Long overdue - I was all in a few years ago with Warp, but after the last couple of years of not addressing this need, I have moved on from Warp. I now DO NOT see the need to embed AI into the terminal when you can have all sorts of TUI doing the same job.
I wrote a little wrapper to start tmux with two panes open, one pane is an ssh connection to a host and one runs Claude Code, with an auto-generated CLAUDE.md telling Claude to use tmux commands to interact with the remote host (https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem). Agents can also use ssh, but I wanted an interactive way to poke around on a remote system and also be able to ask Claude to look at or do something on its own without copy/paste.
I was looking at warp, wave, and a few others, and this is the exact stuff I will need, thanks for sharing.
So when I SSH to remote servers, I would like to bring my agent buddy with me, currently, I open two terminals, one with a remote SSH session, and one with opencode/claude code, now I have to copy & paste commands/info between the 2 terminals, which can be anoyying, so that is why I was looking at warp, but it has a paywall for BYOK :)
Confirming that Pi can definitely handles this. I've written a harness "factotum" based on pi just for managing my homelab and my radio club's systems. Has absolutely no issue sshing into things remotely, running ansible/helm/kubectl/talosctl commands.
There's a few skills, a and an extension to switch inventory. The extension is only needed because I want to switch between the two organizations. It's pretty slick. One of my use cases was just getting my homelab under control. So one of the first tasks I gave it was to go find everything that's running on these hosts, system services, docker compose, kube pods, etc. Builds an inventory, memory, todos.
Switches the script from "ai helps me launch more experiments to lose track of" to "organized and back under config management".
How do you use `pi` to ssh? I use `oh-my-pi`, and tried the `/ssh` command, but I couldn't get it to work. Then I saw a suggestion somewhere to just run `!ssh` to place things into the agent's context.
Is there a way to use it like "The current directory is at `ssh server`" and have the agent work from there?
Most if not every agent has access to bash or similar, which ssh typically is available. You don't need any bloated skills or anything, as long as you include `host is available via user@10.55` or whatever, and you have authentication properly setup, it'll figure it out.
Just tell it to use ssh from the shell. From there you can give it extra context to describe the target (if you know/care about it), or just let it loose and if the environment doesn't have what it expects it will "figure something out" - just the same as with your local env.
If there's some least common denominator you know about e.g. python it can streamline things if you tell it to just use that for everything.
I don't think you understand. I'm well aware it can run whatever command on bash. You're taking a significant risk asking it to do what it's doing via ssh, because it could easily forget that it's suppose to be doing ssh and do whatever locally.
The point is: opencode should have a specific deterministic tool like https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-ssh where commands can only be run; the environment can only be the remote; etc.
The last thing I would want is for it to suddenly forget it's suppose to be running commands as ssh and does something local.
In practice I just don't think this is a real problem, or at least not one I've seen.
I do something like this a lot with local VMs managed through Incus (so not literally invoking ssh but the exact same pattern) and they don't "mess up" in that particular way. If they ever did they figured it out immediately and I didn't even make note of it happening.
I guess to sum up my feelings on it: if you don't think the tool is reliable enough to correctly use ssh to execute remote commands, you probably shouldn't be trusting it to run remote commands in the first place.
You're still ignoring the crux of the difference in _risk_. Say the risk of `rm -rf /` for any given model is 1%. That is, the probabilty, that it'll just absolutely saveagly destroy the system you're working on. We know it's lower than that, because millions of tokens per day are generated and we only get a few of these "production database was wiped" news items.
There difference is still: If that risk-reward is to be recieved, you can't tell me you'd rather have it run locally than on some system you're managing. Because POV, you're the one responsible and if a coding tool _takes out your system_, you no longer have any means to fix the problem.
So, maybe the risk-reward is _technically_ equal, but only if the operator of the coding tool continues to operate regardless of what commands it's issuing. That's not the case if you're just saying "hey guy, use ssh for all your commands"
It can equally hallucinate commands. Fine. The problem is, if I'm working on a remote machine, I'm generally doing things that I'd be less concerned about. If I'm on a VPN and it rm -rf / while I'm trying to clean it up; bad break, but it's not _my machine_ it just removed root on.
So if your LLM is just running something like `ssh <remote> "<cmd>"` it could easily foget the ssh <remote> part and suddenly you're modifying your local system.
