I used to really like Warp, back when it was just a terminal. Then as they went more and more in on AI the actual terminal features became more and more buggy and I ended up having to go back to WezTerm.
Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
Yeah I became a fan of Warp when they offered a terminal that treated the input as a normal text input field so I could use my normal keyboard text editing shortcuts.
But I understand that's not a viable business model. I'm back on iTerm2 now cause Warp isn't approved for use at my job (and never would be with all their AI pushing), and I've managed to pound iTerm 2 into something usable enough but I wish every terminal would copy Warp's text input style.
I never used Warp, is the editing similar to PowerShell ISE's editing by chance? Powershell ISE is like a mix of a script editor and a PowerShell UI so you can script out some things or use the terminal directly.
I can't compare to PowerShell, I've only ever used the Mac version of Warp (the Windows version is relatively new, I can't attest to the quality)
To be more specific about what I was saying, on Mac, in any standard text field I can hold Cmd and hit left or right to jump to the start or end of a line, or hold Option to jump a word at a time, and if I hold shift it'll select text. Option-delete deletes the last word, etc.
I've managed to get iTerm2 to do a lot of this stuff but, for example, Option-shift-left, instead of highlighting the last word, spits out the text ";4D"
The killer feature that got me into using it was the shell integration. Your prompt, input and command output are entirely separate entities rather than one single stream of text. It's like using a Jupyter notebook for the terminal.
That was also the thing that destroyed it for me, since navigating between history entries started getting more and more unreliable and sometimes clicking on the input box would randomly resize the entire window or move it between screens. I don't entirely know how they managed that one.
does anyone know if the above experience and fluid vim-style behaviour can be replicated on something like ghostty? this was the killer feature of Warp imo and I saw no other benefits, but somehow not other terminal has been able to (or tried to) catch up
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it's not necessarily a terminal feature per se. Have you tried setting `vi` mode in your shell? There is a bit of lag going into normal mode in ghostty; maybe ghostty is configured by default to wait for a second keypress when you hit Esc and you can disable that.
I do use vi mode in the shell, but unfortunately it's not quite the Warp experience, which has full vim functionality with visual mode, multi-cursor, mouse selection, syntax highlighting, etc :)
I feel the same. I also really liked the text input. The suggestions and autocomplete where also easy to use. And the block-based approach, with easy copying and sharing (through a URL), were super useful at times.
And for the AI part, the AI command generation (from plain text) was great. Also the follow-up command suggestions were handy sometimes.
Too bad Warp entered enshittification (already some time ago). Any (open source) alternatives for the good parts?
Warp engineer here - Warp is open source as well if there's anything we can do to improve the default experience. Otherwise, it's available to fork and customize: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp
I also felt this way and after staring at the 900MB app package in disbelief started tearing out features using Claude with minimal supervision over the weekend.
It was also a bit of an experiment with a larger Rust codebase, which is outside my usual areas. I did pull out powershell since this was just for personal use on macOS. Been using it today and enjoying it in place of Ghostty, but merely an experiment and learning project:
The writing was on the wall from the very start of Warp. I can't remember precisely what happened, but years ago when it was first announced there was something that required internet, or telemetry, or an account to use Warp. I noped out right there before I even tried further. It was always going to be bloatware.
Another reason why individual developers do not pay for their tools. This is one of the only professions that does this and they always pass the cost to the employer, who will pay for it until they cut costs.
So the open source code on GitHub is the library that agents need to train on, to do all the economically useful work for 1/100th of the cost or close to free.
That is where it is going and the raised money will be going to the agents.
Warp was so promising to begin with - super clean and polished UI, AI features that actually made sense, really good dev outreach & PR. Over time, they started cramming more and more AI in everywhere, took over half the input area and you could just see there was no coming back. This is why VC backed software will always stink in the end. I use ghostty now.
The point being I liked the general offering including the AI _to begin with_. Once they went OTT with it it killed the product for me to the point of not wanting it with or without
100% agree. I've ended up building my own [1][2] mostly because I got annoyed the agent cli's are building remote control into the agents, instead of into the terminal. I really want the agent cli's to focus on being the best autonomous agents, then let me choose a great terminal that does all the extra.
Another great option (not mine) is Orca [3] and it's a lot more mature. Really nice to use.
