Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#581

Post by smoldesu » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #467

gerbilly wrote: post #133

It looks nice but I'd never use a shell that phone's home. Period. I mean the CLI has been one of the last parts of my system that I really still trust is working on my behalf only. This product made me rethink that assumption. As for capturing the output from a command line on the mac (and also on linux IIRC) just use pbcopy/pbpaste. My opinion: It's not worth giving your privacy away for features like this.

Lots of CLI tools phone home unfortunately. I mean, snap has a cli.. :) Maybe that's low hanging fruit.

1. CLI != CLI tool != terminal emulator

2. Snap is a package manager. All package managers phone home by design, because they make requests to external servers on the user's behalf. If you invoke Snap then you are most likely aware of what it does and how it behaves.

3. I would argue that a lot of CLI tools don't phone home actually. You're right that some do, but the majority of shell utilities are designed to operate on stdin/stdout/stderr. They have no need for network access, and very few utilities come to mind that perform the same degree of data collection as Warp. Certainly no terminal emulators come to mind.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#582

Post by kobalsky » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:08 AM UTC

eddieroger wrote: post #574

gerbilly wrote: post #133

It looks nice but I'd never use a shell that phone's home. Period. I mean the CLI has been one of the last parts of my system that I really still trust is working on my behalf only. This product made me rethink that assumption. As for capturing the output from a command line on the mac (and also on linux IIRC) just use pbcopy/pbpaste. My opinion: It's not worth giving your privacy away for features like this.

pbcopy/pbpaste are gems that more Mac users need to know about. A command line interface for your clipboard is invaluable and really ties together jumps from UI to CLI. Regarding the other thoughts in this post, I have to agree. I use iTerm instead of Terminal.app, but if I had even the remotest fear that it was sending anything elsewhere, I would jump ship. My terminal has all kinds of information that can act on my…

I use them from my linux workstation as a poor man's access to apple's universal clipboard.

echo -n something | ssh my-mac pbcopy

then I can paste on my phone.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#583

Post by ovao » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

zachlloyd wrote: post #570

warent wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, this is a pretty bad deal breaker for me. Big business people doing short-sighted big business things, salivating at cramming a product full of telemetry. All without transparency around it? In a terminal of all things?? Indescribably off-putting and catastrophically damages my trust in the product and the CEO. EDIT: To be fair there is some transparency in the original post. I was looking through the landing…

Hi - as the poster and founder I again completely get the concern. We should make it even more transparent what we collect. You can see it here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel... Re: big business, we're still pretty small, but it's true that we are trying to build a business around the command-line. I get that's controversial and it's not something that exists and that the terminal is a…

As much as I can appreciate the community’s reaction to your approach of default collection of telemetry, I can also equally appreciate you and the rest of the team sucking it up and accepting the feedback. Thanks for that, and I’m personally interested to see where you’re able to take Warp. I think there’s something potentially pretty compelling here.

My advice here would be to simply make telemetry opt-in during the beta period. I’m typically pretty liberal about opting in to telemetry (particularly when the extent of which is documented), but obviously a lot of your users will not be. Your desire to accelerate your progress seems to conflate with the needs of your target demo, and I think this warrants adjustment.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#584

Post by tehnub » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

hbn wrote: post #253

ushakov wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what’s wrong with the standard terminal then?

It does none of the things I mentioned

Option+left/right works, but that's it :-]

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#585

Post by resonious » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #274

orastor wrote: post #20

Wanted to give it a shot but got disappointed when I launched it and the following happened: - Outgoing request to googleapis.com - Outgoing request to segment.io - Outgoing request to sentry.io - Requires sign up (only via Github, mind you) I understand the first request is probably to get some dynamic configuration, even though I'd rather my terminal ship with static configuration. But then you have segment and sen…

> Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app . Well, at least they didn't lie. As of my personal position: I want less products in my computing environments, not more. I hope more people would ponder on possible ramifications of going in the opposite direction.

I'm not sure I care very much about which piece of software is a "product" or not (I have no qualms with devs asking for money), but I definitely agree that calling a piece of software "modern" actually carries negative connotations nowadays. I think most would agree that apps developed within the last 4 years are often more resource-intensive and slower than the equivalents from 15+ years ago.

