▲> Open-sourcing is fundamentally coming from our desire to build a successful business. We are competing with other highly funded, closed-source competitors, and we think opening and providing the resources for the community to improve Warp is a smart way for us to accelerate product development. Yes, we are a VC funded startup, but we do not have the resources to compete on price or massively subsidize usage – we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.
Appreciate the candid take. Warp is great.
Who are their highly funded closed-source competitors they claim Warp cannot beat on price?
Warp is the only closed source terminal product I know of. Most other popular terminal emulators are open source already.
I feel like their funding is drying up and this is their last ditch effort to have the "community" build their product for them.
They claim agents will run the show, with inputs from community in the form of ideas/specs/direction. I wonder how long that will be sustainable for given the subsidized model prices are collapsing as we speak.
Is this an attempt to pivot to something else while the "community" keeps their first product alive? Maybe I'm being too cynical here, but I don't see this as an act of good faith, especially given their roots in VC funding.
They see their competitors as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, not ghostty or something.
reply▲reply▲The problem description is spot on, but the solution isn't. No-one is going to sit in that chat and "collaborate" on each other's stuff in real time all day. You may as well just all sit around a screen.
I welcome the experimentation, there will definitely be something new, but this ain't it. New primitives are needed, at a higher level of conceptualization, not merely a fancy new interface.
I swear I've heard that exact phrase repeated over and over by many people
reply▲Many people believe it’s true.
My hobby projects have 100x more tests than they used to, because LLMs are great at writing tests. And my subjective experience is that the net quality has increased as a result.
YMMV, but it’s certainly a common belief, and for me at least a lived experience.
A lot of people believe a lot of things are true. Plenty of things that are provably false too. People will have strong convictions. People will drink deadly Koolaid because they believe in things so much.
I don't care what people believe, I care about what is. What is measurable. What is factual. I need evidence for a belief to be meaningful. I need strong evidence for a belief to be strong. Not just evidence in favor, but evidence that alternative explanations are unlikely.
Currently I see evidence that things are moving fast. But I am unable to distinguish if this is actually because of AI or because increased efforts and motivation. Most importantly, speed isn't the same thing as velocity.
What I do not see evidence for is increasing quality. In fact, I see strong evidence to the contrary. I see strong evidence that quality is declining even quicker than it was before. I'm not convinced AI is that cause of this, but there's more than adequate evidence for me to believe it is a (significant) catalyst.
Right now you could throw a stone in a random direction and there's a good chance that whatever it lands on will be decreasing in quality. It is even easy to gesture broadly at Microsoft, but they aren't the only big tech disappointing their users.
I hear a lot of claims. I don't see a lot of evidence.
the presenter is pretty sane, but the product is hardly a product at the current scenario. pretty much codemirror 6 collaborative editing demo + vm running claude code, with a web GUI. will fall apart with large code bases just like vscode, github codespaces and co. do, and expensive for llms to run against. Would be nice to see the foundational problems being worked on instead of regurgiting what everybody is doing.
reply▲That's immediately addressed in the talk. It's a GH Labs experiment.
reply▲correct - our business is our agent and orchestrator, not our terminal.
reply▲SOLAR_FIELDS2 days ago
[-] I'm not too familiar with Warp so can someone help clarify for me:
Is Warp a terminal? Or an agent harness? Or both?
Warp as a terminal to me seems less interesting than having a well built agent harness like OpenCode that can effectively use many different models. If it's both, is there any advantage to having them be the same thing? Like, is there any way your harness can be smarter if it is also tightly integrated in your terminal? Or is it just something that Warp happens to do both of?
It's a terminal. It was a terminal before they pivoted to AI (I don't blame them, with their funding rounds I don't see them having particularly free reins) Before this, it was all about collaborative (CRDT) features. I have no idea why you'd want a terminal that is also an agent harness, but I appreciate them making it open source none the less.
reply▲> Who are their highly funded closed-source competitors they claim Warp cannot beat on price?
Agentic AI, broadly speaking. Including CLI agents and IDEs.
soloterm.com is closed source
reply▲> Appreciate the candid take. Warp is great.
