Why is the terminal input so weird?

https://www.warp.dev/blog/why-is-the-terminal-input-so-weird

by zachlloyd • 4 years ago

110 178 4 years ago

apetresc2• 4 years ago

I can edit the terminal input line with full vim-mode in my shell (zsh). In fact, in normal mode I can even hit 'v' and edit the line in a full vim session to zip around however I want, do completions, etc. It's pretty close to the platonic ideal method of input I could imagine.

ploum4• 4 years ago

I’m also using vim mode in zsh with simply "bindkey -v". I’m interested by your "v" as full vim session shortcut. Do you mind sharing the config?

apetresc2• 4 years ago

It's this section of my .zshrc here:

  # edit long commands
  autoload -U edit-command-line
  bindkey -M vicmd v edit-command-line

That `edit-command-line` autoload script is part of zshcontrib and should be installed by default on any recent zsh distribution. I've never encountered a server I've ssh'ed into that didn't have it. Enjoy :)

puffoflogic2• 4 years ago

The biggest problem with zsh's vim mode is it's actually vi mode. I constantly want "])" and "aw" motions but they're not implemented :(

But, like, this is obviously an entirely different class of problem from TFA, which is a skill issue.

terminal_d2• 4 years ago

This is also available in bash. In emacs input mode (aka the default) one can press C-x C-e to edit the current command in an editor.

`v` is also available in vi input mode.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

As much as I'd like to encourage the rethinking of input methods, any terminal with a "Pricing" page is an instant nope from me. My current terminal is Open Source and while it's not perfect, it's also Free. That matters more to me than mouse input or IDE autosuggestions. If you're going to treat Linux users as a second-class citizen and charge for corporate usage, who are you hoping your target audience will be? Frankly, I don't ever see this replacing iTerm 2 for most Mac developers.

I wish you luck, but your product in it's current state is confusing to me. fish solves most of these issues for me and it runs on all my devices, free. All I'll say is that your competition is stiff.

danny_warp3• 4 years ago

The app is 100% free for any and all individuals. The business plan is to create collaborative and cloud-based features that businesses will be willing to pay for. Please check out our pricing page to learn more.

Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data.

https://www.warp.dev/privacy

KronisLV2• 4 years ago

The business plan is to create collaborative and cloud-based features that businesses will be willing to pay for.

You know what, that is fair. I know a lot of folks take an issue with software that is monetized and many are jumpy about software that might rugpull them and lock certain features behind a paywall some time down the line, or look into more aggressive forms of monetization, but at the same time a lot of software would probably be better made if it had stable financial backing.

I'll probably keep using the most boring terminal setup that's possible just for the sake of not being an early adopter (which is just an excuse because I don't have a Mac), but I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term, so good luck with your endeavor!

Please check out our pricing page to learn more.

Here's the direct link: https://www.warp.dev/pricing

And to save folks a click:

  Individual
  A modern terminal experience for individuals. Download now!
  Free
  Includes
  - Block Creation
  - A.I. Command Search
  - Workflows
  - Modern input text editing
  
  Team
  Advanced collaboration and support for teams. Coming soon.
  Pricing TBD
  Everything in Individual, Plus
  - Shared team configurations
  - Shared team workflows
  - Real-time terminal sharing
  - Shared terminal notebooks

  Enterprise
  Security, compliance, and flexible deployment. Coming soon.
  Pricing TBD
  Everything in Team, plus
  - Advanced security and compliance
  - Advanced team deployment
  - Integration with internal tools

Arnavion3• 4 years ago

>My current terminal is Open Source and while it's not perfect, it's also Free.
The app is 100% free for any and all individuals.

I assume the usage of the upper-case F in "Free" indicated libre, not gratis. Your comment is about the latter.

protomikron• 4 years ago

It has to be open-source (meaning (A)GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.) to be even considered by bigger organizations (especially in Europe). I worked with medium and large organizations and if you're fully open-source you can even get funding [to help distributing open source infrastructure software], but if you do the "shady open-core" model I can't use it at least where I work.

titaniumtown• 4 years ago

of so if it's 100% free, where's the source code?

derefr4• 4 years ago

Could you separate that into "free for businesses if they only want the stuff individuals want; but you can pay for a corporate plan on top to enable extra stuff" — i.e. open-core model?

Maybe with a proprietary binary release that includes the corporate features, and an open-CI/CD binary release that doesn't, ala the Chrome/Chromium split?

coldtea3• 4 years ago

Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data

Doesn't matter, any kind of connection to the mothership or telemetry is a no-no...

You could have corporate edition, with telemetry and everything or a personal one.