Warp looks really cool as a tool and I intend to try it as soon as it's available on Linux, but it was pretty bold of them to include outgoing network requests by default before presenting directly to HN. I saw the post about "everything is opt in, where 'everything' means 'sending terminal contents'" - as if people read privacy policies before trying out a new dev tool.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#586

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:24 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #220

qbasic_forever wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Windows? Have you ever opened its terminal? Congrats, you're using a terminal that you agreed can phone home with telemtry. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal/9n0dx20hk... and the link to the privacy policy for windows terminal http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=521839 I suspect OSX is no different and has similar telemetry and privacy policy for its terminal.

In an (absurd-ish) defense of macOS, I don't believe anyone really uses the built-in Terminal and grabs an alternative (often iTerm2). There's also the rumor that Terminal in macOS has had a handful of developers working on it, at best, over the years. I would bet money that Apple doesn't care enough about it to bother with telemetry and/or privacy policies for it.

I have been an OS X user since its inception, and have only ever used the built in terminal. I spend a ton of time in the terminal and I have never felt the need to use anything else.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#587

Post by decodebytes » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

michlim wrote: post #89

qeternity wrote: post #42

They’ve raised $23m?!? Uhhh

Yeah it might seem like a crazy amount. Building a terminal is hard. We have to build feature parity, maintain a stable terminal-shell interface, on top of modernizing the product experience. The money allows us to hire engineers to work on this project full-time and create a great product experience.

How are you going to get a return on that money though? Sell an enterprise version, or do a free / professional model?

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#588

Post by estro0182 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

zachlloyd wrote: post #563

jnovek wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: security? I expect my terminal to be a much more secure environment than my web browser. When an application starts communicating with the internet, I have no choice but to treat it with the same level of scrutiny as my browser. Even making telemetry opt-in means that it has the capability to send information to the internet that I don’t know about, which means that I have to treat it like an application that c…

As the author of the post (and founder of the company), I think this is also a very reasonable concern. It's one that we have as well and that we take very seriously. Our stance here is that: 1) We are very explicit about what gets sent (only telemetry and crash reporting) and you can see the full list of telemetry events here ( https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel... ) 2) For collaborative fe…

> However, I do believe pretty deeply that every app has the potential to be much more powerful if it leverages the internet and I think the terminal is not an exception.

But that’s exactly it. A lot of people on here, including me, do not agree that _every_ app has that potential. In fact many believe that internet connected apps are unnecessary for many things. There is strong evidence against this if you just look at the number of “secure” systems that have been hacked over the decades. While you may capture a large audience with your internet-first terminal “app”, who honestly don’t care about this stuff while at work, you will get pushback from HN and somewhat+ privacy concerned devs.

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#589

Post by vulcan01 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #469

While it's entertaining to see Warp get excoriated for telemetry, keep in mind that they're doing what everyone else is. The new Windows Terminal has opt-out telemetry, as does PowerShell 7, .NET Core, and well... pretty much everything Microsoft ships these days has telemetry on by default. Last I checked, a fairly basic Windows + Office setup has 200+ individual sets of telemetry. To get this veritable torrent of i…

This is an interesting comment. Warp is a Mac application. How does the amount of telemetry on Windows have anything to do with this post?

Re: Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

#590

Post by resonious » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

zachlloyd wrote: post #302

stormbrew wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just.. an incredibly bad look to have this be the top comment on a post about this while the website claims that "cloud stuff" is opt-in. It's more essential to be honest about this during the beta period than after, so "oh it will be opt in" is a cold comfort, alongside the approximately never-true "we'll open source it some day." Not touching this with a ten foot pole. Not for something as essential to my day…

We tried to be really upfront in the privacy policy: https://www.warp.dev/privacy Opt-in refers to anything that sends any contents of a terminal session to our servers (as opposed to telemetry which is metadata and never contains any terminal input or output). But we hear the feedback and appreciate it.

I highly doubt anyone reads that. I think the only way to be up-front about it is to have an annoying pop-up that with a button that says "OK YOU CAN SEND TELEMETRY" that must be clicked before proceeding.

To be fair, I think HN is a collection of outliers when it comes to caring about network activity caused by running programs. Most devs will probably just be happy that the tool provides a lot of value.