Warp is now open-source

by doppp • 3 months ago

237 173 3 months ago

ahmadyan4• 3 months ago

Congrats on open-sourcing warp.

May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?

Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

AirMax98• 3 months ago

OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open-source Warp repository.

Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.

pzo2• 3 months ago

Wondering if additionally OpenAI afraid of Cursor being bought by xAI

dgellow• 3 months ago

Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product

tnkuehne• 3 months ago

Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.

ahmadyan4• 3 months ago

this make sense, thanks

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

Warp founder here. Great question.

I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)

But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.

The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.

Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.

ahmadyan4• 3 months ago

make sense, thank you for your response.

Muhammad5235• 3 months ago

They made a blog post about it [0]. I haven't read it yet, but it might answer your question.

[0] https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source

Esophagus42• 3 months ago

I really like Warp.

I’ll admit the UI has changed a lot recently and I find it more intimidating than when I was using it a year ago, so I mostly use Ghostty now.

pzo2• 3 months ago

same with me, it looks more or less too flat with just maybe 2 main colors and just one font variant, feels like big pile of flat text - hard to see what is header what is footer and sometimes what is button.

I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.

alokedesai4• 3 months ago

Hey, Aloke from Warp here.

We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!

Esophagus42• 3 months ago

Hey Aloke!

Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try and see how it goes.

james2doyle2• 3 months ago

I noticed that too. I’ve been using cmux (based on ghostty, has a more basic UI) and have been happy with it: https://cmux.com/

shimman9• 3 months ago

Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.

Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.

They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.

lucidia3• 3 months ago

if you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million

shimman9• 3 months ago

This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.

It's disgusting behavior.

blitzar• 3 months ago

Toss a coin to your Witcher

devin2• 3 months ago

I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?

peschu• 3 months ago

talk is cheap ...

pear01• 3 months ago

Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support

So are you going to donate to them or not?

koolala• 3 months ago

Doesn't that make not supporting them even worse???

nixpulvis5• 3 months ago

I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.

I have absolutely no hard feelings.

Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.

Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.

elzbardico• 3 months ago

Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.

But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?

shimman9• 3 months ago

Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.

bigyabai• 3 months ago

Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.

Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.

Aeroi2• 3 months ago

genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?

shimman9• 3 months ago

Well do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?

dpe822• 3 months ago

I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.

theturtletalks2• 3 months ago

So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.

nixpulvis5• 3 months ago

To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.

It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.

lagniappe• 3 months ago

If you expect payment then put that in the license. Yes it's a dick move, but those are the terms the original developer chose.

nixpulvis5• 3 months ago

Alacritty doesn't accept donations.

ramon156• 3 months ago

This is such an HN take. "If you want money you have to force people into it"

What a shithole society is

argc• 3 months ago

Yeah I don't understand why people are acting so hurt by this. If you want to be paid for something, don't make it open source. If you want to force users to keep the source open, make it GPL/AGPL/whatever. If you want to prevent commercial use, use an appropriate license. This company didn't do any wrong from my limited knowledge of this thread.

Sure it would be great for them to give back, and they absolutely should, but I don't see why they deserve any hate (unless they hide what they did or engage in otherwise shady practices, but based on the comments I'm not seeing that).

Muhammad5235• 3 months ago

This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3

(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)

shimman9• 3 months ago

I didn't suspect you were a bot; I'm a fan of the semicolon and ()'s myself.

dcreater• 3 months ago

And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)

ferfumarma• 3 months ago

This is a shortcoming with permissive licenses (such as MIT).

If you want to prevent your own project from being taken from you, then AGPL3 is your best option.

If you don't want to stifle adoption then you can always offer bespoke licenses to companies who need them (at a cost to them, and a profit to you).

Until hackers understand the risk of permissive licenses, this will continue to happen.

ajam1507• 3 months ago

Seems silly to bash a company for using open source exactly in accordance with the license. If they expected to be compensated, they picked the wrong licensing terms.

meowface4• 3 months ago

The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.

(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)

shimman9• 3 months ago

You don't understand why tech workers are suddenly visibly, even violently, angry at an industry they helped usher into power whose leadership hold deeply anti-human and anti-democratic views?

Honest Q just for you: have you been in a coma for the last 10 years?

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936264

ipsum22• 3 months ago

Looking at Warp.dev, it looks exactly like Codex or Cursor. I thought it used to be a terminal?

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

It's still a terminal at its core, and you can use it to run any CLI coding agent or use our built in agent.

We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.

ipsum22• 3 months ago

From the website it definitely does not look like a terminal anymore.

indigodaddy• 3 months ago

Have you given any thought to a webui, and a "warp" server I can install on a VPS and interact with it via the webui? I believe this paradigm/approach is the real future.

hmokiguess3• 3 months ago

I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.

I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.

I wish there were an in-between solution out there.

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.

petcat3• 3 months ago

trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features

I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.