So it's one thing to YOLO on production servers, etc, but wiping out something locally is a significantly different event. Imagine it erasing all your scripts or whatever.
Anyway, the point is: I wouldn't trust an agent operating with just a bash cli running ssh commands.
I mean… Claude Code desktop will SSH into anything and start coding for ya. Which could sound horrifying but if you setup an isolated system for that specifically its not that horrifying.
That was exactly my question; why fork? I assumed the project owners were preserving their business model, but if you allow it to be opened-up and turn off the cloud features, I see no reason to fork.
Makes plenty of sense to upstream this (possibly makes more more than forking, although I suppose it's one way of gauging interest and implementation complexity).
Let me tell you a disturbing fact. The open source warp does not even have prompts. It is completely cloud-based, including the calling process of various tools in oz cloud. So I think it is better to change than to wait.
Despite the newish "AI" branding for what I would presume is marketing buzz reasons, most of Warp is really centered around trying to make a terminal interface not anchored to legacy assumptions, like the blocks functionality (https://docs.warp.dev/terminal/blocks).
This page doesn't tell me anything useful about what this feature does or how it works. The attached screenshot is pointless. I assume the actual information is in the embedded Youtube video. YouTube is not an acceptable alternative to written documentation
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
I really liked it, even though I didn't use any of the AI stuff. Then they just keep pushing the AI harder and harder, and I finally stopped and figured out how to configure the Win11 Terminal app "good enough" and dropped it.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)
Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.
- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly
- The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky
- The command prediction
- The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
A word of warning: I just installed OpenWarp from source, but it looks like it will not let me use my own provider without signing up for an $20/month account -- just like the original Warp
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
A terminal with AI focused on doing terminal-ish stuff is actually kind of useful.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
Claude Code is very capable of making a terminal emulator with exactly (and only) the features you want. I did that for myself and it's now my daily driver. Has a few goodies I care about but nothing much else, and I have no intention of adding features for other people: https://github.com/cartermp/term
That pretend demo that's running commands near the top of the page is pretty annoying, it resizes itself as the text changes so even when I'm scrolled to the bottom of the page, everything keeps jumping up and down as the height of that element endlessly changes
I've looked at Warp before and seen that it has some potentially useful features for a command line terminal program, like having each command be its own little history window which you can scroll independently and collapse. (I might have imagined/inferred those from the screenshots of it working though). So an alternative implementation does sound interesting, but I would want it just to be a terminal, not with any AI or agent stuff in it.
I feel this is the wrong way to go about things and I agree that it rude. Why not start by engaging with the warp project and see if some of this work could be upstreamed and if you like warp, target longevity?
You can feel however you want about it, but forking and creating your own version of things with added/removed features is the heart of what open source is.
"OpenWarp is a community fork of Warp's open-source code. It is not affiliated with Warp Inc. and follows the upstream AGPL / MIT dual license."
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason. Jenkins is a community fork. Mariadb is a community fork. Joomla is a community fork. Illumos was a community fork. Rocky Linux is a community fork. Valkey is a community fork.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is a benefit corporation founded by the original founder of CentOS and other CentOS developers in response to CentOS becoming a stream OS instead of a stable OS.
You'll have to be specific about what dubious ethical decisions you mean. I'm unaware of any, and I feel like I'm pretty tuned into this specific story.
If you’re “pretty tuned in” you would at least know that all this founder & foundation fluff is a load of corporate PR BS.
I was also referring to them shipping broken releases early on and them fighting with users about it instead of fixing and figuring out why they were publishing broken garbage.
I don't know anything about that (I didn't know what Warp was until yesterday, still kinda don't know, as it seems to be a terminal plus AI and I don't know what that actually means). But, alacritty's license seems to allow proprietary forks.
I dunno if they adhered to the license previous to open sourcing, though, as you have to include it somewhere in the actual binary distribution, as well, and some folks don't do that. And, that's also shitty and unethical.
You probably can't name a project OpenWarp for the same reason you can't name a search engine OpenGoogle, even though it's a different name to the original. In this case, it's particularly confusing because the original warp project _is_ now open source.
