11 ms·

Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal (waiting list)

291 points by garrettdimon 5y ago

zachlloyd 5y ago
Hi HN, I’m Zach, from Warp. Excited to get feedback on what we’ve been working on. Happy to answer any questions!
- byproxy 5y ago
  Not sure if I missed it on the website, but...is this to be a paid product?
  - zachlloyd 5y ago
    The terminal itself is totally free We may add paid features for enterprises around collaboration, and other things on the server that would cost us money to support.
- sandreas 5y ago
  Why closed source?
  - methyl 5y ago
    It will be probably easier to monetize.
  - techrat 5y ago
    *crickets*
- cs702 5y ago
  Looks quite nice. A few questions: * How do you expect to make money from developers using Warp? * What's the source code license? * Where's the source code?
- soperj 5y ago
  When are you going to be on other platforms?
  - zachlloyd 5y ago
    We are building a web version now using WASM and WebGL. Next up will be Linux, followed by Windows.
- urmish 5y ago
  Does is rely on OpenGL drivers to compile? (whenever its available as OSS). An option to compile it by disabling any hardware acceleration (kitty does require openGL I think) and disabling fancy animations/effects would be great for getting this installed at my workplace. I currently use an not-so-recent version of konsole and its a pain to customize. Kitty, which I on my personal machine is pretty good for customizations and is desktop agnostic too.
- er4hn 5y ago
  Zach, looks like a cool product! How would you say this differentiates itself from Teleport Ssh? I can see at a glance there this is written in Rust (vs Golang) and seems to be based on being a full terminal (vs being an application run on the terminal).
- terhechte 5y ago
  I'd be curious: Did you use any of the existing Rust UI frameworks? (Druid, Iced, Femtovg, etc) or is it all custom build on something like wgpu? If it is all custom, congratulations the rich text layout looks really, really good (something of a sore spot in the current set of pure rust UI frameworks). Great product! I signed up for the beta, excited to try it out.
  - alokedesai 5y ago
    Thank you! The UI framework is entirely built in house with the help of Nathan Sobo (co-founder of the Atom text editor). We definitely considered a few of the options on https://www.areweguiyet.com/ https://www.areweguiyet.com/ but ultimately found none of them supported the requirements we wanted. You can find more details about why we decided to build our own UI framework in the "How Warp Works" blog post we wrote here: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/ https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/
- Telemakhos 5y ago
  macOS's built-in Terminal app is notorious for not handling meta + non-letter keystrokes properly, which is a real pain for emacs users who need a meta-shift-uparrow, for example. Does Warp handle these key mappings, and can they be customized (i.e. option = nomal, option, or esc+) like in iTerm2?
- billconan 5y ago
  how does auto-completion work? will it force me to use shells like fish that has auto-completion built in, or I can use bash?
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Any chance of supporting nushell?
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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threatofrain 5y ago
Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27834649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27834649 (from today)
salasrod 5y ago
Not to be confused with the other big warp rust project, https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/ https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Or CloudFlare's Warp, also using Rust.
dralley 5y ago
If only the website was as blazingly fast as the terminal claims to be! It scrolls at 2 fps.
rcfox 5y ago
Somewhat off-topic: After seeing the layout of the page, I instinctively looked for a "Pricing" link.
perrygeo 5y ago
"Warp" is also the name of a popular Rust web framework. (https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp)
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Which looks better to be honest
comodore_ 5y ago
I expected this to be related to https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp the typo did not help
the_laka 5y ago
Some of the features make it sound dubious. "Real-time collaboration". Why would you bake that in your terminal?
- synthc 5y ago
  it's very useful: prank your colleagues with the occasional fork bomb, steal their ssh keys and delete their files.
- techsetters 5y ago
  Why wouldn't real-time collaboration be useful?
  - the_laka 5y ago
    What? You'll suddenly need 5 people to chat about that multiline command you're about to type?
    - milani 5y ago
      What if you open an editor inside this terminal and collaborate in there?
  - dhagz 5y ago
    What are you doing in a terminal that you need real-time collaboration? Here's what I do in my terminal: * log in to AWS * push commits (though that's mostly in Emacs now) * tail logs from remote services * use ssh * random grepping/cat/awk/sed one-off stuff I don't see any of those benefiting from real-time collaboration. The use-cases presented on the landing page don't make sense to me either - when my entire team is debugging production, we usually fan out and all look at different things rather than needing to fan-in and all do/look at the same thing. And if I want to chat I'll have Slack open next to the terminal.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      How’d you learn how to do all those things? This is where the real-time collaboration comes in. Easy to teach novices how to use powerful shell commands to make things easy.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