But no self-respecting dev is gonna use a terminal calling home for personal use...

qrio23• 4 years ago

How many times do you need to get dunked on before you stop promoting this waste of an app

Brian_K_White3• 4 years ago

There is simply no excuse for this entire concept of this mode of operation for a terminal.

There is no such thing as a good and well-intentioned and safe-trust-us way to do it. The fundamental concept is offensive from the outset.

There is no nice and honest and integrity way to do a fundamentally bad thing.

cosmotic• 4 years ago

Can you explain why free and/or open source is important to you? What sacrifices are you willing to make to maintain free and open source?

JadeNB• 4 years ago

Can you explain why free and/or open source is important to you? What sacrifices are you willing to make to maintain free and open source?

Why should you have to make sacrifices for it? If I were demanding an open-source solution where one didn't exist, that would be one thing, but here I (and presumably also the parent) intend just to keep using an open-source solution that works perfectly well for me.

mhitza• 4 years ago

This terminal could be good for people learning a new commandline tool. Can fish shell show inline the documentation for the command flags during completion?

Tools with better DX (developer experience) are a market that's been tapped into heavily in the past few years, personally I'm not surprised there's a pricing page. Would I pay for something like this? Probably never; I don't feel like I need to optimize my terminal workflow even if I have to reach for the manpage of a command from time to time.

dgunay• 4 years ago

can fish shell show inline docs

Yes, it can. It's not the full docs of course, but tab completion for flags often comes with a one liner about what it does from the docs [1].

[1] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/fish-shell-is-awesome/

zokier3• 4 years ago

Although I don't like terminals, I think the article overstates the problems to significant degree. The fact that text editors running in terminal still manage to have "ide-like" experience (including mouse input!) proves that you can do a lot with terminals. I still think that trying to move beyond terminals is good idea, but it's important to distinguish what is impossible, and what is just ugly/hacky to do.

alokedesai5• 4 years ago

Aloke from the Warp team here--you're totally right that some of these features (syntax highlighting) can be accomplished within the terminal using an editor. In a traditional terminal--you'd have to spend time configuring your shell to get this to work instead of getting these features by default.

Some of these features are near-impossible given the current terminal-shell abstraction, however. For example, a traditional terminal has no concept of command input/output, which means that it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command.

vimda• 4 years ago

it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command

thefuck (https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck#how-it-works) does exactly that...

zokier3• 4 years ago

For example, a traditional terminal has no concept of command input/output, which means that it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command.

Neither does wayland or whatever. Point being that you can treat terminals as dumb character cell grid display with slightly wonky input mechanism and get quite far ignoring/working around all the traditional line-oriented stuff.

ploum4• 4 years ago

People who do not understand things are poised to reinvent them badly.

The post manage to analyse terminal input without having acknowledging readline. So yeah, they have no idea what they are talking about.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-ev...

sureglymop• 4 years ago

They fail to understand that this isn't a problem of the terminal at all... The terminals only job is to display output and to pass through input.

They could write an "interactive shell" with mouse support that implements all those features and it would run in any pre existing terminal. They could even make this work with existing shells and it would work over ssh ect. Nothing against innovation but this is the wrong approach imo.

brenns102• 4 years ago

I also disagree with this article's approach, but it seems pretty disingenuous to say that they don't understand terminal input because they didn't mention readline. After all, this is a blog post on the site for a terminal implementation. They'd have to be unbelievably ignorant to not be aware of the role of readline here.

They're not writing a technical deep dive, they're presenting their vision for a different approach. I think that vision is flawed but I'm not going to grade them on how deep they get into implementation details.

mostlysimilar• 4 years ago

I bit and was curious to try Warp. Downloaded it and it immediately made a request to a Google domain and then forced a sign-up window on me. I clicked their "why do we require an account" FAQ and the answer is "we think there are features that are better with a login."

Absolute no from me, even if their terminal truly is better and innovative.

drcongo3• 4 years ago

I have one question about terminal input that I cannot work out how to work out.

The setup: I'm on a Mac, I use iTerm for my terminal, Fish for my shell, and most often I'm inside a docker container also running Fish and using iPython.

The question: When I Ctrl+W to delete a word in a Fish prompt, what counts as a word is different to what counts as a word in iPython. For instance, Ctrl+w at the end of this string `test.func('param1', 'param2')` produces...

Fish: test.func('param1', 'param2'

iPython: test.func('param1',

Hit Ctrl+w again, and you get...

Fish: test.func('param1', '

iPython: all gone.