One can claim a trademark without registering it (the difference between ™ and ®). But, if one wanted to sue, you'd probably register it first. But, a claimed trademark that is suitably unique for your product is defensible if you can prove consistent usage pre-dating the new user of that mark.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
Here are some links to the official website of the actual United States Patent and Trademark Office, commonly and distinctly abbreviated "USPTO", whose domain name is duly registered at uspto.gov
Search for "wordmark" "warp", filter for currently live and 009, shows 44 results.
A search for "openwarp" yields 0 results, none dead, none historical; nowhere in the system is this unique name registered.
A banner at top-of-page offers various pointers for consumers on how to discern official US Gov websites from imposters, domain squatters, and name-stealers
For everyone who is thinking this is too much for a terminal, there's a lightweight solution based on your existing terminal (iTerm2 in my case), which adds auto correction and natural language execution into your tool: https://github.com/allaud/fix
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
Truthfully most vibe coded sites look boring but work. All you need to do on a front page is return proper text, support vertical scroll, and links. Maybe my expectations are too high to expect that any more
yeah the third item on your list is what drove me here to complain. how do you expect me to read any text on your site when it moves up or down approx. an inch every second?
I hope they bring back the former UI that allowed you to explicitly toggle "AI / Agent" mode on/off in a terminal session, and gets rid of the Oz / Cloud Agent stuff.
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
technically you can't create a PR without forking the repo first. practically it also makes sense for a larger change to be developed in the open before it is ready to be merged upstream, so a friendly fork with the intent to explore some ideas usually is fine.
What even is Warp now? I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it. Then I think I read it got the RIIR treatment, but there was already Ghostty and Alacritty by then. Now it looks like it’s another AI thing?
Warp was always an AI thing, as I recall - the seem much heavier on AI bandwagon nowadays, but their whole thing was a terminal for teams where you could share knowledge and command palettes and generate stuff.
Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.
I don't think this should be dismissed as a cheap and rude ripoff. I'm no expert in trademarks or the naming convention part of the story, but for the rest: warp is not a great company taking far too long to roll back its weird account requirement, tracking users, enshittifying the core terminal experience with often unwanted AI and other crap features and dismissing annoyances that are brought up by 100eds of users. We need to show companies they need to behave or will be crushed by the community.
In fact, I think warp software is very good, but it also has many imperfections. Forking this branch is not to split it. If warp does better one day, this branch may be deleted, but for now I prefer my own~
Warp founder here. It's cool to see the community excitement here.
Note that we are going to add bring-your-own-model directly into Warp. Would love interested folks to weigh in on the discussion here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/discussions/9619
Long overdue - I was all in a few years ago with Warp, but after the last couple of years of not addressing this need, I have moved on from Warp. I now DO NOT see the need to embed AI into the terminal when you can have all sorts of TUI doing the same job.
Looks like there is a "neuter" fork out there: https://github.com/GarethCott/warp#whats-different-from-upst...
What about when SSHing to an external server, or working in a container?
I wrote a little wrapper to start tmux with two panes open, one pane is an ssh connection to a host and one runs Claude Code, with an auto-generated CLAUDE.md telling Claude to use tmux commands to interact with the remote host (https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem). Agents can also use ssh, but I wanted an interactive way to poke around on a remote system and also be able to ask Claude to look at or do something on its own without copy/paste.
I was looking at warp, wave, and a few others, and this is the exact stuff I will need, thanks for sharing.
So when I SSH to remote servers, I would like to bring my agent buddy with me, currently, I open two terminals, one with a remote SSH session, and one with opencode/claude code, now I have to copy & paste commands/info between the 2 terminals, which can be anoyying, so that is why I was looking at warp, but it has a paywall for BYOK :)
Nanobot will happily ssh to a host and do things on it. I'm sure that's just a skill away for pi or opencode.
Confirming that Pi can definitely handles this. I've written a harness "factotum" based on pi just for managing my homelab and my radio club's systems. Has absolutely no issue sshing into things remotely, running ansible/helm/kubectl/talosctl commands.
There's a few skills, a and an extension to switch inventory. The extension is only needed because I want to switch between the two organizations. It's pretty slick. One of my use cases was just getting my homelab under control. So one of the first tasks I gave it was to go find everything that's running on these hosts, system services, docker compose, kube pods, etc. Builds an inventory, memory, todos.
Switches the script from "ai helps me launch more experiments to lose track of" to "organized and back under config management".
