> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their terminal is just Alacritty, why would you do all these extra steps instead of just using Alacritty, or Ghostty? The terminal emulator was never their selling point, the AI wrapper was.
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?
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/mistty
check 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!)
> 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.
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.
They see their competitors as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, not ghostty or something.
GitHub is going to go after this too (unsurprisingly). Working "Ace" prototype from Github "lab."
https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
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
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.
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.
And of course harness [1] (I kid, this is my tiny personal project in the same space)
[1] https://harness.mikelyons.org
correct - our business is our agent and orchestrator, not our terminal.
soloterm.com is closed source
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?
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.
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?
~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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their terminal is just Alacritty, why would you do all these extra steps instead of just using Alacritty, or Ghostty? The terminal emulator was never their selling point, the AI wrapper was.
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005
Oh, not OS/2 Warp.
>Oh, not OS/2 Warp.
That would be awesome!
I thought it was Cloudflare’s DNS caching service at first.
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.
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.
What makes you say that Ghostty is less usable than another?
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/mistty
check 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.
no. stop spamming this crap.
apologies, just trying to get the word out. and why is it crap? it seems exactly relevant to what i'm replying to.
well maybe meaningfully participate in the thread before pitching your product
Not convinced making it open source will increase their development speed.
Any chance they could make it less than 850 MB?
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
+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.
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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.
Which when I last used it they forced you to do. I'm assuming this has changed in the several years since?
Correct, we got rid of this requirement a couple of years ago. No login required at all, except for using AI and team features.
> 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.
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!
> OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open-source Warp repository, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models.
Nice...
I never really understood why anyone would use this when you can just fire up claude code from your favorite terminal.
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
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.
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.
Can I use it now without logging in?
They got rid of the login requirement a long time ago: https://www.warp.dev/blog/lifting-login-requirement
Maybe someone will finally add tmux/zellij support…
This is on our public roadmap actually. Would love to work with the community on this.
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.
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?
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47937349 (or vice versa; this one was earlier but has fewer comments)
Open-sourcing the terminal so the agent business has somewhere to land is a pretty honest framing, at least.
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.
^X^E in bash takes your current prompt and moves it to your $EDITOR.
for zsh:
or just type "fc" to edit the previous command.
Other shortcuts to edit prompt in editor:
Alt-e for fish
Ctrl-g for Claude code
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.
Have you tried `C-x e`
Just ask your agent to fork and remove it!
Trying it on Ubuntu 26.04 Desktop Guest w/VirtualBox on Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS Host but getting a black window, nothing else: https://imgbox.com/WaOGe9gu
Great terminal, annoying that everytime it updates I have to go back to the settings to disable new AI features or layout changes.
Was hoping this was about OS/2. Nope, all AI grifts.
now someone please remove the login module
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.
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!)