This causes me to over delete in iPython many, many times per day. I'm guessing that the rough flow of the delete word signal is iTerm -> Fish -> iPython and that iPython is the thing that's being overzealous?

theblazehen• 4 years ago

I'm guessing that the rough flow of the delete word signal is iTerm -> Fish -> iPython and that iPython is the thing that's being overzealous?

Almost correct. Once you launch iPython, Fish is out of the picture until you quit iPython. However yes iPython does handle Ctrl-W differently from your shell

drcongo3• 4 years ago

Thanks, that helps narrow it down. Next to work out how to make it behave more like fish, as Ctrl+w deleting the entire string `test.func('param1',` seems like madness to me.

fratajcz• 4 years ago

That bothered me too, the default function for Ctrl-W in ipython is unix-word-rubout from python-prompt-toolkit [1], which uses spaces for word boundaries. You can rebind it to backward-kill-word so it uses "not a letter nor a digit" as a word boundary.

Here's a gist with my config (also binds shift-left/right arrow to move to previous space instead of visual select): https://gist.github.com/fratajczak/64e32421a43d3b8194d0409ce...

[1] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit/blob...

drcongo3• 4 years ago

Oh you are a star, thank you so much!

puffoflogic2• 4 years ago

TL;dr.

In zsh (vi mode) I simply press shift-v and I am dropped into my $EDITOR with my current input loaded into a buffer. Of course I rarely need to do this because zsh vi mode covers 99% of my requirements.

So, my tldr for an article I didn't finish reading: someone doesn't know how to use their tools and instead of learning they jumped on the internet to complain, and/or sell me a solution or something, idk.

nsdarren• 4 years ago

What's the point of this comment other than being snarky/attempting to show off? You should reflect on it, because this would be a better place if people like you just didn't bother replying.

Maybe you don't find it valuable because your setup and mad vi skills offer you an alternative (which I'm very sure is just as feature-rich as what is described in the post, which you didn't read). Isn't it obvious how a more accessible solution might be useful to some people?

I for one welcome the efforts of the Warp team to improve terminal UX.

Stranger432• 4 years ago

Interestingly for me this dont work with .zsh out of the box on my mac(i run a deliberately minimalist .zsh) what did you actually do to enable it.

esc -> v does work both with bash and mksh on ubuntu with stock config but not out of the box with zsh on my macbook so i suspect there is something missing im my one line .zshrc file.

Capital V is an actual vim command btw triggering linewise visual mode and that does somewhat seem to actually seem to be the functionality of shift-v by default in zsh.

quesera5• 4 years ago

what did you actually do

Enable vi mode (usually in .zshrc but you can test from the command line):

  set -o vi

Invoke $EDITOR on the current command line:

  ls -la /tmp<Esc><v>

That's Escape, then the lowercase v key (sequentially, not together)

You can use up-arrow to go through command history, reach the one you want to rerun with modifications, then press Esc, v.

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

TO better understand the architecture, how will this work if I want to use the shell in vi mode? IIUC that would not be possible with their setup, right? Warp would need to implement a vi mode, correct?

Is it possible to work with vim in warp?

alokedesai5• 4 years ago

You can launch vim within Warp without any problems, but vi/vim mode for the line editor itself isn't supported in Warp just yet. You're correct that this is because we'd need to implement VI mode ourselves (tracking issue here [1] if you are interested).

This is the tradeoff of building our own editor instead of using the shell's--we can build features that wouldn't be possible in the shell directly but it requires us to build features that already exist in the shell from scratch. So far, this tradeoff has been well-worth it to build what we think is a better experience when using the terminal.

[1] https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/159

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the answer! Still curious, how does vim work in Warp? Do you know what process are currently running and then you stop buffering the chars and you pass them directly to the process in foreground? I didn't read the code, but from the article it seemed that you pass the text to the shell only when pressing enter, I think in vi(m) you want to do it the whole time (?). If I want to insert something I just type `isomething to insert<Esc>`. How does this work in Warp? What happens if I put the process in background and then in foreground again?

danny_warp3• 4 years ago

Warp currently requires a login to enable cloud-based features, like A.I. Command Search and Block Sharing, along with team features on the roadmap.

In case there was any confusion, Warp never sends the contents of terminal commands and outputs to our servers (unless a user explicitly chooses to use the "Block Sharing" feature).

What Warp currently sends in regard to telemetry is listed here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel....

bhauer• 4 years ago

Still too much telemetry in my opinion. Is it possible to opt out, perhaps for a price?

alokedesai5• 4 years ago

We are actively working on making telemetry opt out. We are very sympathetic to concerns about telemetry and data collection and try to be as transparent as possible about what we collect and why. We only collect metadata and never command input or output (you can see the full list of events we track here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel....