How do you use `pi` to ssh? I use `oh-my-pi`, and tried the `/ssh` command, but I couldn't get it to work. Then I saw a suggestion somewhere to just run `!ssh` to place things into the agent's context.
Is there a way to use it like "The current directory is at `ssh server`" and have the agent work from there?
Most if not every agent has access to bash or similar, which ssh typically is available. You don't need any bloated skills or anything, as long as you include `host is available via user@10.55` or whatever, and you have authentication properly setup, it'll figure it out.
so, to be clear, is it just doing random bash commands to runn ssh or is it a actual tool, eg, node-ssh command interface.
i would not trust bash execution of SSH because it can easily hallucinate local commands instead of remote.
Background: I use OpenCode to do this.
Just tell it to use ssh from the shell. From there you can give it extra context to describe the target (if you know/care about it), or just let it loose and if the environment doesn't have what it expects it will "figure something out" - just the same as with your local env.
If there's some least common denominator you know about e.g. python it can streamline things if you tell it to just use that for everything.
I don't think you understand. I'm well aware it can run whatever command on bash. You're taking a significant risk asking it to do what it's doing via ssh, because it could easily forget that it's suppose to be doing ssh and do whatever locally.
The point is: opencode should have a specific deterministic tool like https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-ssh where commands can only be run; the environment can only be the remote; etc.
The last thing I would want is for it to suddenly forget it's suppose to be running commands as ssh and does something local.
In practice I just don't think this is a real problem, or at least not one I've seen.
I do something like this a lot with local VMs managed through Incus (so not literally invoking ssh but the exact same pattern) and they don't "mess up" in that particular way. If they ever did they figured it out immediately and I didn't even make note of it happening.
I guess to sum up my feelings on it: if you don't think the tool is reliable enough to correctly use ssh to execute remote commands, you probably shouldn't be trusting it to run remote commands in the first place.
You're still ignoring the crux of the difference in _risk_. Say the risk of `rm -rf /` for any given model is 1%. That is, the probabilty, that it'll just absolutely saveagly destroy the system you're working on. We know it's lower than that, because millions of tokens per day are generated and we only get a few of these "production database was wiped" news items.
There difference is still: If that risk-reward is to be recieved, you can't tell me you'd rather have it run locally than on some system you're managing. Because POV, you're the one responsible and if a coding tool _takes out your system_, you no longer have any means to fix the problem.
So, maybe the risk-reward is _technically_ equal, but only if the operator of the coding tool continues to operate regardless of what commands it's issuing. That's not the case if you're just saying "hey guy, use ssh for all your commands"
> i would not trust bash execution of SSH because it can easily hallucinate local commands instead of remote.
Why would it be more likely to hallucinate local commands instead of remote commands if it is in an active SSH session?
I think you're reading into the statement.
It can equally hallucinate commands. Fine. The problem is, if I'm working on a remote machine, I'm generally doing things that I'd be less concerned about. If I'm on a VPN and it rm -rf / while I'm trying to clean it up; bad break, but it's not _my machine_ it just removed root on.
So if your LLM is just running something like `ssh <remote> "<cmd>"` it could easily foget the ssh <remote> part and suddenly you're modifying your local system.
So it's one thing to YOLO on production servers, etc, but wiping out something locally is a significantly different event. Imagine it erasing all your scripts or whatever.
Anyway, the point is: I wouldn't trust an agent operating with just a bash cli running ssh commands.
This might have changed but Warp was not able to do this without “warpifying” the SSH host.
Hand your agent a tmux session.
I mean… Claude Code desktop will SSH into anything and start coding for ya. Which could sound horrifying but if you setup an isolated system for that specifically its not that horrifying.
Will this require a paid plan? That is, could Warp, when modified, work with a local model on Ollama, no charge?
That was exactly my question; why fork? I assumed the project owners were preserving their business model, but if you allow it to be opened-up and turn off the cloud features, I see no reason to fork.
Makes plenty of sense to upstream this (possibly makes more more than forking, although I suppose it's one way of gauging interest and implementation complexity).
Let me tell you a disturbing fact. The open source warp does not even have prompts. It is completely cloud-based, including the calling process of various tools in oz cloud. So I think it is better to change than to wait.
what is the point of an "ai-terminal" when you can already just directly run ai in a normal terminal
your banner says:
> Bring any AI model into your terminal
its already there. there is no need for a special terminal to do this. in fact better to not have such a thing
Despite the newish "AI" branding for what I would presume is marketing buzz reasons, most of Warp is really centered around trying to make a terminal interface not anchored to legacy assumptions, like the blocks functionality (https://docs.warp.dev/terminal/blocks).