FYI, this appears to be a startup launching an e-mail signup for a product that isn't available yet. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's worth noting up front. There is no download link and the GitHub link goes to an issues-only repo with no code. There are several fast Rust-based, GPU-accelerated terminal projects that are open source and under active development: Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty Wezterm: https://github.com/wez/wezterm https://github.com/wez/wezterm Fig ( https://fig.io/ https://fig.io/ ) isn't Rust, but it's worth noting as a YC-backed competitor terminal product that has autocomplete similar to Warp.dev. Their website is eerily similar to warp.dev 's website, to the point where I can't help but imagine one was the inspiration for the other.
- corndoge 5y ago
  Also alacritty
- nanis 5y ago
  Just tried it: 2021-07-14T17:05:56.423Z WARN window::os::windows::window > EGL init failed with_egl_lib failed: with_egl_lib(libEGL.dll) failed: no compatible EGL configuration was found, atioglxx.dll: LoadLibraryExW failed, fall back to WGL 2021-07-14T17:05:56.500Z ERROR wezterm_gui::frontend > Failed to create window: The OpenGL implementation is too old to work with glium I feel sad when terminals need OpenGL ... OTOH, apparently, my modest needs are adequately served by ConEmu on Windows and xfce4-terminal on Linux.
  - ddek 5y ago
    Well, that is kind of a given for a GPU accelerated terminal emulator, no?
  - petepete 5y ago
    On the flip side, if you do have OpenGL, why not utilise it for unparalleled terminal performance? I've used Kitty for years for that reason, it's incredibly responsive and smooth, a pleasure to use.
barbazoo 5y ago
Somehow it feels odd that an implementation detail like the programming language it's implemented in is so prominent in the project's description. I have no idea what bash is written in and frankly I don't care much about it. It's a tool that enables me do be more productive. Could it be faster? Probably, but does anyone even notice that in the context of all the other things that we do _with_ it? Are there any benefits I'm missing that come from it being implemented in Rust?
- sezna 5y ago
  Rust is an active and growing community, and there are a lot of software engineers here who are interested in how the sausage is made. I can think of two solid reasons I like to know when something is written in Rust: 1) This is a new codebase that we can study and contribute to. Knowing it is in Rust is relevant, so us Rust people know if we are able to dig into it. 2) Rust makes some guarantees about the properties of programs written in it. These guarantees are of interest to some, to the point where many have adopted Rust versions of common utilities (ls/exa, grep/ripgrep, etc.). edit: just saw it is closed source. Bit of a bummer, and nullifies my points to a certain extent. But I will leave them up since I think they apply to other projects that are more open.
- ericol 5y ago
  Rust seems to be all the rages these days (Specially here in HN). Besides that, most of the post on Rust also have the word fast in it (Or a similar word related to the speed of the software).
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  We mention Rust primarily because it produces a really high-performance app and to make clear that it's not built using Electron or web tech. We wrote up a pretty detailed technical design if you're interested in checking out how we built and why we made the decisions we made: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/ https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    I was just looking at that! It seems that I'm also conflating "terminal" and "shell" here possibly. Is Warp both in this case?
c54 5y ago
This is cool! I especially like the help functionality for various flags. How does this handle really long outputs like with [tail -f], or pagers like [less]? Also, does opening up vim “just work”?
fundamental 5y ago
A terminal requiring a privacy policy? I'll stick to simpler tools even if that means missing an occasional quality of life feature.
JeremyHerrman 5y ago
Warp looks great, but what do I do next? Where's the call to action? There is no download link, no "sign-up to hear more". With all of the thought and polish that went into this I'm surprised to see the ball dropped at the most important step!
- werm82 5y ago
  There's a "Request access" button above the fold.
  - wocka 5y ago
    Not the original commenter, but thanks. In my case the "Request access" button was blocked by uBlock Origin.
    - alokedesai 5y ago
      Good to know! You can find a direct link to sign up for the waitlist here: https://zachlloyd.typeform.com/to/yrwMkgtj?typeform-embed=oembed&typeform-medium=embed-oembed https://zachlloyd.typeform.com/to/yrwMkgtj?typeform-embed=oe...
dralley 5y ago
The logo is quite similar to the Scroll logo.
donio 5y ago
Who cares that it's Rust if it's closed source? Also: "All cloud features are opt-in. Data is encrypted at rest." The fact that this even needs to be stated makes it a hard no, especially for a terminal emulator.
- z3t4 5y ago
  [meta] I think many people here are interested in learning Rust and they use upvote button to "bookmark" (should use favorite instead, until you have actually read the article) (sugg: add favorite link to the main page)