Sorry but I can't read this statement in a tone is not absolutely dry sarcasm.
Warp is a masterclass in how to have a great product statement, very nice UI and completely ruin it with greed, closed-source, and by not listening to your customers.
I don't know who at Warp got replaced and wants to "fix" things, but they have a lot to overcome. At this point, it might not even matter-- another product written from scratch might have better success.
Literally installed and used Warp for the first time ever, asked the agent "/agent can you open a tab in the terminal for each build folder" and my account got disabled for AI immediately due to a "Terms of Service violation".
Very poor first time user experience.
I was confused by the name. For a second I got excited that OS/2 Warp was being open sourced. That os was ahead of its time. And I don't just say that because my dad was called "Mr. OS/2" because he was very good at selling it to clients of IBM
reply▲Hey, it's Sathvik from the Warp team. So sorry to hear this! Do you mind reaching out to appeals@warp.dev? We'll help you get this sorted out.
reply▲Can you confirm that Warp is NOT initiating any connection to any service whatsoever unless explicitly enabled in Settings?
Warp had an account requirement in the beginning which spoke volumes about the misalignment of values. Now the terminal is not called a terminal, it is "the agentic development environment" (whatever that means) which also lowkey implies that it might have some kind of online features. But at the same time I understand that it is now an absolute requirement to mention AI on any web page for any product.
Does it call home?
> Does it call home?
Absolutely, in heaps. The very moment you start Warp, it sends 5 HTTP requests, (1 version check, 1 LLM model list, 3 telemetry events). The former two go to app.warp.dev, the latter 3 go to warpianwzlfqdq.dataplane.rudderstack.com and include a persistent UUID, your operating system and version, Warp version, and the tracked event name and its properties.
All of this happens before you even see the window. After you're done clicking 'No' to all the SaaS nags, you can turn off telemetry in the settings, but for some reason it gets turned back on when you restart the terminal.
While the terminal is running, it calls home whenever you trip one of the events listed in this 7000-line long file: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/blob/d0f045c01bacbd845a63.... Besides all the hosts listed earlier, it also makes requests to o540343.ingest.sentry.io.
All in all, a privacy nightmare.
This is incredible, really. I am impressed. Thank you for the explanation.
reply▲See @alokedesai himself confirming this in an answer below.
reply▲For transparency, the issue with telemetry turning back on after an app restart was a very bad bug introduced yesterday that only affected new users; this is P0 for us to fix and we’ll have a new release out in the next few hours with a fix. The PR is here
https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/pull/9438/ if you want to follow along.
To add more color to some of your points in the post above:
* We give users the option to disable telemetry before sending any back to our servers.
* We use Sentry for crash reporting, this can be disabled.
* Yes, we record telemetry with the option to disable. The events are in our source code (as you point out) and also on our website.
* We have a network log in app that you can open and view _any_ request we make, including requests to send telemetry.
* If you compile the OSS build it has no telemetry or crash reporting.
Our motivation with open sourcing is to build more trust with our community, not less. Happy to discuss more and, of course, the codebase is available to audit.
> build more trust
At this point I'm not sure we share the same understanding of what constitutes trust.
To me any connection initiated by a terminal app itself is terminal (pun intended) for its reputation, leave alone hideous things like online login or telemetry.
But that's just me: I'm old fashioned. And I'm sure plenty of people will continue to enjoy Warp.
I hope someone will create a lightweight version without AI and code editing stuff. The terminal experience is the best, but I don't have any use for the agentic stuff while having claude code, opencode, codex and plenty other options.
reply▲It's good feedback. We've tried to make it so there is a single "turn off all the AI stuff" button (and you can opt into plain old terminal during onboarding as well, with no login, etc). Curious if this does the trick?
reply▲~And where is it? I am a long time signed in user, so no onboarding for me.~ How would you make money from users like me?
edit: nevermind, it was quite discoverable...
the rpm available for download (warp-terminal-0:v0.2026.04.27.15.32.stable_03-1) doesn't seem to work without login. after going through all the setup i got stuck at a prompt asking me to log in with no option to skip it.
reply▲Hey Zach - one thing I'm really missing is the ability for this to be toggled on/off per device - whilst I love it on my personal devices and want to use AI there, I also want to be able to use and log into warp at work without having to toggle it off, as I can't use AI there.
reply▲I originally got into Warp because they made a terminal where my normal text input keyboard shortcuts work.
