Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal
Like others here, I&#x27;m leery of replacing my terminal with a VC-backed, maybe open-sourced eventually product, and a bit annoyed it claimed a name already in use in the Rust world.<p>But...it is exciting to see someone reimagining the terminal a bit. People frequently talk about wanting a better GUI interaction model for everyone, but the actual ideas to improve it seem to be missing, I think because the desktop status quo is really not that bad for low-learning curve systems. (In fact, I think many of the changes in the name of desktop&#x2F;mobile convergence have been for the worse.) I&#x27;m way more interested in the idea of creating a hybrid text&#x2F;graphic command interface for programmers. There&#x27;s a much better interface waiting for someone with the vision and (more importantly) ability to create an ecosystem around it. Some ideas:<p>* Warp&#x27;s more visual completion is super welcome. Does it work with the shell&#x27;s standard completion scripts?<p>* Warp&#x27;s blocks look like a nice step in the right direction. How do they work? I&#x27;d guess it&#x27;s ANSI codes like iTerm uses to distinguish the ends of commands, although that has the downside that a broken&#x2F;hostile command can impersonate the shell saying the command has ended. It&#x27;d be nice to work out some compatible yet more robust protocol. (Maybe the shell takes responsibility for piping subcommand&#x27;s output through it and filtering, or maybe something else.)<p>* It&#x27;d be interesting to further extend blocks with some protocol that allows programs to output within their block using richer elements: non-monotype fonts, adjustable tables, etc. A little like a Jupyter notebook, maybe. Even better if it works with some richer way for programs to pipe information to each other.<p>* Likewise, when launching alternate-screen terminal stuff, to allow them to do more with the rectangle than a grid of text. Closer to embedding an arbitrary cross-platform network-transparent GUI, launched from the shell, occupying its rectangle.<p>* And at first glance, looks like it&#x27;s missing tmux-like features (whether integration with tmux proper like iTerm has or its own thing). I&#x27;d want that in any richer terminal app—most of my work in terminals is on remote machines, often over flaky network connections.