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    What data leads you to this conclusion?
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  Our plan is to open source the Rust client code once it's more mature. We are particularly excited about sharing our Rust UI framework since there aren't a lot of great options for building native UIs in Rust right now. We want to make it cross-platform first though.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Super excited about both of these things. Will your text editing widget be part of that? Because I'd absolutely love it if a widget with capabilities similar to that of full on text editor (sublime/vs code, etc) became the standard "textarea widget".
  - lyxell 5y ago
    What about the UI framework druid? It has 3.9k stars on Github and is under active development. https://github.com/linebender/druid https://github.com/linebender/druid
    - alokedesai 5y ago
jacobmischka 5y ago
The UI seems interesting, and I'm a sucker for RIIR, but why do terminal emulators keep trying to use "blazingly fast" as a feature? They're all fast (except the hideous electron ones), they're white text on black rectangles.
- samatman 5y ago
  Not true! If a terminal doesn't paint on a per-frame basis, then dumping reams of text to that terminal will slow the program to the speed of printing, this can easily be a 100x slowdown versus only updating the view when the monitor wants more pixels. Most of them don't do this, so the ones that do are within their rights to advertise it as a feature.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I don't get it either - I use Windows (the default cmd, Powershell and Cmder), Linux and MacOS and don't recall a terminal emulator being slow... ever. Yet when the subject of terminal emulators comes up, there are often comments from other HN users insisting that Windows terminal emulators are molasses compared to MacOS, or that this emulator is much faster than that. I don't get it.
  - vsviridov 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg This, I think, sufficiently explains the slowness of terminals on Windows.
    - GordonS 5y ago
      It's an hour long, but I watched a few snippets - is the "problem" only if you try to print megabytes of text on the terminal? I started with computers more than 30 years ago, and have been a "power user" and coder for essentially all of that. In all that time and experience, I've never found any terminal to be slow, or found one to be noticeably "faster" than another.
      - 5y ago
arthurcolle 5y ago
I've been using Tabby (used to be called Terminus) which I have been enjoying
oefrha 5y ago
The screenshots look cool, and I joined the waitlist, but gotta say, a prominent GitHub icon in the nav bar only to land me on an issue-only “repo” for what is actually a closed source project is highly misleading.
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  That's a fair point - it wasn't meant to mislead since we are using Github for feature requests and issue tracking, but I think you're right. We'll remove the link.
option_greek 5y ago
May be consider a name change? There is a rust based web framework called warp. I know, totally unrelated except for the rust part but the annoying thing is that a search for warp always shows startrek stuff and searching with rust brings up quite rusted metal solutions stuff so I use warp+rust :)
- declnz 5y ago
  Or Warp, the best-known Haskell web server: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/warp https://hackage.haskell.org/package/warp
  - option_greek 5y ago
    Worst part is all inspired by a technology that is theoretically impossible and all picked by developers. It could be anything else that denotes speed in any human language but its warp always :D (Off to work on my next project that will speed up note taking - probably going to name it after a technology in my favourite tv series)
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
the branding decision when there's other related Warp things around this space is unsettling. Forever doomed to constantly have to follow the word Warp with 'terminal'
nicoburns 5y ago
The text editing features (multiline, multiple cursors) are something I've really wanted from a terminal for a long time. Editing long/complicated commands in most terminals is not a great experience, so the point that I normally copy and paste from my text editor. A little wary of this if it's not open source, but looking forward to being to try it out.
- mftb 5y ago
  man bash, and search for, 'edit-and-execute-command', to launch a configurable editor for long commands. zsh has a similar facility.
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sagupta 5y ago
I think collaboration, saving sessions and rehydrating it with a link are killer features. Uh.. so much value there. A lot of work happens in the terminal but it is not in repo or documented, and each team member kinda develops their own thing. I see Warp standardizing and making the non-code writing part of development
paulhodge 5y ago
Funny how similar this is to https://fig.io/ https://fig.io/ . Even the landing pages are hard to tell apart!
gratner 5y ago
I've been piloting Warp for a few weeks, and I have to say it's awesome. I can totally see the future of where this is going and I think that there is a lot left to be done to improve the terminal experience. Breaking the barrier of having the terminal be accessible only to thee most sophisticated folks will be huge. Excited to follow along with this project as it continues to evolve and mature.
abnercoimbre 5y ago