We initially required telemetry for all users while in beta so that we could have a better understand of usage patterns and improve the product in its early stages. As we mature, we are able to better extrapolate from a larger sample size without requiring telemetry.

danny_warp3• 4 years ago

Yes! We are working on opt-out for telemetry.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

This post is about why terminal-based input seems stuck in the 80s

It's actually more 60s/70s, when the first terminals, command-line prompts, and shells were built. The reason why it's stuck there is technology has only improved iteratively rather than revolutionarily. The "lets add another layer of abstraction" form of innovation, rather than outside-the-box thinking and reinvention.

The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me. It's not that far removed from punch cards.

maximus-decimus2• 4 years ago

What would you prefer it to be? Audio recording of spoken words? Diagrams like Labview?

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

Ideally? That holographic interface Tony Stark uses. I would settle for a combination of SolidWorks and Visual Basic. SoldWorks to model and visualize the whole thing, pick it apart, run it. Visual Basic to assemble DCOM objects, add simple logic, design an interface. Export/import SolidWorks models and connect them to new models to re-use a whole "machine". Keep a corporate library of "machines", import one to do what you need, fork it and make a new one if it doesn't do what you want.

solarkraft4• 4 years ago

Code is really a tree of stuff. There are are somewhat more powerful editing paradigms for trees than bare text.

The editor I'm imagining looks and works a lot like your typical code view, but has a better understanding of the semantics and makes things there are keyboard shortcuts for more visible. From the top of my head: First-class code folding and commenting and actions primarily on blocks rather than lines. e.g. if you disable ("comment out") an if-statement, either disable the whole block or the wrapping of the inside code with the condition. It's very rare that you want to do something in between and in textually based languages this action is much harder than it needs to be without producing a syntax error.

An important part of GUI design is to avoid the possibility for invalid states, but text-based code editing in its current form produces a lot of them, totally unnecessarily and annoyingly so, in my opinion.

I'm sure that tools with features like this already exist, but they're certainly not popular.

solarkraft4• 4 years ago

The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me.

Agreed. This makes some changes that could be simple unnecessarily hard. Formatting shouldn't even be a thing. FWIW though, having an auto-formatter on save has solved a big chunk of that pain for me.

bombolo4• 4 years ago

I hate autoformatters with a passion. They love to generate 3000 lines diff for a 3 lines change, and then I have to review that.

Also git blame becomes kinda pointless.

astrobe_• 4 years ago

The fact that we still write software by hand using lines of source code in a text editor is pretty ridiculous to me. It's not that far removed from punch cards.

Well, it wasn't hard to beat punch cards in terms of convenience (BTW did you use them once?), but apparently it's very difficult to beat text editors because they've survived for 50+ years despite the fact the mouse was available in the 80s and that people have been saying that sort of thing once in a while for at least 3 decades.

hprotagonist3• 4 years ago

if $EDITOR is properly configured, C-x C-e and hey presto, all is well for complex commands.

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

The fact that such a command exists is an argument that terminal input is indeed bad.

hprotagonist3• 4 years ago

i bother with it very rarely. readline is more than enough.

bombolo4• 4 years ago

readline is used by more than one kind of shell. I'd actually like if ipython used it.

lordleft• 4 years ago

Guys, it doesn't matter if you can edit terminal input in vim. If there's a way to do it in an even more ergonomic / user-friendly way, that's not intrinsically a bad thing. This entire comment thread makes us sound like tech-grognards.

Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.

Arnavion3• 4 years ago

And who decided that Warp's method is more ergonomic / user-friendly with such objective proof that it cannot be argued over?

password12• 4 years ago

Maybe some user research? It can be argued for sure though, everything can be argued over all the time forever.

bee_rider2• 4 years ago

It isn’t a bad thing that somebody is trying to find an alternative to the standard terminal. Good luck to them!

But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow. People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems.

If warp didn’t want it to matter, they could have not brought it up I guess.

coldtea3• 4 years ago

But they decided to write a whole blog post making up problems about peoples’ current workflow.

Not really, those are problems with current workflows.

People are naturally going to point out that they don’t suffer from these problems.

They do, they just work around them or are used to them.

password12• 4 years ago

What's the problem with the pricing? It seems pretty fair to me, free for users and paid for teams basically.

sli2• 4 years ago

Rent-seeking over a terminal emulator is pathological at best.

zokier3• 4 years ago

The problem with the whole article revolves around this paragraph:

In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way.

They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

Yes, regardless of the motivation/the author pimping his product, fundamentally he's right about the maddening nature of command input. It's terrible.

Tab completion is a half-designed solution, and not exactly portable across shells.