I'm glad it works for you, but I've got enough electron apps running on my computer already. I have to run a bunch for work and fully half my cpu is just electron at idle
> Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
Well, i'm trying to do the later, and it is very hard to position the product and differentiate without vertical integration. When Warp owns both agent and the terminal, they can a) give terminal for free and charge on the agent, and b) lock the user in, so it is a good business but poor user experience.
on the other hand, i have to make sure every agent is working which more surface area to maintain, and i'm also limited to the common subset of features. Also it is much harder to convince folks to switch.
Lets try: I support Wezterm (and ghostty, and others) with 40+ different agents (Claude, Codex, etc) in agentastic.dev, would you give it a try?
when i open a new tab in warp now it defaults to their agent and not my actual terminal. i'm going to have to switch back to something else, do you like wezterm?
I don't dislike it. The keybindings are a bit arcane and having to write the config in Lua rather than having a preferences panel is annoying (though spectacularly powerful), but I've settled in to it and being able to use ctrl-shift-p to control the entire terminal is nice.
My absolute favorite thing about Warp is the function that suggest a new command intelligently when the one I just ran failed or changes to the code when execution failed. Haven't been able to replicate that as smoothly in Ghostty which I really want to enjoy but honestly haven't really felt the same delight I got from Warp.
The other day in warp I literally couldn't run `ls` because it kept interpreting it as a AI command. I still love warp, but some of the stuff is crazy.
Warp team member here. If you have natural language detection on, you can turn this off in Settings > Agents > Warp Agent > Input by disabling "Autodetect agent prompts in terminal input." Still, I wouldn't expect `ls` to be classified as an AI command... I've seen this when auto-detection is disabled and you're in an agent conversation unexpectedly. Maybe that's the case?
FWIW I use ZSH in Warp daily and never had this problem with ls. Although I have experienced the the agent prediction doing a false positive auto-switch thing a few times.
So this is a competitor to something like OpenCode or Pi? I suspect for most developers, they are using Claude Code or Codex CLI mainly just so they don't have to pay-per-token and can use the subscription products - which I assume can't be done with Warp Agent?
Warp engineer here - yes, you can use OpenCode or Pi as comparison points; our CLI has BYOK, Supergrok subscription support, or our own inference to connect to frontier / open weight.
The main reason you might try it is the shell access. We made CLI commands runnable in an agent session in the foreground, similar to our terminal agent. It means you can `cd` into different directories during the session, or run interactive commands like vim or REPLs in the session. One reason is convenience (it's nicer to cd around projects and keep the conversation going) and another is visibility (you can run a REPL in the foreground and tag in an agent to help and control that REPL). We're curious how others like working this way. It's pretty convenient.
The codex and many other subscriptions can be used with other harnesses like OpenCode and pi. It's officially supported most of the time. Using my Codex and MiniMax sub just fine in pi.
I suspect most developers don’t care too much about cost because they’re just using what their company is just paying for whatever enterprise subscription/billing.
> Cloud agent handoff
> Start work in the CLI, then hand it off to the cloud when you want to close your laptop. All cloud agents are tracked centrally and can be monitored and steered via the web so you can continue work on the go.
They hype up not needing a third party binary to remote and run agents against SSH'ed systems, but how does this "cloud agent" work then? Are they shelling you through their own back-end? Because that sounds bad and probably wrong? Maybe its a different use case.
Interesting idea! I like the idea of more deeply integrating code agent with the terminal (e.g. shell, ptys, etc).
It's spawning PTYs but does it support SSH'ing into a remote session and running commands from a remote shell? That's something I built into zmx in order to scratch that "debugging in a remote VM" itch.
I find it a bit strange that none of the mainstream harnesses have dedicated support for using an agent on another machine/VM on. I understand there is security and permissions limitations, but if I have 30 different VMs, it becomes unmanagable pretty quickly.
I don't currently plan to use this stuff (mostly because I generally use Claude via IDE sidebars) but I still love Warp and their TOML/YAML based config which preloads my 10 tabs + tab groups on init, covering the 3 projects I work on. So I don't have to go into each dir and remember start commands every time I reboot.
I do like integrating the shell with the agent. That seems like something I do occasionally need. But the occasion when I need it is getting rarer and rarer so I suspect that this is building a feature for 6 months ago.
> think of our CLI agent as a built-in mux’er across agent sessions. This allows more natural interactions, like being able to switch directories in agent sessions, have the agent drive full-screen terminal commands (e.g. sqlite and mysql), and even run across ssh sessions with no remote binary install.
