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Guys, it doesn't matter if you can edit terminal input in vim. If there's a way to do it in an even more ergonomic / user-friendly way, that's not intrinsically

Guys, it doesn't matter if you can edit terminal input in vim. If there's a way to do it in an even more ergonomic / user-friendly way, that's not intrinsically a bad thing. This entire comment thread makes us sound like tech-grognards. Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.

Arnavion 4y ago
And who decided that Warp's method is more ergonomic / user-friendly with such objective proof that it cannot be argued over?
- password1 4y ago
  Maybe some user research? It can be argued for sure though, everything can be argued over all the time forever.
bee_rider 4y ago
It isn’t a bad thing that somebody is trying to find an alternative to the standard terminal. Good luck to them! But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems. If warp didn’t want it to matter, they could have not brought it up I guess.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. Not really, those are problems with current workflows. >People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems. They do, they just work around them or are used to them.
  - hansvm 4y ago
    > They do, they just work around them or are used to them. That's trivially true for any "problem" that people "don't suffer from," and it's not that interesting. Problem: Input editing in the shell is hard if you can't remember the appropriate keyboard shortcuts and don't use the relevant features. Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them. Blog-proposed workaround: Download our app. If people want to use their app then that's fine and dandy, but I don't think it's reasonable to frame my experience as being hampered by a problem that the app would solve when my workflow is not in fact hampered by it. It's acceptable and normal for a tool to not have a universal audience.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >That's trivially true for any "problem" that people "don't suffer from," and it's not that interesting. Yes, and it's called denial and compromise. >Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them. Notice how that's not a "workaround": it's resigning to the problem and suffering the limitations of the system. The very opposite of a workaround, which is finding an alternative easier solution to something being hard.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        This apparent distinction between finding workarounds vs working around things seems to be heavily dependent on your opinion of what is hard or easy. I guess if you want to be the oracle of which workflows are good that’s fine, seems like it would be a bit annoying on your end though.
      - rvbissell 4y ago
        Is remembering how to play different chords on a guitar and using them, also "resigning to the problem and suffering the limitations of the system"?
password1 4y ago
What's the problem with the pricing? It seems pretty fair to me, free for users and paid for teams basically.
- sli 4y ago
  Rent-seeking over a terminal emulator is pathological at best.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    The software-as-a-service model is literally not rent-seeking, by the definition of "rent-seeking"[1]. Please stop lying about it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632437
    - hansvm 4y ago
      Unless ongoing costs are essential to the thing being provided then it is, by definition, rent seeking. If you sell me a book, the fact that I continue to derive value from it for years to come might be an argument that you could get away with selling it to me as a subscription, but doing so would by definition be rent seeking unless the subscription offered additional value to me somehow, and an alternative and more palatable model for extracting additional profits in proportion to the value in receiving would be to just charge more for the purchase.
      - throw10920 4y ago
        > Unless ongoing costs are essential to the thing being provided That's not the definition of rent-seeking. "Rent seeking [...] is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp The "reciprocal contribution of productivity" provided by the Warp developers is increased functionality of the software. You can argue that you'd rather pay once for a particular version of the software (I would), or that you don't want to pay for a terminal emulator in the first place (I don't either), or that the Warp devs could stop improving the software in the future (and they could), but "rent-seeking" is still an incorrect description of their business model, and is only used by people who have an agenda trying to slander Warp for some reason.
zokier 4y ago
The problem with the whole article revolves around this paragraph: > In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way. They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Yes, regardless of the motivation/the author pimping his product, fundamentally he's right about the maddening nature of command input. It's terrible. Tab completion is a half-designed solution, and not exactly portable across shells. Terminals need to stop pretending they are dumb 8" CRTs from the 1970s. Virtually all interactive terminal input is through GUI applications at some point, and if it's not, it's not by choice. And performing stdin input in scripts for programs that need it? Don't get me started, and don't say "expect" with a straight face. The fact that scripting languages have no provisions after 40-50 years is nuts.

Arnavion 4y ago

And who decided that Warp's method is more ergonomic / user-friendly with such objective proof that it cannot be argued over?

password1 4y ago
Maybe some user research? It can be argued for sure though, everything can be argued over all the time forever.

bee_rider 4y ago

It isn’t a bad thing that somebody is trying to find an alternative to the standard terminal. Good luck to them! But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems. If warp didn’t want it to matter, they could have not brought it up I guess.

coldtea 4y ago
>But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. Not really, those are problems with current workflows. >People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems. They do, they just work around them or are used to them.
- hansvm 4y ago
  > They do, they just work around them or are used to them. That's trivially true for any "problem" that people "don't suffer from," and it's not that interesting. Problem: Input editing in the shell is hard if you can't remember the appropriate keyboard shortcuts and don't use the relevant features. Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them. Blog-proposed workaround: Download our app. If people want to use their app then that's fine and dandy, but I don't think it's reasonable to frame my experience as being hampered by a problem that the app would solve when my workflow is not in fact hampered by it. It's acceptable and normal for a tool to not have a universal audience.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >That's trivially true for any "problem" that people "don't suffer from," and it's not that interesting. Yes, and it's called denial and compromise. >Workaround: Remember keyboard shortcuts and use them. Notice how that's not a "workaround": it's resigning to the problem and suffering the limitations of the system. The very opposite of a workaround, which is finding an alternative easier solution to something being hard.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      This apparent distinction between finding workarounds vs working around things seems to be heavily dependent on your opinion of what is hard or easy. I guess if you want to be the oracle of which workflows are good that’s fine, seems like it would be a bit annoying on your end though.
    - rvbissell 4y ago
      Is remembering how to play different chords on a guitar and using them, also "resigning to the problem and suffering the limitations of the system"?

password1 4y ago

What's the problem with the pricing? It seems pretty fair to me, free for users and paid for teams basically.

sli 4y ago
Rent-seeking over a terminal emulator is pathological at best.
- throw10920 4y ago
  The software-as-a-service model is literally not rent-seeking, by the definition of "rent-seeking"[1]. Please stop lying about it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632437
  - hansvm 4y ago
    Unless ongoing costs are essential to the thing being provided then it is, by definition, rent seeking. If you sell me a book, the fact that I continue to derive value from it for years to come might be an argument that you could get away with selling it to me as a subscription, but doing so would by definition be rent seeking unless the subscription offered additional value to me somehow, and an alternative and more palatable model for extracting additional profits in proportion to the value in receiving would be to just charge more for the purchase.
    - throw10920 4y ago
      > Unless ongoing costs are essential to the thing being provided That's not the definition of rent-seeking. "Rent seeking [...] is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp The "reciprocal contribution of productivity" provided by the Warp developers is increased functionality of the software. You can argue that you'd rather pay once for a particular version of the software (I would), or that you don't want to pay for a terminal emulator in the first place (I don't either), or that the Warp devs could stop improving the software in the future (and they could), but "rent-seeking" is still an incorrect description of their business model, and is only used by people who have an agenda trying to slander Warp for some reason.

zokier 4y ago

The problem with the whole article revolves around this paragraph: > In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way. They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Yes, regardless of the motivation/the author pimping his product, fundamentally he's right about the maddening nature of command input. It's terrible. Tab completion is a half-designed solution, and not exactly portable across shells. Terminals need to stop pretending they are dumb 8" CRTs from the 1970s. Virtually all interactive terminal input is through GUI applications at some point, and if it's not, it's not by choice. And performing stdin input in scripts for programs that need it? Don't get me started, and don't say "expect" with a straight face. The fact that scripting languages have no provisions after 40-50 years is nuts.