This page doesn't tell me anything useful about what this feature does or how it works. The attached screenshot is pointless. I assume the actual information is in the embedded Youtube video. YouTube is not an acceptable alternative to written documentation
Cool will run this in Hyperia.
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
I have this functionality bound in alt-backslash using this - https://github.com/CGamesPlay/llm-cmd-comp
You write your prompt in any terminal, press alt-backslash and it'll give you a command which you can either refine or accept (or esc/ctrl-c out).
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
Is it Rust or Node/Electron? That’s one of the key considerations I have these days; I’m over bloatware.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
Why do you need to have a whole fork to remove them when there is a single AI killswitch option already?
I really liked it, even though I didn't use any of the AI stuff. Then they just keep pushing the AI harder and harder, and I finally stopped and figured out how to configure the Win11 Terminal app "good enough" and dropped it.
It's not as good, but it's good enough.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
https://thenewstack.io/developer-review-of-warp-for-windows-...
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)
Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.
Off the top of my head:
- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly - The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky - The command prediction - The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)
The other thing I really love is the cross-platform support.
I don't have to tweak my usage of the terminal depending which platform I'm on.
I just have to remember to use Ctrl+Shift for copy/paste on Windows/Linux.
Also, great example of why you don't take a terminal that requires login as your daily workhorse. It never ends well.
That was a mistake they made initially, but iirc they got rid of it after a while.
If you block internet access to Warp, it refuses to start. That's all I need to know about it.
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
Warp is a terminal for people who don’t like the terminal.
guessing it spits you out on Win11?
can you please elaborate?
A word of warning: I just installed OpenWarp from source, but it looks like it will not let me use my own provider without signing up for an $20/month account -- just like the original Warp
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
You need to switch to the openWarp branch, master is the official code
Oh, thanks!
Maybe it's just me, but I'd love a "ThinWarp" -- just the terminal with the great UI, etc.
I can run Claude Code there or whatever. But I personally don't need the AI in the terminal itself.
A terminal with AI focused on doing terminal-ish stuff is actually kind of useful.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
Claude Code is very capable of making a terminal emulator with exactly (and only) the features you want. I did that for myself and it's now my daily driver. Has a few goodies I care about but nothing much else, and I have no intention of adding features for other people: https://github.com/cartermp/term
A personal Mac terminal emulator built for terminal-based AI work.
How exactly does it help with "terminal-based AI work"?
You're right to push back. It doesn't — he made it up.
...because it's a terminal emulator? I use it to run Claude Code?
There seems to be a "neuter" fork out there that disables a bunch of stuff: https://github.com/GarethCott/warp#whats-different-from-upst...
We have a way of turning off all the AI if you don't like it (Settings > AI > turn it off). I get the desire here.
Why not just use ghostty at that point?
That pretend demo that's running commands near the top of the page is pretty annoying, it resizes itself as the text changes so even when I'm scrolled to the bottom of the page, everything keeps jumping up and down as the height of that element endlessly changes
Came here looking for someone mentioning this very issue. Did they not even view the model's output once? So strange.
I've looked at Warp before and seen that it has some potentially useful features for a command line terminal program, like having each command be its own little history window which you can scroll independently and collapse. (I might have imagined/inferred those from the screenshots of it working though). So an alternative implementation does sound interesting, but I would want it just to be a terminal, not with any AI or agent stuff in it.
So alas this doesn't appear to be it.
There can be problems with open source projects run by for-profit companies, but this fork seems a little premature.
I feel this is the wrong way to go about things and I agree that it rude. Why not start by engaging with the warp project and see if some of this work could be upstreamed and if you like warp, target longevity?
My problem with Warp is that I have to create an account to use my local llm
This project is no different
You can feel however you want about it, but forking and creating your own version of things with added/removed features is the heart of what open source is.
How do you know they didn't?
I was hoping that this was an opensourcing of OS/2. (With the recent DOS announcement, I guess one can only dream.)
An oft-repeated comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940669
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941712
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941782
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941974
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942198
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943175
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947007
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948005
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952979
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970965
"OpenWarp is a community fork of Warp's open-source code. It is not affiliated with Warp Inc. and follows the upstream AGPL / MIT dual license."