As they've been scrambling to find a way to monetize and riding the AI train, it feels more bloated than ever and the constant pushing for me to use "agents" and whatnot really put my off using it. Plus with all the privacy concerns I can't with good conscience use it on my work machine.
So yes, I'd like a non-tracking, no-AI version of Warp too.
100,000% I loved it when it was JUST good at terminal rendering. Ghostty alternative. Not a crazy bloatware AI play.
reply▲This is a pretty good used case for vibecoding. “Claude, take this project and rip out all the obnoxious monetization and vendor lock in.” It just might do the trick. I’ve been to get rid of a fair bit of paid software by just cloning the parts I want with little more than a high-level description.
I don’t think the approach of open source as a substitute for a quality program is going to last.
can you share more about what makes it so great. this is the first i am hearing about it , so i am curious.
i currently use tmux and ghostty for my workflow
The way it goes beyond just emulating terminal. Multiline input that works like text editor, separated input and output blocks, wrapped shells that keeps the same ux with local and remote shells, the polish.
reply▲You could probably few-shot this yourself by pointing at the repo. I'm 95% sure it can be done in a day end-to-end.
reply▲Sad that they didn't open source the commit history. I would have loved to branch off of like 5 years ago when Warp was just a terminal, rip out all the AI and cloud shit, and turn it into just a nice terminal with some neat features.
reply▲As someone who released the source of an app that was always expected to be public I appreciate that it would be interesting but I'm not surprised. If the code isn't being regularly published there is just less incentive to be sure that every commit is "public ready". So when releasing I wanted to do a full review of current code (and especially comments and docs). This was tedious enough and even though we didn't find anything major and only a handful of things that should be cleaned I absolutely wouldn't want to do this for the full history.
Could we have just released it? Absolutely. But I think everyone who contributed felt better knowing that what was released had one final "ready for public" review. Then our regular review process handled that going forward.
Ironically a task that an AI agent would have no problem doing.
reply▲Yeah, it would have been a great job for an LLM. Although if you find something in the history you then need to make the annoying choice of history rewriting or just leaving it in.
reply▲reply▲> The terminal emulator was never their selling point, the AI wrapper was.
Considering it came out in 2020 - a few years before the LLM hype train left the station, and when I started using it there was no AI integration, this doesn't seem accurate.
I liked using it because of the text input.
Thanks for the correction, I’ve only had it on my radar since they became the AI Terminal.
reply▲This is just incorrect. Warp predates the AI craze, and one of its original selling points was reimagining how the terminal could work: it could be more native, and act like a REPL/chat, instead of a grid of characters.
reply▲They have also innovated by requiring login (into a console!!) which is a very bold move. Today they have heaps of telemetry, so a privacy nightmare.
This is a terminal that is not designed for users.
You've just described 99% of modern non-FOSS software. The only thing actually novel is that it's a terminal in this case.
> not designed for users
It's not designed for you.
My main driver has been Ghostty but I've been looking at Warp for a while. Warp seems like a full on IDE (~ADE) though, as opposed to a minimalistic terminal. Can anyone add some thoughts? Are these 2 very different?
tangential: I've seen Mitchel tweet that people in SF have ran up to him showing him how they fully riced their Ghostty setup. How many people here have done this and how easy/manageable is it? e.g. just forking the repo and implementing whatever Warp feature I like?
Warp founder here. We actually are chatting with Mitchell about integrating Ghostty so it's the terminal grid renderer within Warp.
reply▲Warp failed to launch. Perhaps too much AI pushed onto the users in the early days that failed to show its charm.
Ghostty remains incredible stable and usable and fast compared to competition.
Warp is equally stable, almost as fast, while being more usable than Ghostty.
reply▲What makes you say that Ghostty is less usable than another?
reply▲Well, for starters, I get obscure errors if I get something wrong editing the Ghostty config file.