Looks interesting! I'm surprised. I've been working on my own emulator [0] and we share some ideas. I think you could go a little farther with what you have. If you watch my demo feel free to reach out. Banter is always useful [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/terminal-click https://media.handmade-seattle.com/terminal-click
soulbadguy 5y ago
Look super cool, i definitely think there is a need for a modern interpretation of the terminal experience. Please think of a good licensing scheme for single dev. who would want to use it and support you guys without being tied to a subscription. Something like sublime text on time fee.
shmerl 5y ago
> After a very brief experiment with Electron, we quickly pivoted to building in Rust and rendering directly on the GPU using Metal Huh? What about Linux? Why not use something like gfx-rs instead? It's too bad Apple refuses to support Vulkan, but at least you could use something that could help it actually work on multiple platforms. Using Metal will make it unportable, unless you plan to support multiple GPU APIs. Also, there is no source in the Github link: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp
techsetters 5y ago
Is Warp to terminal what Superhuman is to Gmail?
bennyp101 5y ago
I don't get all these terminals/prompts in rust at the moment, is it the 'Todo list' of rust?
- wffurr 5y ago
  How many are there? Two? I only know of alacrity as the other written-in-Rust terminal app.
jatins 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! I think the team features will be really useful. We currently use browser based repl at work and I could see something like this replacing that.
dpbriggs 5y ago
Anyone else avoid closed source tools? This would be interesting if the source was actually available.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  I prefer open source tooling as well. Check out Tabby, it's been my daily driver. It's kind of annoying it doesnt by default open up to a terminal, but this is now configurable.
brendanfalk 5y ago
Co-founder of Fig (https://fig.io https://fig.io) here. I'm pleased that there is more innovation in the terminal emulator space. For a tool used by just about every developer, not a ton has changed since the launch of the VT100 [1] in the 70s. Fig adds autocomplete [2] to your existing terminal. Soon, we're launching the ability for you to build your own visual apps and shortcuts (like these: https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4 https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4) and share them with your team or the community. Rather than building our own terminal, we integrate with the terminals you already use (even the one embedded in your IDE). This means everyone on a team can collaborate but keep using their existing terminal and shell setup. We are excited to integrate Fig with Warp. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 [2] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  Thanks Brendan! We've been following fig and are excited to see more innovation in this area!
- vidarh 5y ago
  Actually, a lot changed since the launch of the VT100, but most of those features just haven't survived into modern terminals and/or people don't use them. E.g. Sixel, ReGIS, html output, terminals treating the scrollback buffer as a live document where commands can be re-executed. AmigaOS let you auto-complete filenames using a file requester. The hard part is becoming so seamless that it integrates into peoples workflow to the point of being something they're not willing to live without, and none of the above really succeeded at that. The terminals I use have Sixel and ReGIS enabled, and I have a shortcut to output images to the terminal, but I still often forget and open a separate image viewer anyway, for example (but it is awesome to be able to display an image from a remote server directly over the ssh connection, but that depends on a utility script on said server). Instead we revert to the lowest common denominator because it's good enough and other things, like latency and being ubiquitous across platforms matters more.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
What's the business model? How will that impact the quality of the product in comparison to, say, iTerm2? I see the team [1] has some strong credentials, which honestly looks overpowered for "just" a terminal app. Unfortunately, that makes me suspicious of their goals for "just" a terminal app, which has a relatively well-established expected feature-set. [1] https://www.warp.dev/about-us https://www.warp.dev/about-us
jkelleyrtp 5y ago
You guys did a really great job with the user experience! I'd love to see an interactive Repl/Notebook with the UI/UX you've figured out for the terminal.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Cool idea, but finding product/market fit might be hard. I've never experienced a situation where collaboration in the terminal would be useful, and if I want to share sequences of commands with other users, a recorded zoom video with commentary is usually more useful. However, if you work closely with larger companies, I'm sure there's some killer feature that will hook the engineering managers, even if developers are split on using it.
kazinator 5y ago
Every terminal I've used for the past 30 years has been blazingly fast beyond diminishing returns. You could stick random usleep() calls in there for small values, and I wouldn't notice.
scui88 5y ago
great achivement!
seumars 5y ago
Block IO is a feature I never knew I wanted until now. Are there any other terminal emulators with similar functionality?