Terminals need to stop pretending they are dumb 8" CRTs from the 1970s. Virtually all interactive terminal input is through GUI applications at some point, and if it's not, it's not by choice.

And performing stdin input in scripts for programs that need it? Don't get me started, and don't say "expect" with a straight face. The fact that scripting languages have no provisions after 40-50 years is nuts.

shadeslayer_• 4 years ago

I have been using Warp for the past couple of days and the autosuggestions when I'm working over SSH are pretty nifty, it probably saves me a fair amount of time everyday.

Making a login required is absolutely unnecessary, though.

kevdoran• 4 years ago

Warp looks fantastic! It looks like it's not OSS yet but they're considering it? https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/blob/main/LICENSE

alokedesai5• 4 years ago

Thank you for your kind words! We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client. We want to make sure we get this right, both for our users and for Warp.

Our current best-guess on how we'd do this is a more restrictive license that * allows for verifying security and privacy * allows individuals to build and tweak Warp * prevents another company from starting a commercial enterprise off of it

We'd love more thoughts here though! Feel free to join the discussion at https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400 if you're interested.

bombolo4• 4 years ago

So many words to write "it will never be open source"

chungy• 4 years ago

Emacs's term-mode already solves all of these supposed problems.

I say supposed because they're really not all that big of a deal. OK, bash making it difficult to go backwards to previous lines is... annoying, at least until you press C-x C-e and do what you want anyway.

The use of a mouse for something text-centered is pretty much foreign to me, too.

tmtvl• 4 years ago

And of course for anyone who doesn't like term there's always shell and eshell. And if neither of those will suffice vterm is readily available from MELPA.

gtm1260• 4 years ago

This is awesome

deanmen• 4 years ago

Just use `M-x shell` in emacs.

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

Indeed. What the article describes is Emacs' terminals. Can also use `eshell` (albeit non-POSIX shell) for an even better experience.

thefilmore• 4 years ago

Because you haven't `set -o vi`.

terminal_d2• 4 years ago

A lot of macOS users are suckers for any sort of themed-up applications that can be replicated in their normal setups without any extra software, had they just bothered to RTFM.

wmf2• 4 years ago

You're not wrong but historically a lot of money has been made selling thing to people who don't RTFM. I mean a lot.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

Now for the real trick: if Apple obfuscates the manual and taxes the manual-sellers, then they have a real moneymaker on their hands!

brenns102• 4 years ago

A lot to be said about this - setting aside the privacy/login/pricing stuff, I think the problems and solutions here are vastly overstated.

Yeah, terminal input is odd at times. Doubly so if your main prior experience is entering text into HTML textareas. There's a learning curve, but there's a benefit to tackling that curve. For one, you get readline editing, which is _far_ more powerful than the textarea comparison, and it's customizable. For another, if you need to use your editor to manage a larger command, you have that exact option (see Ctrl-X Ctrl-E in bash/readline). That editor can be vim, or it could be your pimped out VSCode with Copilot. Bash doesn't care.

When you think about it, that's a good 70% of the article's complaints resolved. Trouble navigating through lines of command input? Learn your readline keybindings, or just pop it open in your editor of choice, which also grants you syntax highlighting and whatever else.

The other 30% of what article proposes are pretty decent ideas. Why _isn't_ there a way to hover over a command and see a snippet from its manual page, or to hover over a command-line flag or option, and see the data from the manual page? We have bash-completion which can provide us command-specific completion, what about docs? Many new features can be added to the current architecture. For example, OSC 52 allows terminal apps to send data to the clipboard so long as the terminal emulator supports it. I don't see why similar extensions couldn't enable applications to annotate text with documentation, etc. But that doesn't require the terminal to take over all the line editing: it's just incremental improvement to the current system.

And that's where I think this article and approach are wrong. Maybe it works with the user's shell, but what about Python? GDB? Or the myriad other command line tools I use on a daily basis? As it is now, my terminal is responsible for being the best "terminal emulator" possible. It handles input, draws to my screen, and does it fast. It doesn't need to concern itself with supporting GDB: it is a terminal, and that's that. I'd rather not see these layers get smooshed. Let's focus on improving the current system so that GDB, readline, and the other pieces of the puzzle can incrementally improve the situation.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

What do heavier terminal users think of Warp's philosophy vs. Fig's (which I've found useful as a relatively-light terminal user)? https://fig.io/

brendanfalk• 4 years ago

Founder of Fig here. For context, Fig integrates with your existing terminal and shell.

