Telemetry is now optional in Warp

https://www.warp.dev/blog/telemetry-now-optional-in-warp

by zachlloyd • 4 years ago

56 69 4 years ago

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

At this time, Warp continues to require login.

I don't want to stoke the flames again, but even VS Code doesn't force you to log-in. Microsoft knows that blocking you from using basic functionality of a free app is a bad user experience. It's good that you're letting people opt-in to a more private experience, but that was hardly the largest problem I could see the last time this was brought up.

From where I'm standing, it looks like you're trying to build a terminal for a pretty small audience; people who own a Mac, but don't want to use iTerm2 or the builtin terminal. That leaves a markedly tiny audience of people who don't use custom shells/incompatible configurations, want to log-in to your application and don't care about any of iTerm2's extra features. It's a bit of a pipe-dream to be honest, and you're not helping yourself by delaying your versions for other platforms.

My intention is not to discourage you, but I think this project needs a little tough love. You might be optimizing for the wrong users.

0xdeadfa65• 4 years ago

Thank you for the very thoughtful comment. The required login I think is enough to scare me off. Which is a shame. It’s the first time I’ve heard of this terminal and the features listed intrigue me enough to want to explore more.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

If you're just looking to pimp your terminal and sand off some of the edges, fish is a great shell replacement to try: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell

A lot of Mac users either don't know they're using zsh by default now or simply don't take advantage of it's scripting language/featureset. For those people, I think fish makes a compelling upgrade. No log-in, just a slightly nicer interactive terminal prompt.

ibejoeb3• 4 years ago

Same.

Warp team: I watched the demo and it looks great, and I downloaded it while going through this thread. I didn't install. I think you're boxing yourselves out.

zachlloyd• 4 years ago

Zach from Warp here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

Re: login, I get the concern and we are exploring product options that let folks preview warp without login.

From a product perspective our goal is to make the terminal cloud-native and have a way of facilitating collaboration, and it's not really possible to build that without user identity. Specifically, login allows us to build cloud-oriented features that make the terminal have a concept of “your stuff” and “your team’s stuff” – for example Block Sharing. This is the same reason other collaborative apps like Figma and Github require login. We do get the concerns though and understand that this is not traditionally how a terminal has functioned and that it will make some users uncomfortable. But on the whole we feel like it's the right way to push the command line experience forward.

Re: configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them. It's hard technically to both innovate on the command-line and maintain complete backwards compatibility, but that is our goal.

Re: Mac only, this is also really just a limitation of eng bandwidth, not a product strategy. We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.

7e2• 4 years ago

One can have identity without centralization; look at PKI. I don’t need to create an account with some website in order to use SSH.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

Thanks for responding, it's good that you're thinking about these problems.

I feel pretty strongly that the terminal ought to be cloud-native

This seems like an oxymoron to me. A terminal is not cloud-native; it does network with the host machine, but a local shell is inherently local. If you've built the cloud part first, then you're building this product in reverse.

You're welcome to explore whatever avenues please you, but I'm not convinced there's much business to be found in cloud-native local shells.

configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them.

No sweat, I don't actually use Warp. This isn't a legitimate concern for me to level, just an example of the infinite treadmill of issues that you need to solve in a closed-source project. If alacritty has a configuration issue, the community fixes it. The way you've structured your project makes it extremely hard for your community to help you here.

We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.

I wish you luck, it's hard work carving out a market segment of your own. I look forward to how your future features stack up against other terminals.

arberx• 4 years ago

You should make users CHOOSE to provide their login/identity by giving them features that improve the experience: e.g, synchronized settings across all terminal sessions.

It should be optional.

jjwiseman• 4 years ago

~99% of people are not going to be interested in the collaboration features, and will not log in. The ~1% who are interested in collaboration will want to first know whether it's a good shell, and ~50% won't log in to try it if they need to do that first. Maybe you don't care about that, but for most products that would be a lethal problem.

picometer• 4 years ago

Hi - I am trying out Warp at a job that defaults to the MacOS ecosystem. But as a Linux user in all other domains I’m glad to hear that you’ll be going cross platform.