291 points by garrettdimon 5y ago

zachlloyd 5y ago

Hi HN, I’m Zach, from Warp. Excited to get feedback on what we’ve been working on. Happy to answer any questions!

byproxy 5y ago
Not sure if I missed it on the website, but...is this to be a paid product?
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  The terminal itself is totally free We may add paid features for enterprises around collaboration, and other things on the server that would cost us money to support.
sandreas 5y ago
Why closed source?
- methyl 5y ago
  It will be probably easier to monetize.
- techrat 5y ago
  *crickets*
cs702 5y ago
Looks quite nice. A few questions: * How do you expect to make money from developers using Warp? * What's the source code license? * Where's the source code?
soperj 5y ago
When are you going to be on other platforms?
- zachlloyd 5y ago
  We are building a web version now using WASM and WebGL. Next up will be Linux, followed by Windows.
urmish 5y ago
Does is rely on OpenGL drivers to compile? (whenever its available as OSS). An option to compile it by disabling any hardware acceleration (kitty does require openGL I think) and disabling fancy animations/effects would be great for getting this installed at my workplace. I currently use an not-so-recent version of konsole and its a pain to customize. Kitty, which I on my personal machine is pretty good for customizations and is desktop agnostic too.
er4hn 5y ago
Zach, looks like a cool product! How would you say this differentiates itself from Teleport Ssh? I can see at a glance there this is written in Rust (vs Golang) and seems to be based on being a full terminal (vs being an application run on the terminal).
terhechte 5y ago
I'd be curious: Did you use any of the existing Rust UI frameworks? (Druid, Iced, Femtovg, etc) or is it all custom build on something like wgpu? If it is all custom, congratulations the rich text layout looks really, really good (something of a sore spot in the current set of pure rust UI frameworks). Great product! I signed up for the beta, excited to try it out.
- alokedesai 5y ago
  Thank you! The UI framework is entirely built in house with the help of Nathan Sobo (co-founder of the Atom text editor). We definitely considered a few of the options on https://www.areweguiyet.com/ https://www.areweguiyet.com/ but ultimately found none of them supported the requirements we wanted. You can find more details about why we decided to build our own UI framework in the "How Warp Works" blog post we wrote here: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/ https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/
Telemakhos 5y ago
macOS's built-in Terminal app is notorious for not handling meta + non-letter keystrokes properly, which is a real pain for emacs users who need a meta-shift-uparrow, for example. Does Warp handle these key mappings, and can they be customized (i.e. option = nomal, option, or esc+) like in iTerm2?
billconan 5y ago
how does auto-completion work? will it force me to use shells like fish that has auto-completion built in, or I can use bash?
steveklabnik 5y ago
Any chance of supporting nushell?

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threatofrain 5y ago

Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27834649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27834649 (from today)

salasrod 5y ago

Not to be confused with the other big warp rust project, https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/ https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp/

threatofrain 5y ago
Or CloudFlare's Warp, also using Rust.

dralley 5y ago

If only the website was as blazingly fast as the terminal claims to be! It scrolls at 2 fps.

rcfox 5y ago

Somewhat off-topic: After seeing the layout of the page, I instinctively looked for a "Pricing" link.

perrygeo 5y ago

"Warp" is also the name of a popular Rust web framework. (https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp)

simonbarker87 5y ago
Which looks better to be honest

comodore_ 5y ago

I expected this to be related to https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp the typo did not help

the_laka 5y ago

Some of the features make it sound dubious. "Real-time collaboration". Why would you bake that in your terminal?

synthc 5y ago
it's very useful: prank your colleagues with the occasional fork bomb, steal their ssh keys and delete their files.
techsetters 5y ago
Why wouldn't real-time collaboration be useful?
- the_laka 5y ago
  What? You'll suddenly need 5 people to chat about that multiline command you're about to type?
  - milani 5y ago
    What if you open an editor inside this terminal and collaborate in there?
- dhagz 5y ago
  What are you doing in a terminal that you need real-time collaboration? Here's what I do in my terminal: * log in to AWS * push commits (though that's mostly in Emacs now) * tail logs from remote services * use ssh * random grepping/cat/awk/sed one-off stuff I don't see any of those benefiting from real-time collaboration. The use-cases presented on the landing page don't make sense to me either - when my entire team is debugging production, we usually fan out and all look at different things rather than needing to fan-in and all do/look at the same thing. And if I want to chat I'll have Slack open next to the terminal.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    How’d you learn how to do all those things? This is where the real-time collaboration comes in. Easy to teach novices how to use powerful shell commands to make things easy.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