A few things we've found: 1. Developers are understandably opinionated about their terminal/shell setup. It's a matter of personal productivity. 2. We have noticed a general trend of more terminal use happening in IDE, not a standalone terminal. 3. Most terminal "collaboration" happens asynchronously not synchronously (e.g. shared scripts, CLIs, secrets etc as opposed to live terminal sharing) 4. Most of the collaboration happens at the shell level not the terminal level

Given the above, we made the conscious conscious decision not to build our own terminal.

Happy to elaborate more

jasonjmcghee• 4 years ago

We have noticed a general trend of more terminal use happening in IDE, not a standalone terminal.

This. I barely use terminal outside of Jetbrains, and heard similar things from other devs.

And people who live in vim/emacs (I used to live in vim)- I would be surprised if they'd pickup something that might interfere with their setup, like tmux or special plugins etc. (forcing login stuff aside- assuming that'll be removed at some point)

But maybe warp folks will find a way to play nice with everything, or be simply too useful to not use.

einherjae• 4 years ago

A lot of the complaints here can be solved by knowing that C-x e will drop you from bash into emacs to edit your current line, which then gives you any bells and whistles you’ve configured in emacs. Bonus is that this is generally available and doesn’t require a newfangled set of tools.

niemandhier• 4 years ago

15 years and I never heard of that! Cool featue.

beej71• 4 years ago

At the simplest level, this reminds me of input in C64 BASIC. You could hit RETURN anywhere on on any line and that line would get parsed as if you'd just types it in. You could cursor around, edit previously-entered lines, and so on. It was pretty neat.

kelseyfrog• 4 years ago

Seventy-five to one hundred percent of the author's complaints are addressed by the `fc` command and I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet. Fc opens $EDITOR and upon exiting executes the saved contents. It's great for editing a complex command, but perhaps a tad obscure.

Arnavion3• 4 years ago

Also bash supports Ctrl-X + Ctrl-E to open $EDITOR to edit the current prompt.

quesera5• 4 years ago

In vi mode (i.e. after "set -o vi") in bash or zsh, you can open $EDITOR on the current prompt contents with: Esc, then v

davesmylie• 4 years ago

certainly pretty obscure. I'd been mucking around in shells for 20+ years before I found it. Now it's part of my core set of commands used constantly.

frankjr• 4 years ago

If using iTerm2, you can also press Shift+Cmd+. and it will open a small window/prompt where you can type your command while still interacting with the terminal.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

M-x shell in Emacs also covers most of the complaints.

Galaxy brain: M-x eshell. Use regular Emacs commands from the shell! Define functions in Emacs Lisp, use them as shell commands!

steve1977• 4 years ago

set -o emacs?

aap_• 4 years ago

On plan 9 you can easily edit any text in a window. Seems like a sensible idea.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

$27 million in A round funding for a terminal emulator, folks. And it's written in Rust! For Macs only! All it needs is to detect and respond to the state of your gut bacteria and it'd be truly peak Hackernews.

Good thing they got that funding a few months ago instead of now, when there's far less VC money sloshing around and the Juicero of the command line looks like a far less enticing proposition.

motbus3• 4 years ago

learn vi set -o vi You are free

ed25519FUUU• 4 years ago

What I don’t like is the non-ergonomic way that text scrolls. If three lines appear then the cursor is moved down three lines. I’m always craning my neck to try and find where the input cursor is just to reset it constantly to the “top” of the screen. I’d love it if I could just “glue” it to the bottom or top so output doesn’t change its location constantly.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

You can use a VT100 escape to force the prompt to the bottom by moving the cursor to line 999 col 0:

  \[\033[999;0f\]

otikik• 4 years ago

I am probably not going to try this, but I am glad it exists.

biftek2• 4 years ago

A lot of those complaints are non issues with the default terminal in MacOS.

Option + mouse click moves the cursor to where ever, control+a|e move to the beginning or end of the line, option+arrow jumps words, and the arrows navigate up and down lines just fine... What am I missing?

wmf2• 4 years ago

You're missing the fact that those shortcuts are not discoverable.

quesera5• 4 years ago

An oddball custom Terminal is not discoverable either.

There's no substitute for learning the tools.

If you ever find yourself thinking "weird that there's no way to X", in a shell or editor, you're probably wrong.

biftek2• 4 years ago

And this app is more discoverable? Those shortcuts also work in any text field in MacOS, they aren't proprietary to just a terminal.

shric3• 4 years ago

Almost nothing in a shell is discoverable. Are these discoverable? ls, cat, $?, $@, <, >, >>, $(cmd), ${foo}, $((2+2))

If you can take the time to learn these (if not, why are you using a terminal?), then you can learn some shortcuts without them being "discoverable".

