it have any reusable modules for other kind of projects?
Was hoping this was about OS/2, was very disappointed.
Me too. Super disappointed. I was thinking, yeah that sounds fun. But, nope.
Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.
Appreciate the kind words!
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936264
I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.