FYI, this appears to be a startup launching an e-mail signup for a product that isn't available yet. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's worth noting up front. There is no download link and the GitHub link goes to an issues-only repo with no code. There are several fast Rust-based, GPU-accelerated terminal projects that are open source and under active development: Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty Wezterm: https://github.com/wez/wezterm https://github.com/wez/wezterm Fig ( https://fig.io/ https://fig.io/ ) isn't Rust, but it's worth noting as a YC-backed competitor terminal product that has autocomplete similar to Warp.dev. Their website is eerily similar to warp.dev 's website, to the point where I can't help but imagine one was the inspiration for the other.

corndoge 5y ago
Also alacritty
nanis 5y ago
Just tried it: 2021-07-14T17:05:56.423Z WARN window::os::windows::window > EGL init failed with_egl_lib failed: with_egl_lib(libEGL.dll) failed: no compatible EGL configuration was found, atioglxx.dll: LoadLibraryExW failed, fall back to WGL 2021-07-14T17:05:56.500Z ERROR wezterm_gui::frontend > Failed to create window: The OpenGL implementation is too old to work with glium I feel sad when terminals need OpenGL ... OTOH, apparently, my modest needs are adequately served by ConEmu on Windows and xfce4-terminal on Linux.
- ddek 5y ago
  Well, that is kind of a given for a GPU accelerated terminal emulator, no?
- petepete 5y ago
  On the flip side, if you do have OpenGL, why not utilise it for unparalleled terminal performance? I've used Kitty for years for that reason, it's incredibly responsive and smooth, a pleasure to use.

barbazoo 5y ago

Somehow it feels odd that an implementation detail like the programming language it's implemented in is so prominent in the project's description. I have no idea what bash is written in and frankly I don't care much about it. It's a tool that enables me do be more productive. Could it be faster? Probably, but does anyone even notice that in the context of all the other things that we do _with_ it? Are there any benefits I'm missing that come from it being implemented in Rust?

sezna 5y ago
Rust is an active and growing community, and there are a lot of software engineers here who are interested in how the sausage is made. I can think of two solid reasons I like to know when something is written in Rust: 1) This is a new codebase that we can study and contribute to. Knowing it is in Rust is relevant, so us Rust people know if we are able to dig into it. 2) Rust makes some guarantees about the properties of programs written in it. These guarantees are of interest to some, to the point where many have adopted Rust versions of common utilities (ls/exa, grep/ripgrep, etc.). edit: just saw it is closed source. Bit of a bummer, and nullifies my points to a certain extent. But I will leave them up since I think they apply to other projects that are more open.
ericol 5y ago
Rust seems to be all the rages these days (Specially here in HN). Besides that, most of the post on Rust also have the word fast in it (Or a similar word related to the speed of the software).
zachlloyd 5y ago
We mention Rust primarily because it produces a really high-performance app and to make clear that it's not built using Electron or web tech. We wrote up a pretty detailed technical design if you're interested in checking out how we built and why we made the decisions we made: https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/ https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I was just looking at that! It seems that I'm also conflating "terminal" and "shell" here possibly. Is Warp both in this case?

c54 5y ago

This is cool! I especially like the help functionality for various flags. How does this handle really long outputs like with [tail -f], or pagers like [less]? Also, does opening up vim “just work”?

fundamental 5y ago

A terminal requiring a privacy policy? I'll stick to simpler tools even if that means missing an occasional quality of life feature.

JeremyHerrman 5y ago

Warp looks great, but what do I do next? Where's the call to action? There is no download link, no "sign-up to hear more". With all of the thought and polish that went into this I'm surprised to see the ball dropped at the most important step!

werm82 5y ago
There's a "Request access" button above the fold.
- wocka 5y ago
  Not the original commenter, but thanks. In my case the "Request access" button was blocked by uBlock Origin.
  - alokedesai 5y ago
    Good to know! You can find a direct link to sign up for the waitlist here: https://zachlloyd.typeform.com/to/yrwMkgtj?typeform-embed=oembed&typeform-medium=embed-oembed https://zachlloyd.typeform.com/to/yrwMkgtj?typeform-embed=oe...

dralley 5y ago

The logo is quite similar to the Scroll logo.

donio 5y ago

Who cares that it's Rust if it's closed source? Also: "All cloud features are opt-in. Data is encrypted at rest." The fact that this even needs to be stated makes it a hard no, especially for a terminal emulator.