I vacillated for a long, long time before registering for an account. The distrust of cloud centralization, especially among developers who would otherwise be impressed by the “built in Rust” marketing, runs deep. Even if your intentions are totally beneficial right now, companies can change hands to people who aren’t aligned with user interest. Users who are developers are frequently in privileged positions at their workplaces, and being compromised at the level of their terminal could be catastrophic.

I’m the type of person who will take on many extra hours of configuration hell because I spurned Docker Desktop for its account requirement. So why did I end up signing up for a Warp account? Because yes, you are actually innovating in an area that desperately needs modernization. You recognize the risks and importance, at least in words, and in actions such as you have taken today. But because of the account requirement, I can’t let myself become locked in to Warp, so I’m not sure how deeply I’ll be able to explore it. And if a competitor arises that can innovate without any potential for lock in, I would jump ship without hesitation.

Thank you for your efforts and please, please, please take all the feedback here with utmost seriousness.

janef0421• 4 years ago

That seems quite similar to allowing developers to SSH into a development server. That option is highly mature, allows users to use a variety of tools, and is not very expensive. How does your product improve on that?

allarm• 4 years ago

collaboration

While it is possible to share a session with tmux, I have never used it for collaboration - in my 20 years in the industry, no such need has arisen. I'm not saying it's not a useful feature, others probably use it, but still, it's hard to see it as a selling point. And yes, mandatory registration discourages me from trying Warp.

7e2• 4 years ago

I agree, this is fruit fly startup which will eventually fail. I can’t believe anyone could think this would be successful. It might do something interesting before it dies, though.

e1g2• 4 years ago

Warp got $23M from folks like the CEOs of Figma, Salesforce, and LinkedIn - they all expected this fruit fly to turn into a unicorn.

berjin• 4 years ago

I agree. I installed warp and uninstalled it as soon as I saw the login screen. I understand this might be good for a business but it brings no value to me and wastes my time.

thecodrr• 4 years ago

I don't think something as fundamental a developer tool as a Terminal makes sense as a proprietary software. That doesn't mean nobody will use it, obviously, but it does mean that you guys are sacrificing a lot of potential users for...I have actually no idea why Warp isn't open source. What's the issue? What are you afraid of?

rubberduckiee2• 4 years ago

Hi, Jess from Warp here.

As a response to your questions, please see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400

As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go.

The community has already been contributing new themes (https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes). And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. See: https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows

titaniumtown• 4 years ago

if it's not fully opensource, most actually technical people won't use it because they know better

ibejoeb3• 4 years ago

A lot of pros use Terminal.app. As far as I know, that's not open source.

smoldesu6• 4 years ago

Would they still use it if it forced you to login online?

juice_bus• 4 years ago

Might draw some people in. I'm of the opinion that my terminal is one of the most important things to keep safe - a closed source terminal is not safe to me.

rubberduckiee2• 4 years ago

Hi - thanks for the comment. We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now. You can see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400

As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go.

Hope you find this helpful!

sshine4• 4 years ago

My current terminals, iTerm2, xfce4-terminal, and Alacritty, don’t have telemetry. What am I missing out on here?

mindslight2• 4 years ago

Seriously, what the actual fuck?

Have enough developers really been conditioned to accept surveillance and pervasive centralized control that someone thought this was a good idea? The fact that the telemetry code even exists is a problem - both in case of a bug that turns it on, and what it says about the proclivities of its developers.

It's utterly inappropriate to refer to this as "the Rust-based terminal", as if the language is its distinguishing feature. More like "the obscene SaaSification of a basic foundational utility". I'd be very much interested in trying a new terminal written in Rust, which could presumably be quicker and have a smaller chance of hiding latent parsing bugs, but this most certainly is not that.

whatshisface• 4 years ago

Scrolling through their website it looks like they are offering an enterprise terminal that's not meant for personal use.

com2kid• 4 years ago

This is a enterprise product, and I can easily see how its adoption can save an organization a lot of time.