I think there's a reason people are very interested in libghostty. It's a fully-featured library to build off of, but Ghostty proper still lacks a lot of polish.
libghostty makes it pretty easy to do. I spent about two weeks setting something up until it was advanced enough to daily drive. I wanted to have a modal workflow similar to vim or tmux copy mode, but without having the overhead of using tmux... that's probably a lot more complicated than "I want Ghostty but with $X tweak". You can poke around in the repo to get a feel for what's involved if you want:
https://github.com/milch/misttycheck out yaw terminal for a terminal first experience that also treats ai cli as a first class citizen. and if you're on windows is very dialed into git bash.
reply▲no. stop spamming this crap.
reply▲apologies, just trying to get the word out. and why is it crap? it seems exactly relevant to what i'm replying to.
reply▲well maybe meaningfully participate in the thread before pitching your product
reply▲Glad to see such a move from the Wrap team.
It's been my go-to terminal emulator for a few years due to :
- Being able to drop in a brand new laptop and have almost all I need out of warp and a barebones ZSH configuration. I used to spend a lot of time on getting ZSH both fast and feature-rich, and it's brittle. Warp by default provides good auto-complete etc.
- Fast rendering and sane graphical defaults. I don't need to do much more than put my font of choice.
- QoL features regarding file rendering etc.
I've never used the agentic parts of it, when I needed CLI my company paid for Claude and I get most of my stuff done with what I get out of my Zed subscription.
But I'd be more inclined to do so now.
Interestingly i had been building a terminal in rust and libghostty(with Linux and windows supported too) with built-in agent that understands terminal, too.
And the motivation was warp is doing a little bit more than a terminal.
https://con.nowledge.co
Glad to see now warp is open-sourced
Keep working on it. Warp has to overcome much of it's historical bad decisions. They announce becoming open-source, but they don't have trust yet.
reply▲+1 use warp every day. Needs some UX improvement around the agent stuff and file editor but I see it as alpha/beta software so I'm not too critical.
reply▲Oh, not OS/2 Warp.
reply▲>Oh, not OS/2 Warp.
That would be awesome!
I thought it was Cloudflare’s DNS caching service at first.
reply▲Any chance they could make it less than 850 MB?
reply▲I'm trying to understand what Warp is. I watched the 2.0 announcement, and it looks like it's an agentic editor that calls itself a "terminal" for some reason. I don't think the video shows a single terminal command being executed in a product called "Warp Terminal."
reply▲I really like Warp. It's a lot nicer to be able to visualize what I'm doing in the terminal. Some people don't like the AI features, but they only activate if you log in.
reply▲Which when I last used it they forced you to do. I'm assuming this has changed in the several years since?
reply▲Correct, we got rid of this requirement a couple of years ago. No login required at all, except for using AI and team features.
reply▲> we got rid of this requirement a couple of years ago.
Do you regret having this requirement in the first place?
Personal feedback: I live in a terminal 24x7 for the last 30+ years and once Warp came out I wanted to try it out immediately, but I was impressed by the requirement. So I never had a chance to try it out.
theappsecguy2 days ago
[-] Maybe someone will finally add tmux/zellij support…
reply▲This is on our public roadmap actually. Would love to work with the community on this.
reply▲I never really understood why anyone would use this when you can just fire up claude code from your favorite terminal.
reply▲It's not like this is where they started: Warp dates back to 2020 and probably had an initial strategy of "just build a really nice, fast terminal emulator and figure out the money later", which honestly isn't the worst idea in the world.
The AI integration only came years later, and they probably figured maybe they could compete in the space with Cursor, repl.it, etc. And then Claude Code came and just devoured everything, while Google bought Windsurf, Microsoft pushes Copilot, and OpenAI has Codex (while at the same time kitty and ghostty also built really nice, fast terminal emulators)
I agree I don't think they have any real shot and I certainly wouldn't recommend investing in their next round, but it's not like this was their plan all along, they went where the winds were blowing.
I used it because of the integrated voice to text (since apple's built in dictation is terrible) but stopped using it when i replaced it with superwhisper
reply▲Recently I've started to use
https://superset.sh as alternative to Warp. After the volks @mastra mentioned it. Very cool open source project.