z3t4 5y ago
[meta] I think many people here are interested in learning Rust and they use upvote button to "bookmark" (should use favorite instead, until you have actually read the article) (sugg: add favorite link to the main page)
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  What data leads you to this conclusion?
zachlloyd 5y ago
Our plan is to open source the Rust client code once it's more mature. We are particularly excited about sharing our Rust UI framework since there aren't a lot of great options for building native UIs in Rust right now. We want to make it cross-platform first though.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Super excited about both of these things. Will your text editing widget be part of that? Because I'd absolutely love it if a widget with capabilities similar to that of full on text editor (sublime/vs code, etc) became the standard "textarea widget".
- lyxell 5y ago
  What about the UI framework druid? It has 3.9k stars on Github and is under active development. https://github.com/linebender/druid https://github.com/linebender/druid
  - alokedesai 5y ago

jacobmischka 5y ago

The UI seems interesting, and I'm a sucker for RIIR, but why do terminal emulators keep trying to use "blazingly fast" as a feature? They're all fast (except the hideous electron ones), they're white text on black rectangles.

samatman 5y ago
Not true! If a terminal doesn't paint on a per-frame basis, then dumping reams of text to that terminal will slow the program to the speed of printing, this can easily be a 100x slowdown versus only updating the view when the monitor wants more pixels. Most of them don't do this, so the ones that do are within their rights to advertise it as a feature.
GordonS 5y ago
I don't get it either - I use Windows (the default cmd, Powershell and Cmder), Linux and MacOS and don't recall a terminal emulator being slow... ever. Yet when the subject of terminal emulators comes up, there are often comments from other HN users insisting that Windows terminal emulators are molasses compared to MacOS, or that this emulator is much faster than that. I don't get it.
- vsviridov 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg This, I think, sufficiently explains the slowness of terminals on Windows.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    It's an hour long, but I watched a few snippets - is the "problem" only if you try to print megabytes of text on the terminal? I started with computers more than 30 years ago, and have been a "power user" and coder for essentially all of that. In all that time and experience, I've never found any terminal to be slow, or found one to be noticeably "faster" than another.
    - 5y ago

arthurcolle 5y ago

I've been using Tabby (used to be called Terminus) which I have been enjoying

oefrha 5y ago

The screenshots look cool, and I joined the waitlist, but gotta say, a prominent GitHub icon in the nav bar only to land me on an issue-only “repo” for what is actually a closed source project is highly misleading.

zachlloyd 5y ago
That's a fair point - it wasn't meant to mislead since we are using Github for feature requests and issue tracking, but I think you're right. We'll remove the link.

option_greek 5y ago

May be consider a name change? There is a rust based web framework called warp. I know, totally unrelated except for the rust part but the annoying thing is that a search for warp always shows startrek stuff and searching with rust brings up quite rusted metal solutions stuff so I use warp+rust :)

declnz 5y ago
Or Warp, the best-known Haskell web server: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/warp https://hackage.haskell.org/package/warp
- option_greek 5y ago
  Worst part is all inspired by a technology that is theoretically impossible and all picked by developers. It could be anything else that denotes speed in any human language but its warp always :D (Off to work on my next project that will speed up note taking - probably going to name it after a technology in my favourite tv series)

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

the branding decision when there's other related Warp things around this space is unsettling. Forever doomed to constantly have to follow the word Warp with 'terminal'

nicoburns 5y ago

The text editing features (multiline, multiple cursors) are something I've really wanted from a terminal for a long time. Editing long/complicated commands in most terminals is not a great experience, so the point that I normally copy and paste from my text editor. A little wary of this if it's not open source, but looking forward to being to try it out.

mftb 5y ago
man bash, and search for, 'edit-and-execute-command', to launch a configurable editor for long commands. zsh has a similar facility.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sagupta 5y ago

I think collaboration, saving sessions and rehydrating it with a link are killer features. Uh.. so much value there. A lot of work happens in the terminal but it is not in repo or documented, and each team member kinda develops their own thing. I see Warp standardizing and making the non-code writing part of development

paulhodge 5y ago

Funny how similar this is to https://fig.io/ https://fig.io/ . Even the landing pages are hard to tell apart!

gratner 5y ago

I've been piloting Warp for a few weeks, and I have to say it's awesome. I can totally see the future of where this is going and I think that there is a lot left to be done to improve the terminal experience. Breaking the barrier of having the terminal be accessible only to thee most sophisticated folks will be huge. Excited to follow along with this project as it continues to evolve and mature.

