zhengt
We don’t know about any shells outside of Warp so technically, they could also using other terminals - but that’s enough info for our product development.
We never track the contents of commands. A full telemetry table is included in our user docs.
Regarding open source, we want to do it for parts and potentially all of the code. We plan to open-source our extension points as we go. You can read more about this here https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400.
We have also talked internally about having penetration testing.
As for our business model, the terminal is totally free for individuals and we want to make a terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.
The general philosophy is that we would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. So no paywalls around SSH or anything like that. The types of features we could eventually charge for are things that have a cost to us, for example enabling real-time terminal collaboration.
When we GA, login will be opt-in (although you'd lose some of our cooler features).
As cieplik mentioned, it's true that telemetry has not been mentioned as frequently as it has been on HN.
> I think it does an amazing job of making the terminal easy and friendly to infrequent users.
As for our users, it's a combination of newer and more experienced terminal users. More than half of them are self-reported advanced or expert terminal users.
There are a lot of great shell configs. One advantage of Warp is that the terminal & shell have these features out-of-the-box.
> A shell script will run in it's interpreter regardless of what shell you happen to use, shared commands will inherently be in the flavour of shell-script that the sharer is used to, and so i have to know how to use their shell as well as mine to translate between them, which again isn't a problem when running a script.
Workflows in Warp specify the shell in the metadata.
The idea for workflows is to allow people to search commands based on what they accomplish, rather than requiring everybody to remember the command and type. For example, if I wanted to delete all empty files in a line, instead of remembering the exact incantation of sed to accomplish this, I could search "delete empty files".
The terminal is totally free for individuals and our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.
We are also definitely open-sourcing parts and potentially all of the code.
You can read more about how we see it here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400.
Right now, we have two relevant features: 1. The ability to share a "block" of input/output to a permalink that anyone can view. 2. A.I. command search.
Later on, for an individual, it may mean being able to sync settings across devices, fast setup of your terminal on new computers, and being able to access the command line on any device via the web.
For teams, it means we can build collaborative features. This does not mean just Google Docs-style real-time collaboration, but asynchronous collaboration through sharing commands, settings, and history. It means increased knowledge-sharing through wikis and READMEs that run directly in the terminal. It means making the terminal safer and more secure via integrated password-management and audit logging. It means making the terminal a more extensible and customizable platform, with a nice modern ecosystem.
The app works offline, just the two features I mentioned won't work.
It's too early right now, but we are definitely going to open source parts and potentially all of the code.
One of Warp is that you don't have to think twice about it because it behaves similarly to text fields everywhere else on your computer.
In the terminal, I often have the feeling that personal computing revolution from Xerox PARC & Apple Computer never happened.
Additionally, Warp has GUI elements like blocks and context menus. We talk about performance because when we discuss our features, people automatically assume it's going to be sluggish.
While folks have mentioned here that shells have powerful line editing capabilities, I've found that a lot of people miss this. We want to allow a broader set of people to be productive in the terminal. And FWIW, a lot of developers - with varying amounts of experience - have resonated with the text input.
Personally, I'm a heavy vim user and I've never gotten particularly comfortable using the shell's line editor.
We think the two products are meant for two different audiences.
Alacritty has a very minimalist philosophy that suits some terminal power users very well. It’s geared towards folks who are familiar with more advanced tools like tmux, and who are comfortable doing advanced configuration in the shell. For instance, Alacritty has no tabs: users are expected to use tmux.
With Warp, you get similar performance to Alacritty (we are both Rust-based, GPU-accelerated native apps, and Warp leverages some of Alacritty’s model code) But you also get many more built-in features that we think make all developers more productive, like:
- Blocks (grouping commands and outputs together)
- A modern text editor for your input
- Features like Workflows and AI command search that help you perform tasks faster
- Tabs, native split panes, and menus
The terminal is totally free for individuals. The general philosophy is that we would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. So no paywalls around SSH or anything like that.
You're totally right in that the collaborative/audit features are a good fit for being paid features. Our business model will be around charging companies for team features.
For our public beta, we do send telemetry and we do associate it with the logged in user because it makes it much easier to reach out and get feedback when something goes wrong. But we only track metadata, never console input or output. For an exhaustive list of events that we track, see here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel.... If this is uncomfortable to you, please wait for Warp to enter General Availability. At that point our plan is to make telemetry opt-in and anonymous.
How can I learn more about your project?
Btw, we are hiring! ;)
> I would easily pay $20-50 for a souped-up terminal (I spend all day in it), even a closed-source one, but the "we raised tons of money to build a free terminal and haven't figured out how to monetize it yet", again, understandable, but not the best look, given the mandatory data collection. Hey, dev's gotta eat, but I'd rather pay for OSS and transparency, rather than free-but-you-are-the-product, and I hope they go for the former route.
The terminal is totally free for individuals. Our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.
The general philosophy is that we would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. So no paywalls around SSH or anything like that. The types of features we could eventually charge for are things that have a cost to us, for example enabling real-time terminal collaboration. Even those will likely be free up to some level of usage and only charged in a company context.
We will never sell your data.
> Also the privacy policy doesn't seem to be linked from the app. I can get to it, but would be nice to just go there right from the about page.
The privacy policy is linked from the login screen and it's also one of the first items in our user docs.
The reason we don't submit this only during a crash, is because there are a lot of other things we want to know about users like: Which features are they using? Are they sticking to warp as their daily driver? How much time do they spend in the app?
We do want to make the telemetry opt-in after Warp is out of beta.
Totally understand if you're not comfortable with that though! It will be removed when Warp is out of the beta test.
If we already had a C++ terminal, I don't know that we would've rewritten in Rust. Starting from scratch, we were able to build an app and ship features in a good cadence.
We mention Rust in our marketing, because when talking about our features like blocks, code editor, visual menus, people automatically think "slow".
For benchmarks, we have some preliminary info in this tech blog https://www.warp.dev/blog/how-warp-works.
Email is required only for the closed beta. Warp will be offline-first. All details here: https://www.warp.dev/privacy.
All details here: https://www.warp.dev/privacy
Warp is a fork of Alacritty, their team was very gracious in collaborating and reviewing Warp's initial designs.