Looks like they let you use your LLM of choice on anything your terminal can SSH into using their TUI without having to install Claude Code or their agent on a remote system. Also, you are able to have multiple shell instances as you would on tmux in one session, all with the LLM fully aware of each one (not sure if its a model per session, or multiple, or what).
No guy, this is the one, this is the coding agent that everyone is going to use now, instead of the one that is in the editor or part of their existing ai providers offering.
The irrational exuberance of these guys. It's interesting to see what happened, somebody somewhere got the very very bad idea (if the goal is to make money) of "we will build, like the BEST terminal."
Which, given open-source, is just going to be a dead-end, even before AI. Because software likes to be modifiable, and this sort of thing is literally at the center of people who like to modify software.
But, hey, if something good comes of it, fantastic. I mostly the think of Docker, an unqualified success in software and probably a huge failure in business.
And the latter actually makes this a double-good; a "successful" docker would have somehow monopolized some very important part of the process, and docker is too good to be gatekept like that.
Docker has an ARR of ~$200mm. They did that by pivoting to a strong focus on developer tooling in 2019 after they nearly went under due to focusing too much on their enterprise infrastructure product.
I would be fine being a business “failure” by that definition.
I used to really like Warp, back when it was just a terminal. Then as they went more and more in on AI the actual terminal features became more and more buggy and I ended up having to go back to WezTerm.
Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
Yeah I became a fan of Warp when they offered a terminal that treated the input as a normal text input field so I could use my normal keyboard text editing shortcuts.
But I understand that's not a viable business model. I'm back on iTerm2 now cause Warp isn't approved for use at my job (and never would be with all their AI pushing), and I've managed to pound iTerm 2 into something usable enough but I wish every terminal would copy Warp's text input style.
I never used Warp, is the editing similar to PowerShell ISE's editing by chance? Powershell ISE is like a mix of a script editor and a PowerShell UI so you can script out some things or use the terminal directly.
I can't compare to PowerShell, I've only ever used the Mac version of Warp (the Windows version is relatively new, I can't attest to the quality)
To be more specific about what I was saying, on Mac, in any standard text field I can hold Cmd and hit left or right to jump to the start or end of a line, or hold Option to jump a word at a time, and if I hold shift it'll select text. Option-delete deletes the last word, etc.
I've managed to get iTerm2 to do a lot of this stuff but, for example, Option-shift-left, instead of highlighting the last word, spits out the text ";4D"
The killer feature that got me into using it was the shell integration. Your prompt, input and command output are entirely separate entities rather than one single stream of text. It's like using a Jupyter notebook for the terminal.
That was also the thing that destroyed it for me, since navigating between history entries started getting more and more unreliable and sometimes clicking on the input box would randomly resize the entire window or move it between screens. I don't entirely know how they managed that one.
does anyone know if the above experience and fluid vim-style behaviour can be replicated on something like ghostty? this was the killer feature of Warp imo and I saw no other benefits, but somehow not other terminal has been able to (or tried to) catch up
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it's not necessarily a terminal feature per se. Have you tried setting `vi` mode in your shell? There is a bit of lag going into normal mode in ghostty; maybe ghostty is configured by default to wait for a second keypress when you hit Esc and you can disable that.
Bash (also works in zsh): https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-...
I do use vi mode in the shell, but unfortunately it's not quite the Warp experience, which has full vim functionality with visual mode, multi-cursor, mouse selection, syntax highlighting, etc :)
Maybe try ghostel with evil-mode, if you're okay with Emacs? https://github.com/dakra/ghostel
I feel the same. I also really liked the text input. The suggestions and autocomplete where also easy to use. And the block-based approach, with easy copying and sharing (through a URL), were super useful at times.
And for the AI part, the AI command generation (from plain text) was great. Also the follow-up command suggestions were handy sometimes.
Too bad Warp entered enshittification (already some time ago). Any (open source) alternatives for the good parts?
Warp engineer here - Warp is open source as well if there's anything we can do to improve the default experience. Otherwise, it's available to fork and customize: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp
I also felt this way and after staring at the 900MB app package in disbelief started tearing out features using Claude with minimal supervision over the weekend.
It was also a bit of an experiment with a larger Rust codebase, which is outside my usual areas. I did pull out powershell since this was just for personal use on macOS. Been using it today and enjoying it in place of Ghostty, but merely an experiment and learning project:
https://github.com/dxmachina/warp-nine
The writing was on the wall from the very start of Warp. I can't remember precisely what happened, but years ago when it was first announced there was something that required internet, or telemetry, or an account to use Warp. I noped out right there before I even tried further. It was always going to be bloatware.