abnercoimbre 5y ago

Looks interesting! I'm surprised. I've been working on my own emulator [0] and we share some ideas. I think you could go a little farther with what you have. If you watch my demo feel free to reach out. Banter is always useful [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/terminal-click https://media.handmade-seattle.com/terminal-click

soulbadguy 5y ago

Look super cool, i definitely think there is a need for a modern interpretation of the terminal experience. Please think of a good licensing scheme for single dev. who would want to use it and support you guys without being tied to a subscription. Something like sublime text on time fee.

shmerl 5y ago

> After a very brief experiment with Electron, we quickly pivoted to building in Rust and rendering directly on the GPU using Metal Huh? What about Linux? Why not use something like gfx-rs instead? It's too bad Apple refuses to support Vulkan, but at least you could use something that could help it actually work on multiple platforms. Using Metal will make it unportable, unless you plan to support multiple GPU APIs. Also, there is no source in the Github link: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp

techsetters 5y ago

Is Warp to terminal what Superhuman is to Gmail?

bennyp101 5y ago

I don't get all these terminals/prompts in rust at the moment, is it the 'Todo list' of rust?

wffurr 5y ago
How many are there? Two? I only know of alacrity as the other written-in-Rust terminal app.

jatins 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! I think the team features will be really useful. We currently use browser based repl at work and I could see something like this replacing that.

dpbriggs 5y ago

Anyone else avoid closed source tools? This would be interesting if the source was actually available.

arthurcolle 5y ago
I prefer open source tooling as well. Check out Tabby, it's been my daily driver. It's kind of annoying it doesnt by default open up to a terminal, but this is now configurable.

brendanfalk 5y ago

Co-founder of Fig (https://fig.io https://fig.io) here. I'm pleased that there is more innovation in the terminal emulator space. For a tool used by just about every developer, not a ton has changed since the launch of the VT100 [1] in the 70s. Fig adds autocomplete [2] to your existing terminal. Soon, we're launching the ability for you to build your own visual apps and shortcuts (like these: https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4 https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4) and share them with your team or the community. Rather than building our own terminal, we integrate with the terminals you already use (even the one embedded in your IDE). This means everyone on a team can collaborate but keep using their existing terminal and shell setup. We are excited to integrate Fig with Warp. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 [2] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete

zachlloyd 5y ago
Thanks Brendan! We've been following fig and are excited to see more innovation in this area!
vidarh 5y ago
Actually, a lot changed since the launch of the VT100, but most of those features just haven't survived into modern terminals and/or people don't use them. E.g. Sixel, ReGIS, html output, terminals treating the scrollback buffer as a live document where commands can be re-executed. AmigaOS let you auto-complete filenames using a file requester. The hard part is becoming so seamless that it integrates into peoples workflow to the point of being something they're not willing to live without, and none of the above really succeeded at that. The terminals I use have Sixel and ReGIS enabled, and I have a shortcut to output images to the terminal, but I still often forget and open a separate image viewer anyway, for example (but it is awesome to be able to display an image from a remote server directly over the ssh connection, but that depends on a utility script on said server). Instead we revert to the lowest common denominator because it's good enough and other things, like latency and being ubiquitous across platforms matters more.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

What's the business model? How will that impact the quality of the product in comparison to, say, iTerm2? I see the team [1] has some strong credentials, which honestly looks overpowered for "just" a terminal app. Unfortunately, that makes me suspicious of their goals for "just" a terminal app, which has a relatively well-established expected feature-set. [1] https://www.warp.dev/about-us https://www.warp.dev/about-us

jkelleyrtp 5y ago

You guys did a really great job with the user experience! I'd love to see an interactive Repl/Notebook with the UI/UX you've figured out for the terminal.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Cool idea, but finding product/market fit might be hard. I've never experienced a situation where collaboration in the terminal would be useful, and if I want to share sequences of commands with other users, a recorded zoom video with commentary is usually more useful. However, if you work closely with larger companies, I'm sure there's some killer feature that will hook the engineering managers, even if developers are split on using it.

kazinator 5y ago

Every terminal I've used for the past 30 years has been blazingly fast beyond diminishing returns. You could stick random usleep() calls in there for small values, and I wouldn't notice.

scui88 5y ago

great achivement!

seumars 5y ago

Block IO is a feature I never knew I wanted until now. Are there any other terminal emulators with similar functionality?