Easily share out custom workflows to fetch development keys and login to different services. Onboarding scripts that setup all the terminal things needed for development environment.

"the obscene SaaSification of a basic foundational utility"

Watching their demo vid, it is a very nice terminal that also supports org wide shared scripts, in a unified manner with autocomplete.

Right now I have a text file with commands that I copy and paste daily to get things done. I share bits and pieces of this file with new hires when they onboard to solve various common problems. This shell solves that problem for an entire organization, and it does so in a discoverable way.

Can an org have their own repo of shell scripts? Sure, but then you have to make sure all developers in the org pull the latest when changes happen, and discoverability within "folder full of scripts" isn't the best.

The fact that the telemetry code even exists is a problem - both in case of a bug that turns it on, and what it says about the proclivities of its developers.

Telemetry exists because running user studies is expensive. "What features are people using, what is crashing, where are people getting frustrated".

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

Yup the new script kiddies in town have not had to win wars against large enterprise companies.

Hacker culture is very minimal these days.

Now a quick npm install here and there, using a slow af editor like vs code, using autocomplete which sends your strokes to the sky and using every single cloud service available to be "pragmatic" while sipping soy lattes, have made this whole industry, slow, uncool and boring.

wmf• 4 years ago

Paying the developers.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Business model: Juicero for bash.

sshine4• 4 years ago

I didn't know about Juicero, so for those who don't, this is hilarious:

Juicero was an American company that designed and manufactured the Juicero Press, a fruit and vegetable juicer. The Juicero Press was a Wi-Fi connected juicer that used proprietary, single-serving packets of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables that were sold exclusively by the company by subscription. From 2014 to 2017, the San Francisco-based firm received $120 million in startup venture capital from investors.[1]
The company attracted significant negative media attention when consumers and journalists discovered that its juice packets could be squeezed just as easily by hand as by the company's expensive machine. On September 1, 2017, the company announced that it was suspending sales of the juicer and the packets, repurchasing the juicer from its customers and searching for a buyer for the company and its intellectual property.[2][3] After its collapse, the company was described in the press as a symbol of a dysfunctional Silicon Valley culture. The Guardian wrote that Juicero was an example of "the absurd Silicon Valley startup industry that raises huge sums of money for solutions to non-problems."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero

I laugh, but at the same time, I have a Nespresso machine.

Conclusion: Subscriptions work better if you sell drugs.

tomaskafka• 4 years ago

Being able to set up a quake mode reliably with assigning a key. I never got this working in iTerm2 in a way where the terminal would always pop up and have focus, despite having spent really lot of time in preferences creating profiles etc.

Seriously, what's wrong with you, iTerm2? Feel free to keep your multilevel settings, but expose the important stuff up front as a single click preset to apply.

tksb• 4 years ago

Honestly been a Mac user since I could be defined as a user and I'm still yet to install iTerm over Terminal.app, so I'm curious: who is this for, really?

selectnull• 4 years ago

Honestly, you're in a minority. Most Mac users install and use iTerm2, Alacritty, (my favorite) WezTerm, etc... So obviously, there is a market for terminals. Warp though, definitely not for me.

kitsunesoba• 4 years ago

I tried running iTerm for a while and found its quirks more annoying than its perks are worth. I don’t live in the terminal though… it gets frequent use but it’s not the primary tool that it is for some.

BoorishBears• 4 years ago

I thought I was who it was for: someone who doesn't have a dogmatic view of terminals, I don't care about telemetry or closed source, I'll take my IDE over vi any day, I've used Hyper which is an electron based CLI and that'd make most people shudder, etc.

I mean, it's ok? But I rarely feel like opening it.

Small things don't work for some reason. Like alt-clicking in nano doesn't move the mouse like it does in basic old Terminal.

And the tab completion is really aggravating for me. There's like 3 different actions it takes almost randomly that make zero sense, for example in a window I had open:

- If I type "na" and press tab it shows me a popup window with suggestions.

