Warp terminal – no more login required

Exactly right. Warp have defined their market as vanishingly small here.

And for reference, they acknowledged that this was a problem two years ago but didn't fix it until now. It speaks to either a very lazy development ethic internally, or an outright distrust of their own audience when they speak up. Either way, this is not a product that deserves my telemetry, much less my salary.

i am phenomenally skeptical of LLMs as tools that i can apply to my job, and so i say this only to offer a counterpoint - i actually think that warp is the only LLM tool that i like using. i've actually gotten real value out of it that didn't require me doing tons of cleanup or code review on its output.

they did a reasonable job of integrating it with the terminal, of giving you explanations and clear points of review before taking any specific actions on your system, and in general i reasonably trust it won't do anything i don't expect or modify anything critical without asking first - that's been my experience thus far (no guarantees, it's an LLM after all)

for my entire career i've never been much of a bash person, i learn just enough to slice up some text file or something as needed, or put together a build process, and then it all leaves my brain because it's just not something i'm interested in. i used to lean on the tldr manpages pretty extensively when i needed to do a bunch of bulk file processing in the terminal or something.

the case where warp shines is the case where i'd have a folder of text files, or some data i wanted to parse and process real fast, and i'd be thinking "god, i could pull out my little bash reference, or i could throw together a quick python script to get this data in the state i need." i'd say it has an 85% first-time hit rate as far as "i need to modify this file in this way" or "i'd like you to find all the html tags in it with this attribute and extract the values into a list in a text file" or "can you convert all the HTML lists in this document to markdown lists" or "i just downloaded a huge CSV of logs can you just return the count of a certain token on each line in a newline-separated text file." just fast little things i'd either build a utility for, install a plugin for, or poke around online for a website to quickly do.

it's saved me a LOT of time in those cases. i went from only opening it when i wanted to use it for one of those cases to using it full time over the course of a few months and i am cautiously optimistic about it. i was not thrilled about the login requirement, and i'm glad they dropped it.

it also enables justified laziness - i'm doing something in ruby and i haven't used it in a long time, i'm just popping in for a minute - what command do i type to activate a virtual environment? i already know what i want to do, i just don't know the specific incantation off the top of my head. i can just type what i intend to do, and it reminds me of the answer and does it. easy. it also detected which virtual environment tool i'd installed years ago for me, so i got the correct one on the first try.

i obviously can't say whether "optimizing annoying one-off text-munging tasks" is worth the various tradeoffs and sharing data with the company, but it's the only LLM tool i've kept in my workflow after trialing it, and applied specifically to the cases it shines at it does a good enough job to be a time-saver (not my experience with copilot, cursor, so on.) i also wouldn't trust its output in a build process or anything that would be frequently run or impact production data. those are all strikes against it, to be fair.

just my two cents. i'm not gonna hard sell you on this at all - i'm not that passionate about it and only use the free tier - but it's probably the best case i've seen for "LLMs can help you in your job" out of every case i've seen.

Never understood why people use iTerm. I know back in the day it was because of the lack of tabs in Terminal.app, but tabs were added long ago and tmux was always a better option for that kind of functionality anyway.

Genuinely curious because I feel like I'm missing something. I tried it again a while ago and still couldn't see anything I couldn't already do.

It's more than I pay for IDEA Ultimate.

From the absurdly CPU-intensive landing page it seems the novelty is mainly some network storage and an LLM-integration, things I already have several of in my terminals on my work computer. I switch over to them in the blink of an eye because my window manager is extremely responsive and keeping their output localised and not split up in a single pseudo-conversation in my current main terminal is a perk, not a bug.