AndriyKunitsyn• 4 years ago

The developers seem to be proud that their shell is “Rust-based”, they write it several times on the main page. But why would I care what a closed-source application is made with? Sorry if it’s blunt, but I just don’t get it.

dack• 4 years ago

I think it's signaling that it's probably modern, fast, and that the authors care about correctness. I think the customer has to have bought-in to the Rust hype for that to work, but since it's a developer tool, I can see how it might attract some.

MrWiffles• 4 years ago

I like the idea of Warp, but I just can't get past the whole "login required to use a terminal" thing. If you force a login to use your closed-source app, beta or not, I'm sorry, but I can't take any commitment to privacy you make seriously whatsoever. No matter how well-intentioned you may be. That well's been poisoned beyond redemption by far worse people than you and there's just no going back.

Now if that login required barrier was removed, I'd at least be willing to give it a try. May not switch, but I'd be willing to give it a chance. But as it stands? Hard pass.

shric3• 4 years ago

It also doesn't support/play nice with[1] tmux, which was a hard deal breaker for me.

[1] https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/501

Brian_K_White3• 4 years ago

"No matter how well-intentioned you may be."

... and they should already know all that, and there is really no believable excuse for not knowing all that already, and I don't for a second believe they don't.

So, really there is not even any doubt to give any benefit of the doubt like "even if you're well intentioned". Passed that already.

qbit42• 4 years ago

As a casual terminal user, I have found Warp to be a nice improvement over standard terminals. Although most of the issues raised in this article can be addressed with various shortcuts, it is nice to not have to remember these when I only pull up the terminal a couple times a week.

golang-gopher3• 4 years ago

Didnt read their article. I have used warp to try it out like an idiot and realized that many of the things people have mentioned here were just things I did not know. Such as ALT + CLICK to bring my carot where I need it and CTRL+X and CTRL+E to use vim to edit more advanced stuff. I always use CTRL+A and CTRL+E on any shell to jump to front or back but I think I have enough information from this hackernews thread to uninstall warp.

nathias• 4 years ago

your problem with terminal is that you don't grok vi

ksherlock• 4 years ago

Let me mention MPW - The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop for classic MacOS. The shell was a text editor, just like the text editor for editing code. When you hit enter (or command-return) it evaluated the current line or selection. Command results were included in the document. (This was strictly a dumb terminal so there were no vt100 escape codes or such to mess up the display)

If you were confused about the command arguments you could run commando (or use … as an argument) to bring up a GUI to select the flags.

The Eddie text editor for BeOS and now MacOS X/XI/XII/XIII has a similar text-editor/shell hybrid.

http://www.el34.com

robterrell• 4 years ago

Also -- BBEdit's "Shell Worksheet" is the MPW Workshop for today. I use it for so much every day. No commando, though, that was so great.

shric3• 4 years ago

Dark pattern #1: Allowing the user to download the app and only then requiring the user to login/signup. This is because you know very well almost nobody will bother to try your terminal if you make it clear you require a login up front. But if they've gone to the trouble of downloading it, dragging it to Applications and running it, then maybe they'll go all the way.

Dark pattern #2: On sign-up, you "agree to our terms of service" but then you have the gall to say, on unsubscribe: "you are currently subscribed to our opt-in messaging. Do you want to remove yourself from opt-in messaging?"

Agreeing to a 17 page terms of service document might be technically "opting in" to messaging (spam), but it sure isn't in spirit. Opting in is when you click on a, previously unchecked, check box that has "I'd like to receive marketing from you".

I'm sure there's plenty more but I uninstalled it already.

quesera5• 4 years ago

I'm going to go straight to "Any terminal or shell which initiates network connections as part of its core execution model, is a huge no from me".

Think about all the things you type into a shell, via a terminal!

green_on_black• 4 years ago

Stable Diffusion hentai plots.

SAI_Peregrinus• 4 years ago

The one exception I'd give is for actual remote terminals (e.g. old-style TTYs), which are inherently making some sort of network requests. SSH (Secure SHell) would be much less useful if it couldn't make network requests as part of its core execution model!

Of course for a local terminal emulator no such requests are necessary.

sli2• 4 years ago

I've heard of warp but knew nothing about it. I thought you were responding to the post, so I was honestly stunned to realize this comment is about warp itself. That's when I noticed the "pricing" link at the top, and... they want companies to pay per month for a terminal emulator..? They must, because they don't put any actual pricing on that page. That, to me, means rent-seeking. For a terminal emulator.

throw109205• 4 years ago

"Rent-seeking" is blatantly false. Warp is a piece of software that the developers are going to update over time. A subscription model is appropriate for goods and services where the buyers receive value over time due to the continued effort/resources of the producers. You might not want to subscribe to a service or pay for a terminal emulator (I sure don't), but don't lie about it.

