The terminal is on life support. Is it worth saving?
Thanks Peter for posting about us.<p>Hi HN,<p>I’m Zach, the author of the post and founder at Warp—a blazingly fast Rust-based terminal.<p>TLDR; The terminal isn’t built for how modern software engineers work. Software development moved to reusability, composability and collaboration years ago. Terminals are still inherently single-user, linear, and ephemeral because the terminal-shell interface was built during a time people were using physical teletype terminals. This makes it hard for teams to effectively collaborate on production issues, track what actions people are taking, and recall prior events. The terminal-shell interface, which hasn’t changed since the 80s, needs to be rethought if we want to bring the terminal into the modern age.<p>At Warp, we’re holistically rethinking how the terminal should work to bring it into the modern age. To start, we’ve built shell integrations into Bash, ZSH, and Fish as an additional interface between the terminal and the shell. This interface allows us to group commands and their outputs together, allowing users to take actions on “blocks” i.e. copy&#x2F;paste, scrolling, sharing. We currently have integrations for bash, zsh, and fish.<p>We’ve also:
* Replaced the prompt with a full-fledged editor
* Added Visual menus for history &amp; tab completions
* Built a Command Palette to discover and access all shortcuts
See a demo here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X0LzWAVlOC0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X0LzWAVlOC0</a><p>Speed is our top priority and so we chose to use Rust and GPU rendering. See our engineering post for how we built Warp, including how we co-built our own UI framework for Rust:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.warp.dev&#x2F;how-warp-works&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.warp.dev&#x2F;how-warp-works&#x2F;</a><p>Our terminal model code is based on Alacritty’s model code; we’re grateful that a few of the collaborators reviewed our early design docs.  Huge thanks to our collaborators: Atom co-founder Nathan Sobo [1], Nushell co-founder Andres Robalino [2], and Fish shell lead developer Peter Ammon [3]! We hope to open source the client soon.<p>Ask me anything!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathansobo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathansobo</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andrasio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andrasio</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ridiculousfish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ridiculousfish</a>