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
I agree on the name, but to me the word community here is used to mean it's not run by a company.
Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason. Jenkins is a community fork. Mariadb is a community fork. Joomla is a community fork. Illumos was a community fork. Rocky Linux is a community fork. Valkey is a community fork.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
> Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason.
That seems more like it should be called an "alumni fork"
"Community" makes more sense for people who aren't necessarily affiliated with the official project but were in the community that spawned around it.
I've never seen the term "alumni fork" used.
Rocky Linux was a corporate fork with numerous dubious ethical decisions early on
Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is a benefit corporation founded by the original founder of CentOS and other CentOS developers in response to CentOS becoming a stream OS instead of a stable OS.
You'll have to be specific about what dubious ethical decisions you mean. I'm unaware of any, and I feel like I'm pretty tuned into this specific story.
I mean here are just a few of the issues re: the founding https://hackernoon.com/the-case-against-rocky-linux
If you’re “pretty tuned in” you would at least know that all this founder & foundation fluff is a load of corporate PR BS.
I was also referring to them shipping broken releases early on and them fighting with users about it instead of fixing and figuring out why they were publishing broken garbage.
It's ok to start new things with aspirations. Spare us such melodrama, such pedantry.
Yep, start a new thing with a new name. Go for it.
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I would like to introduce my new venture, OpenOpenAi.
Warp is already an Alacritty fork with no acknowledgement. I feel they deserve no respect for this.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939527
I don't know anything about that (I didn't know what Warp was until yesterday, still kinda don't know, as it seems to be a terminal plus AI and I don't know what that actually means). But, alacritty's license seems to allow proprietary forks.
The license requires copyright notice to follow the code and that seems to be present: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/blob/6d7a01cc9727472a1bcb...
I dunno if they adhered to the license previous to open sourcing, though, as you have to include it somewhere in the actual binary distribution, as well, and some folks don't do that. And, that's also shitty and unethical.
But calling it OpenAlacritty would be worse, which is what happened here.
Domain Squatting 2.0
Agreed. They should not be using the name Warp inside of the fork.
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You probably can't name a project OpenWarp for the same reason you can't name a search engine OpenGoogle, even though it's a different name to the original. In this case, it's particularly confusing because the original warp project _is_ now open source.
I used Warp a bit on Windows. It looked promising, but didn't work quite as well as I would have liked. It's great that it's been open sourced.
Does anyone keep a DB somewhere of open source project names?
I think it would be better to give the code fork a different name.... And maybe move it off Github!!
I do have to admit, when I saw Warp I thought of OS/2, a long forgotten Win32-compatible OS by IBM, btw, does anyone know if IBM trademarked Warp?
You can't name something OpenGoogle, because the Google name is trademarked.
Is Warp trademarked?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark
Even if it is not a registered trademark, it can be enforceable as a trademark due to common law
It is, and the discussion is about etiquette, not law.
Yes it is, as another person has replied.
Definitely rude, too close to the same name. Warp just recently open sourced their client, a [not community] personal fork should be more considerate.
Try do create a game called ”Open Pokémon Go” and see if it works or not.
It is not the "open" version of Warp. Warp is already open. So the name is rude.
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This is about the name, not the source.
Also calling a fork "Open" is disingenious. They wouldn't be able to fork it if the original wasn't "open".
> even if this isn't 'free' licensed
What part of it isn't "free"?
Definitely disagree about rudeness.
Only a trademark violation if a trademark has been registered. IANAL.
One can claim a trademark without registering it (the difference between ™ and ®). But, if one wanted to sue, you'd probably register it first. But, a claimed trademark that is suitably unique for your product is defensible if you can prove consistent usage pre-dating the new user of that mark.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
https://uspto.report/TM/90342558
> WARP® trademark registration is intended to cover the categories of [...] Downloadable computer terminal emulator program [...]
How were they able to register it? So many other things are named Warp, for example Cloudflare Warp.
Cloudflare Warp is also trademarked: https://uspto.report/TM/88455403
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
Here are some links to the official website of the actual United States Patent and Trademark Office, commonly and distinctly abbreviated "USPTO", whose domain name is duly registered at uspto.gov
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90342560
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90342558
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/88455403
Search for "wordmark" "warp", filter for currently live and 009, shows 44 results.