"Rent seeking [...] is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp

waynecochran2• 4 years ago

I am glad I checked back here before I clicked "Open" when asked

      “Warp.app” is an app downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?

I had a feeling I should check first .. spidey senses were good...

waynecochran2• 4 years ago

I wish I could upvote this 100 times...

itslennysfault• 4 years ago

If you're on Apple iTerm solves most of the problems outlined in this blog post. Option+click moves cursor wherever you want, cmd+click on any url or path to open it. Plus tabs, panes, and a bunch of other neat stuff. Free, open source, no login required, but it'd be cool if you donated to them.

thiht• 4 years ago

Option+click moves cursor wherever you want

So it doesn't solve the problem then. The problem is that terminal input doesn't respect[1] the other conventions we're used to. I've used iTerm for... 5 years now? and had no idea option+click was a thing. I even had to enable a non default keybinding preset (something named like "natural keybindings something") to get the basic option+left/right arrows to move the cursor word by word.

I like iTerm, but a more natural prompt option would sure be appreciated. Warp may not be the solution because of dark patterns but there are no reasons to keep terminal input stuck in the past, they're onto something. Just the ability to consider inputs and outputs as more than just text is great: I can actually copy a whole output without having to select the characters and being careful not to go to far/not far enough, or getting stuck because the output was bigger than my configured scrollback. You could also get true output separation between stderr and stdout.

[1]: yes I know it's technically the other way around, no I don't care

alexruf• 4 years ago

Agree. When I stared reading the article I was exited at first. I generally agree that terminals have a lot of legacy issues from the past and could definitely use some innovation. But I don’t see the point why a terminal should require internet-connection at all. There is absolutely no reason any of the features Warp mentions, couldn’t be implemented in a way to work completely offline. Good luck, but I don’t think any people using terminals as their daily drivers will ever use a product like this.

sbbr• 4 years ago

golem> ed

? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ?

giantdude• 4 years ago

This is 'Hacker News'. Hackers like open source.

VWWHFSfQ• 4 years ago

Let's be honest here, nobody is using this warp terminal as long as it's closed-source and especially not when it has built-in tracking.

To the warp terminal developers:

I'm sure your terminal program is great, but stop posting this content-marketing stuff here. It's not your audience.

qrio23• 4 years ago

Seconded, this product is like an anti-tool.

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

The program may be great, may be bad, but the article is interesting when considered in the topic of terminal input and ergonomics.

origin_path• 4 years ago

"nobody is using this warp terminal as long as it's closed-source"

Lots of developers use Terminal.app, so that clearly isn't a real problem. There's no obvious reason why developers would be willing to buy a closed source IDE, operating system or cloud services but not a terminal emulator. I think people are reacting more to the login requirement than anything else.

golang-gopher3• 4 years ago

whats hilarious, is on their discord, they want this upvoted. I dont think they realize this is bad marketing for this article to be upvoted.

" We're launching our new and improved input editor. We just posted our article on the history of the terminal input, and how we could innovate on it.. We would appreciate if you could show the post some love. "Why is the terminal input so weird?” (navigate to HN and go to the “new” page and vote / leave a comment - we aren’t linking to it here because that can trigger HN’s moderation filters)"

Upvote this!!!

eointierney• 4 years ago

I'm only a relative newbie but emacs

Literate programming in org-mode with babel and magit and () is

Still weird but so much more than a terminal

qrio23• 4 years ago

Bro please stop shilling your stupid terminal replacement. Nobody here wants this. Almost everybody here believes you need to get comfortable working in the STANDARD TERMINAL

Brian_K_White3• 4 years ago

If I were able to stomach this idea at all, I would just replace my terminal with Alexa or Gooogle Assistant not this.

blitz_skull• 4 years ago

Wow. The intent and the idea is so cool. But it's so clearly been touched by VC funding, it almost makes me wonder if this is a (really expensive) gag.

Requires an account? Check. Crashes IMMEDIATELY upon opening? Check. Doesn't support any tool I use (e.g. FZF, key-bindings, etc)? Check. Spammy "iS tHe tErMiNaL oN lIfE sUpPoRt?" blog post? Check.

Do they even know their target market is mildly allergic to all of the above? Yikes.

raydev2• 4 years ago

I wonder how many people upset about Warp here also use VS Code and don't bother turning telemetry off.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

If you're using Warp it's likely you're not taking your privacy seriously anyways. It only supports MacOS, which has telemetry like OCSP that is impossible to disable.

Why is the terminal input so weird?

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