They were VC-backed, and had some kind of sign-up/account system for the early invites.
Same thing for Arc Browser. Sorry, why do I need an account to use a browser? That was a nope for me
> Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
You can't raise a $50 million series b on making a nice terminal. we already have lots of nice terminals for free
We also have a bunch of agents and harnesses for free
As always it’s about the packaging not the individual components.
Another reason why individual developers do not pay for their tools. This is one of the only professions that does this and they always pass the cost to the employer, who will pay for it until they cut costs.
So the open source code on GitHub is the library that agents need to train on, to do all the economically useful work for 1/100th of the cost or close to free.
That is where it is going and the raised money will be going to the agents.
Warp was so promising to begin with - super clean and polished UI, AI features that actually made sense, really good dev outreach & PR. Over time, they started cramming more and more AI in everywhere, took over half the input area and you could just see there was no coming back. This is why VC backed software will always stink in the end. I use ghostty now.
I clicked on no ai during onboarding after installation, and I have never seen AI anywhere. I don't think pressing 1 button is really that hard?
The point being I liked the general offering including the AI _to begin with_. Once they went OTT with it it killed the product for me to the point of not wanting it with or without
100% agree. I've ended up building my own [1][2] mostly because I got annoyed the agent cli's are building remote control into the agents, instead of into the terminal. I really want the agent cli's to focus on being the best autonomous agents, then let me choose a great terminal that does all the extra.
Another great option (not mine) is Orca [3] and it's a lot more mature. Really nice to use.
1. https://github.com/markwylde/terminay
2. https://terminay.com
3. https://www.onorca.dev
I'm glad it works for you, but I've got enough electron apps running on my computer already. I have to run a bunch for work and fully half my cpu is just electron at idle
> Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
Well, i'm trying to do the later, and it is very hard to position the product and differentiate without vertical integration. When Warp owns both agent and the terminal, they can a) give terminal for free and charge on the agent, and b) lock the user in, so it is a good business but poor user experience.
on the other hand, i have to make sure every agent is working which more surface area to maintain, and i'm also limited to the common subset of features. Also it is much harder to convince folks to switch.
Lets try: I support Wezterm (and ghostty, and others) with 40+ different agents (Claude, Codex, etc) in agentastic.dev, would you give it a try?
when i open a new tab in warp now it defaults to their agent and not my actual terminal. i'm going to have to switch back to something else, do you like wezterm?
I don't dislike it. The keybindings are a bit arcane and having to write the config in Lua rather than having a preferences panel is annoying (though spectacularly powerful), but I've settled in to it and being able to use ctrl-shift-p to control the entire terminal is nice.
This is configurable. In Settings search for "Default mode new sessions". You can select "Terminal", "Agent", or "Cloud Oz".
> Why is every company seemingly trying to re-implement agents themselves rather than making their product work with the existing ones?
Why does any company do anything? Money, of course.
My absolute favorite thing about Warp is the function that suggest a new command intelligently when the one I just ran failed or changes to the code when execution failed. Haven't been able to replicate that as smoothly in Ghostty which I really want to enjoy but honestly haven't really felt the same delight I got from Warp.
The other day in warp I literally couldn't run `ls` because it kept interpreting it as a AI command. I still love warp, but some of the stuff is crazy.
Warp team member here. If you have natural language detection on, you can turn this off in Settings > Agents > Warp Agent > Input by disabling "Autodetect agent prompts in terminal input." Still, I wouldn't expect `ls` to be classified as an AI command... I've seen this when auto-detection is disabled and you're in an agent conversation unexpectedly. Maybe that's the case?
FWIW I use ZSH in Warp daily and never had this problem with ls. Although I have experienced the the agent prediction doing a false positive auto-switch thing a few times.
i keep getting the opposite problem:
> please implement the fix
$ please: command not found
Same problem: the classifier.
So this is a competitor to something like OpenCode or Pi? I suspect for most developers, they are using Claude Code or Codex CLI mainly just so they don't have to pay-per-token and can use the subscription products - which I assume can't be done with Warp Agent?
Warp engineer here - yes, you can use OpenCode or Pi as comparison points; our CLI has BYOK, Supergrok subscription support, or our own inference to connect to frontier / open weight.