- If I type "nano", it shows the entire command I wanted to run based on history "nano test.log"... but pressing tab does nothing. You're supposed to know to switch to the right arrow.

- If I type "nano test.lo" there's only one possible completion and now tab does work like the right arrow

- But hold on! If got a selection window in an earlier step, and I decide to type to narrow down the selection so there's only one option left... tab doesn't work like the right arrow and will instead stupidly try to cycle the selection window even though only one option shown is still valid.

It's like the selection window ignores everything you typed after it opened, which plain old zsh solved, but they somehow unsolved

Have also had it break for me once and I'm not clear on how to reproduce, it involved SSH but somehow the order of "blocks" for commands went out of whack, so there was a block stuck underneath the "bottom" where I'm supposed to type, and it'd steal input from the prompt.

And there's this really minor but annoying thing where if you try and select some text then right click to copy, the entire command block gets highlighted, even though in order to select a piece of text you had to intentionally click twice to unhighlight the command block.

Having little moments like that just introduce enough aggravation that I don't want to bother.

To me iTerm is a happy middle ground. It's barely any different from Terminal, but on the few occasions where it adds some value (like being able to view a high quality image preview in your terminal, or share commands between SSH sessions) its completely unintrusive, the opposite of what Warp seems to be aiming for.

Also, semi-off topic, but after using it I get seriously stressed out about the fact that companies like this are hiring people who need to make a living.

There's no reality in which this actually becomes something to justify taking in tens of millions of dollars in funding, which are probably expecting 100s of millions in returns. Clearly their plan is that some companies will end up having this be the go-to tool for developers, but the most "hardcore" developers are the ones who would be most repulsed by this.

The more casual developers work at places that see developers as a cost center and will never spend real money on a terminal when they're barely ok with paying for a Keurig.

I imagine that the founder and maybe the core team know they can get cushy jobs with their technical skills and resumes so it doesn't bother them, but the problem is these things tend to scale up before falling apart.

Eventually they start to pull in people who don't have those kinds of luxuries just to function. People who didn't go to some top school or have a string of in-demand logos on their resume might not have what it takes to weather this all falling apart like they do.

Like yes, startups are inherently very risky, but again, the further away from the core team you get, the higher the headcount they have to show before hiring people, the longer they've been around, they'll start to attract people who can't reasonably be expected to think they're being hired onto the Titanic as it leaves port.

pram• 4 years ago

I think Terminal.app is extremely good personally, I’ve been using it for 20 years at this point. The only thing that seems consistently faster is Alacritty.

I tried Warp and I wasn’t impressed at how it outputs text. I had some issues copying and pasting because it formats some things weird.

ZoomZoomZoom• 4 years ago

Now you can ask our chef to not spit in your soup! Future plans: soup with 50% less petroleum!

blackthornyugen• 4 years ago

Very happy to see that there is the ability to opt out of telemetry; however, I can't recommend this to anyone while it requires logging in.

chimen• 4 years ago

Is this your selling point? "Rust based"? That's how people in the "Rust world" advertise their products? That's how people refer to their work nowadays? Rust-based, there lies the value?

killingtime74• 4 years ago

I've been using this for a while and I like I can use my mouse to move the cursor and make selections. Is there an equivalent open source option?

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

Awesome move!

ibejoeb3• 4 years ago

I stopped using iTerm2 because it was pretty hard on the battery. Any data on how Warp is in the energy department?

slig2• 4 years ago

Just bought all the components and I'm moving from macOS to a PC. What's the best terminal emulator for Windows these days?

rekoil2• 4 years ago

WSL2 in Windows Terminal I guess.

slig2• 4 years ago

Thanks!

blopker• 4 years ago

There's a lot of negativity in this thread and being the good contrarian I am, I wanted to see what's so bad about this. I went ahead and installed it. Sure, the login part is annoying, especially since I don't see any killer features that really need it yet. However, there are some great ideas in this.