I'm actually pretty proud of the final setup I've created with it.
Each time I start to implement a new ticket, superset will pull the ticket from linear, create a worktree/workspace, reserve ports, start the servers, start a browser and start Claude with the ticket as instructions.
The cool thing with this setup is, I can have like 10x the same servers running on different ports/worktrees.
Each time an agent is done, I switch to the workspace, look at the browser and can immediately test things.
It's like having 10 virtual desktops. Wonderful!
> Why now
I am skeptical that they decided human input is their bottleneck just as the cost per token spiked from some AI providers. I see this as a way to reduce their compute spend (offloaded to the community), but I doubt they are going to give up any creative control, so their employee review bottleneck probably won’t change.
Can I use it now without logging in?
reply▲Not convinced making it open source will increase their development speed.
reply▲I've been trying to figure out what the long term play is here - is it an angling for a frontier lab acquisition? Or does open-sourcing put Warp in the same sort of category as OpenCode - where charging for LLM tokens becomes the main commercial driver?
reply▲As someone who was interested in warp in the early days (new rust terminal!), but who would never use a closed source terminal, this feels like a pyrrhic victory, since I don’t care at all about the AI accoutrements.
reply▲I hope someone will make a version of Warp where I can bring in Openrouter key for free. Or any other provider, for that matter. I'd pay $5/10/month just to be able to use it.
reply▲Great terminal, annoying that everytime it updates I have to go back to the settings to disable new AI features or layout changes.
reply▲holotherapper2 days ago
[-] Open-sourcing the terminal so the agent business has somewhere to land is a pretty honest framing, at least.
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Code 99
Holy shit this made my day. Warp’s convenience shell wrapping is amazing. It’s the only terminal where I can actually edit a long command in place rather than copy pasting into an editor and doing so there.
Now I’m more or less assured I can retain this convenience without being forced into more AI crap.
reply▲^X^E in bash takes your current prompt and moves it to your $EDITOR.
for zsh:
autoload edit-command-line
zle -N edit-command-line
bindkey '^X^E' edit-command-line
Right, but if all terminals behaved like modern pieces of software, we would take functionality like Warp's as given, instead of suggesting workarounds.
What you describe sorta works, but you lose things like file/dir-based autocomplete, since your editor doesn't know about your shell session.
or just type "fc" to edit the previous command.
reply▲Or v for those using bash's vi mode
reply▲Other shortcuts to edit prompt in editor:
Alt-e for fish
Ctrl-g for Claude code
Just ask your agent to fork and remove it!
reply▲Was hoping this was about OS/2. Nope, all AI grifts.
reply▲> OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open-source Warp repository, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models.
Nice...
Well, very nice, will need to give it a try afer I check the requirements.
I almost went to Warp from DOS but Linux arrived first.
EDIT: well looks like this is not OS/2 Warp. I wish the title would have noted this is somekind of app instead of just saying "warp".
It's ok to recycle names once every thirty years :) Warp hasn't had a release in decades.
reply▲Well, it hasn't under the OS/2 name, but as the licensed successor ArcOS, its last release was literally this year. (Of course, that's also why OS/2 is pretty unlikely to be open-sourced any time soon: it's actually still being developed and sold!)
reply▲I predicted with 100% certainty that this company would fail at launch. What I failed to predict was how long it would take. I’m not bragging, everyone should see it coming.
reply▲For those people above a certain age, no, this is not OS/2 Warp.
All six users will be disappointed.
Recently cal.com became closed source fearing AI slop PRs! Isnt wasp scared of such a thing?
reply▲opens link...... it's not about OS/2 3 or 4, but some AI thing, and apparently feels no need to disambiguate or even acknowledge the prior usage of its name
... closes tab
reply▲Well, "warp" is a generic word, the projects are unrelated, OS/2 was never that popular, and it was last released 30 years ago.
I personally feel like there's no need for acknowledgement at this point, but that's just me.
To be fair it's been quite a while now since OS/2 was relevant. It never even occurred to me that it might be connected to that mainstream news story.
reply▲This is HN, seeing older tech stuff here wouldnt be surprising at all
reply▲now someone please remove the login module
reply