The main reason you might try it is the shell access. We made CLI commands runnable in an agent session in the foreground, similar to our terminal agent. It means you can `cd` into different directories during the session, or run interactive commands like vim or REPLs in the session. One reason is convenience (it's nicer to cd around projects and keep the conversation going) and another is visibility (you can run a REPL in the foreground and tag in an agent to help and control that REPL). We're curious how others like working this way. It's pretty convenient.
The codex and many other subscriptions can be used with other harnesses like OpenCode and pi. It's officially supported most of the time. Using my Codex and MiniMax sub just fine in pi.
Yeah Anthropic is the only company I am aware of that only allows subscription usage in first party products
Google as well.
I suspect most developers don’t care too much about cost because they’re just using what their company is just paying for whatever enterprise subscription/billing.
Well someone (like me) has to make the decision what their developers get to use, and that was in fact informed by subscription pricing vs. API cost.
> Cloud agent handoff > Start work in the CLI, then hand it off to the cloud when you want to close your laptop. All cloud agents are tracked centrally and can be monitored and steered via the web so you can continue work on the go.
They hype up not needing a third party binary to remote and run agents against SSH'ed systems, but how does this "cloud agent" work then? Are they shelling you through their own back-end? Because that sounds bad and probably wrong? Maybe its a different use case.
Interesting idea! I like the idea of more deeply integrating code agent with the terminal (e.g. shell, ptys, etc).
It's spawning PTYs but does it support SSH'ing into a remote session and running commands from a remote shell? That's something I built into zmx in order to scratch that "debugging in a remote VM" itch.
https://zmx.sh
I find it a bit strange that none of the mainstream harnesses have dedicated support for using an agent on another machine/VM on. I understand there is security and permissions limitations, but if I have 30 different VMs, it becomes unmanagable pretty quickly.
just... ssh into them and then run the agent?
Warp is bloatware now, has performance issues
I don't currently plan to use this stuff (mostly because I generally use Claude via IDE sidebars) but I still love Warp and their TOML/YAML based config which preloads my 10 tabs + tab groups on init, covering the 3 projects I work on. So I don't have to go into each dir and remember start commands every time I reboot.
Warp eng here. Glad you like it :)
Warp is bloated in recent releases. I just want an old warp, lightweight and fast. Returned to the default terminal.
Open source fork?
I prefer the Orca / Herdr multiplexer implementation, not a fan of this style.
I do like integrating the shell with the agent. That seems like something I do occasionally need. But the occasion when I need it is getting rarer and rarer so I suspect that this is building a feature for 6 months ago.
Anyone use this and have also used cmux?
> a CLI coding agent that does what others can't
I've read the product description and I don't see anything that's truly unique
> think of our CLI agent as a built-in mux’er across agent sessions. This allows more natural interactions, like being able to switch directories in agent sessions, have the agent drive full-screen terminal commands (e.g. sqlite and mysql), and even run across ssh sessions with no remote binary install.
Looks like they let you use your LLM of choice on anything your terminal can SSH into using their TUI without having to install Claude Code or their agent on a remote system. Also, you are able to have multiple shell instances as you would on tmux in one session, all with the LLM fully aware of each one (not sure if its a model per session, or multiple, or what).
I just use tmux (not warp), and the agent interacts with that pretty often. I'm not sure it's at the same level, but it's doing `tmux send-keys`
I like the terminal emulator but I just don't see any use for the agentic stuff.
I've disabled it all because it gets in the way.
I use warp if you don’t like the AI stuff you can turn it off.
im glad you guys open sourced the terminal, just in case, you know...
No guy, this is the one, this is the coding agent that everyone is going to use now, instead of the one that is in the editor or part of their existing ai providers offering.
The irrational exuberance of these guys. It's interesting to see what happened, somebody somewhere got the very very bad idea (if the goal is to make money) of "we will build, like the BEST terminal."
Which, given open-source, is just going to be a dead-end, even before AI. Because software likes to be modifiable, and this sort of thing is literally at the center of people who like to modify software.
But, hey, if something good comes of it, fantastic. I mostly the think of Docker, an unqualified success in software and probably a huge failure in business.
And the latter actually makes this a double-good; a "successful" docker would have somehow monopolized some very important part of the process, and docker is too good to be gatekept like that.
Docker has an ARR of ~$200mm. They did that by pivoting to a strong focus on developer tooling in 2019 after they nearly went under due to focusing too much on their enterprise infrastructure product.
I would be fine being a business “failure” by that definition.
[dead]
[dead]