A search for "openwarp" yields 0 results, none dead, none historical; nowhere in the system is this unique name registered.
A banner at top-of-page offers various pointers for consumers on how to discern official US Gov websites from imposters, domain squatters, and name-stealers
Mixing etiquette and copyright.
It is not only rude but also misleading and frankly, stupid.
Related:
Warp is now open-source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936264
How does Warp/Openwarp relate to Opencode or Claude code?
They all use LLMs as a backend for certain features?
For everyone who is thinking this is too much for a terminal, there's a lightweight solution based on your existing terminal (iTerm2 in my case), which adds auto correction and natural language execution into your tool: https://github.com/allaud/fix
for somebody not in the know... what is this? the website doesn't seem to explain much. i can add models to warp, but what's warp?
A terminal: https://www.warp.dev/
> Warp is the agentic development environment
So not a terminal?
It's a very competent terminal.
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
Since when does command completion require Claude Code?
You aren’t the only one who didnt get this off the bat. I still don’t understand why I do this instead of just typing Claude my terminal
Ive noticed every vibecoded website looks the same, or similar to this one.
Why is it? Does this style have a name?
It is mostly Vercel's design language.
This is the most broken website I’ve ever visited on HN. From Safari on iOS:
1. Im getting non-English text
2. The size of my page is well beyond the width of my screen making it hard to scroll vertically
3. Constant popping/reflowing due to animations
Trust this company with my credit card? I think not.
what did you expect from vibe coding software
Truthfully most vibe coded sites look boring but work. All you need to do on a front page is return proper text, support vertical scroll, and links. Maybe my expectations are too high to expect that any more
There is something wrong with you. Who asked you to give me your credit card? If you don’t need it, don’t pollute your eyes with nonsense.
yeah the third item on your list is what drove me here to complain. how do you expect me to read any text on your site when it moves up or down approx. an inch every second?
I don't see anything asking for a credit card.
Some other comments mention getting the payment prompts after they've downloaded the tool and started using it. e.g. "pay to use your own provider"
I hope they bring back the former UI that allowed you to explicitly toggle "AI / Agent" mode on/off in a terminal session, and gets rid of the Oz / Cloud Agent stuff.
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
at this stage, this being a fork instead of a pr is really weird
technically you can't create a PR without forking the repo first. practically it also makes sense for a larger change to be developed in the open before it is ready to be merged upstream, so a friendly fork with the intent to explore some ideas usually is fine.
What does "100% local credentials" mean as a feature?
That seems pretty risky to use the name Warp in the fork. Seems like a legal situation there.
What even is Warp now? I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it. Then I think I read it got the RIIR treatment, but there was already Ghostty and Alacritty by then. Now it looks like it’s another AI thing?
What the heck is warp???
Warp was always an AI thing, as I recall - the seem much heavier on AI bandwagon nowadays, but their whole thing was a terminal for teams where you could share knowledge and command palettes and generate stuff.
Their "Introducing Warp" post from 2022 actually doesn't mention AI: https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-warp. They introduced Warp AI in 2023: https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-warp-ai
I was pretty interested in it when it was just trying to be a modernized terminal. I still think some of the UI ideas are cool.
Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.
Warp didn't start out as AI, IIRC they started with auto completing terminals.
> I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it.
Pretty sure it's Rust with their own UI framework
Not OS/2.
Yeah :-(
Here I was hoping that somehow IBM had decided to open source it. That would have been fun. But I don't think that will ever happen.
So, Warp with telemetry removed?
Please mention and support llama.cpp directly instead of ollama.
call it Worp
I don't think this should be dismissed as a cheap and rude ripoff. I'm no expert in trademarks or the naming convention part of the story, but for the rest: warp is not a great company taking far too long to roll back its weird account requirement, tracking users, enshittifying the core terminal experience with often unwanted AI and other crap features and dismissing annoyances that are brought up by 100eds of users. We need to show companies they need to behave or will be crushed by the community.
In fact, I think warp software is very good, but it also has many imperfections. Forking this branch is not to split it. If warp does better one day, this branch may be deleted, but for now I prefer my own~
was hoping for OS/2, disappointed
why the fck does openwarp make any sense if warp is alr opened up? lol
If you receive an existing warp then you don't need openWarp
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