I thought I was who it was for: someone who doesn't have a dogmatic view of terminals, I don't care about telemetry or closed source, I'll take my IDE over vi any day, I've used Hyper which is an electron based CLI and that'd make most people shudder, etc.
I mean, it's ok? But I rarely feel like opening it.
Small things don't work for some reason. Like alt-clicking in nano doesn't move the mouse like it does in basic old Terminal.
And the tab completion is really aggravating for me. There's like 3 different actions it takes almost randomly that make zero sense, for example in a window I had open:
- If I type "na" and press tab it shows me a popup window with suggestions.
- If I type "nano", it shows the entire command I wanted to run based on history "nano test.log"... but pressing tab does nothing. You're supposed to know to switch to the right arrow.
- If I type "nano test.lo" there's only one possible completion and now tab does work like the right arrow
- But hold on! If got a selection window in an earlier step, and I decide to type to narrow down the selection so there's only one option left... tab doesn't work like the right arrow and will instead stupidly try to cycle the selection window even though only one option shown is still valid.
It's like the selection window ignores everything you typed after it opened, which plain old zsh solved, but they somehow unsolved
Have also had it break for me once and I'm not clear on how to reproduce, it involved SSH but somehow the order of "blocks" for commands went out of whack, so there was a block stuck underneath the "bottom" where I'm supposed to type, and it'd steal input from the prompt.
And there's this really minor but annoying thing where if you try and select some text then right click to copy, the entire command block gets highlighted, even though in order to select a piece of text you had to intentionally click twice to unhighlight the command block.
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Having little moments like that just introduce enough aggravation that I don't want to bother.
To me iTerm is a happy middle ground. It's barely any different from Terminal, but on the few occasions where it adds some value (like being able to view a high quality image preview in your terminal, or share commands between SSH sessions) its completely unintrusive, the opposite of what Warp seems to be aiming for.
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Also, semi-off topic, but after using it I get seriously stressed out about the fact that companies like this are hiring people who need to make a living.
There's no reality in which this actually becomes something to justify taking in tens of millions of dollars in funding, which are probably expecting 100s of millions in returns. Clearly their plan is that some companies will end up having this be the go-to tool for developers, but the most "hardcore" developers are the ones who would be most repulsed by this.
The more casual developers work at places that see developers as a cost center and will never spend real money on a terminal when they're barely ok with paying for a Keurig.
I imagine that the founder and maybe the core team know they can get cushy jobs with their technical skills and resumes so it doesn't bother them, but the problem is these things tend to scale up before falling apart.
Eventually they start to pull in people who don't have those kinds of luxuries just to function. People who didn't go to some top school or have a string of in-demand logos on their resume might not have what it takes to weather this all falling apart like they do.
Like yes, startups are inherently very risky, but again, the further away from the core team you get, the higher the headcount they have to show before hiring people, the longer they've been around, they'll start to attract people who can't reasonably be expected to think they're being hired onto the Titanic as it leaves port.