The first thing I noticed is that it is fast. Noticeably faster than iTerm, which I use daily. Printing a large file doesn't stutter at all. As a test I printed (cat) a large video file. Warp finished in half a second, where I had to kill iTerm because I got bored watching all the garbled text fly by. Now, I'm not often printing video files to my terminal, but boy is it annoying when I do something dumb like that on accident. Sometimes iTerm just stops responding.

Other than that, there's some great feature innovations, like keeping the prompt visible even when scrolling or treating every command as a block. The block idea is nice because I can pin (bookmark, I guess) the output, so I can easily refer to it later instead of constantly scrolling around to find it. Maybe other terminals do this, but I've never seen it.

Also, aside from turning off telemetry, I didn't have to do any configuration to get it in a usable state. With iTerm I spend at least 30 minutes poking around the hundreds (thousands?) of settings to set everything up.

Now, there are some features than need a bit of work, like the AI stuff is pretty basic. It can't really do complex commands, like anything involving pipes or xargs. Tab completion is a bit clunky, like it will try and cd me into a text file.

Anyway, it's clear to me now that I've become complacent with iTerm and there's still a lot of innovation on the table for terminals. I think a new generation of developers that care less about open source and privacy will like this. However, I'm mostly happy that there seems to be real innovation here. Maybe we'll see some of the best ideas make their way into other products?

gbourne• 4 years ago

I've been using Warp since it was announced on HN, and it is great. May favorite terminal yet. Fast, features such as autocomplete so much better than iTerm.

There is a lot of negative thoughts on this thread - would love to hear from the people who actually have tried out Warp and not those waxing on about the indignity of being asked to login to a free product.

Macha• 4 years ago

Note that it's not hard to be faster than iTerm2: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Warp is built on alacritty which is firmly middle of the road in that chart.

user3939382• 4 years ago

Maybe people do things with their terminal I don’t, but iTerm2 which is apparently slower than others is so fast at responding to my input that I can’t perceive the delay. Then it has 150 more features than I even use. I feel no need at all to replace it.

_andrei_• 4 years ago

I see no benefits in using Warp over a regular (and more supported) GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. It's just "prettier" out of the box, and it seems to market quite a bit to people that either don't know how to configure their shells, or don't know what they're doing.

  - If you want fuzzy command, history, file / contents search, use fzf [0] (you should probably be using fzf and ripgrep [1] anyway if you work daily in your terminal).
  - If you want sessions, use a multiplexer like tmux [2] or zellij [3].
  - If you need to have your own "cheatsheets" use navi [4]. If you want to sync them with your team, use whatever sync solution you like.
  - If you think you need a text editor in your shell's command line, reconsider. If you *really*  want to edit and re-execute the last command in your editor of choice, use something like "fc $!" [5] or create your own shell solution for it.
  - If you want a sexy prompt use starship [6].
  - If you want terminal sharing use tty-share [7].
  - If you want to ask GPT for help, don't do it in your terminal. Open up ChatGPT (or whatever future UI will exist), ask your question, and check that there's nothing harmful in what your about to execute. Sometimes friction is good.

For each of these ^ pieces of software there are tens and hundreds of alternatives.

If you want a terminal that's pretty out-of-the-box, where things are "clickable", you don't have the time or interest to invest your energy in learning tools that could massively boost your productivity for years to come, and you don't care about designing your own workflow and being able swap parts of it at any point, without depending on any single "app", and if you don't mind "logging into your terminal" (what the actual fuck, excuse the language) or the terminal adding its own SSH wrapper and doing things you don't know to the hosts you connect, then maybe Warp is OK for you. But then again, maybe you're not going in the right direction.

There are so many more awesome ways you could improve your shell experience than making things clicky. I don't understand what the market is for Warp, is it for wanna-be professionals that can't be bothered to become professionals? I completely fail to see how this could succeed as a paid product, especially with a subscription model.

  [0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  [1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  [2] https://github.com/tmux/tmux
  [3] https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij
  [4] https://github.com/denisidoro/navi
  [5] https://shapeshed.com/unix-fc
  [6] https://starship.rs/
  [7] https://github.com/elisescu/tty-share

Telemetry is now optional in Warp

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