Muhammad5235• 3 months ago

You can turn off they AI if you want

Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty

scratchyone2• 3 months ago

In all honesty, the people who want to turn off AI won't be downloading Warp in the first place. I know Warp has interesting terminal innovations because I've been familiar with it since before the AI boom, but new users can't really tell.

Homepage header is "Warp is the agentic development environment", only screenshot on the homepage shows what appears to be a product similar to cursor/antigravity/etc AI IDE. Fair if that's your product direction but there's nothing there that tells new users about your terminal UX improvements. Honestly even if I was in the market for a new AI tool, there's nothing on your website that really tells me why I should pick Warp over any of the many competitors.

Fwiw I think Warp is quite cool, I just mean this as hopefully useful feedback from a new customer perspective.

hmokiguess3• 3 months ago

I believe you, though this last time when I installed, the first impression was a giant popup to upsell the Oz agents and all the AI stuff, clicking through it was really difficult, and after that was done I was sort of lost.

I think you need a proper gate before you land so that you have different funnels for onboarding rather than a single journey that assumes all users are the same if you really want to try and have a larger market share.

Then, if you want to upsell stuff to these users, let them opt-in, wait for them to become more sticky, give them some incentive, and that's it.

Alternatively, abandon this direction completely, may not be worth your strategy and priorities as a business.

jeffyaw2• 3 months ago

check out my yaw terminal. iterm2 was absolutely an inspiration.

joshribakoff• 3 months ago

Check out kitty if you haven’t yet.

nickstinemates• 3 months ago

having to kitty-ssh or whatever to set appropriate terminfo otherwise it breaks was really irritating when i was trying it out. has that been fixed?

james2doyle2• 3 months ago

I feel similar. I have been using cmux over the last few weeks: https://cmux.com/

Seems to fit a good balance for the way I want to use my terminal

jacklbk• 3 months ago

Love cmux but lately it's having performance issues. It is not responding for a few seconds when I switch between terminals in the same workspace. I'm tired of it and just use ghostty. I miss the notification from cmux though :(.

jeffyaw2• 3 months ago

there is, yaw terminal.

pancsta• 3 months ago

Terminal should be just a terminal and all the features should be on the server side. All these fancy client side toy terminals are for ppl who are unable to set it up correctly. Test - connect from another (random) terminal, does everything still work?

TLDR; shortcut for the less able

poelzi• 3 months ago

Overwhelming and overloaded. Terminals need to be 1 thing first: fast, and there it fails miserably.

throwatdem12311• 3 months ago

Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.

My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.

alokedesai4• 3 months ago

Awesome to hear that the features are reasonating with you, thanks for the kind words!

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

Glad the workflow is working for you!

In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.

NoGravitas• 3 months ago

Was hoping this was about OS/2, was very disappointed.

kayo_20211030• 3 months ago

Me too. Super disappointed. I was thinking, yeah that sounds fun. But, nope.

redlewel• 3 months ago

Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.

alokedesai4• 3 months ago

Warp is still a terminal, but it also has a coding agent.

no requirement to use it--and you can turn off all of the AI features if you don't want to use them at all

bethekidyouwant• 3 months ago

This is absolutely how I use it as well. Just the copy paste and search functionality is miles of any terminal I’ve ever used. He

meowface4• 3 months ago

I was iffy on it at first but they released an update a week or two ago to make it much more "bring-your-own-coding-agent"-driven, where they facilitate you having lots of tabs with Codex and Claude Code rather than trying to shove theirs down your throat. IMO it's quite a good terminal now, even if they do still have a few other remaining throat-shoving dark patterns in the UI they need to strip out. (The big one being that pressing "+" tries to encourage you to start a new Warp Agent rather than just create a new terminal tab, with no way to change/override it, currently. If they fix that I'd say it'd be stellar.)

mulhoon• 3 months ago

Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.

alokedesai4• 3 months ago

Appreciate the kind words!

morgango• 3 months ago

I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.

I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".

My ESC key is wearing out.

jonotime• 3 months ago

Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.

morelish• 3 months ago

I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.

allenrb• 3 months ago

Was briefly surprised to see IBM open-sourcing OS/2 after all these years. Alas, this appears to be some AI widget.

SuperHeavy2562• 3 months ago

What does this mean?

johanyc• 3 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS%2F2

TIL OS/2 is also called warp

robotnikman• 3 months ago

It's a reference to an old OS made by IBM which was nicknamed Warp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

outlore• 3 months ago

The thing that has kept me away from Warp has been support for bind keys and Atuin. Excited for this!

miohtama• 3 months ago

Does it have any reusable modules for other kind of projects?

aleph_minus_one• 3 months ago

Looking at the headline "Warp is now Open-Source", I really hoped that OS/2 3.0 Warp was open-sourced. :-(

meffie• 3 months ago

Yeah, apparently this is a different Warp.

stuaxo• 3 months ago

There are dosens of us !

blantonl• 3 months ago

Here I was thinking this was OS/2 Warp…

mrichman• 3 months ago

Came here thinking this was about OS/2.

drakenot2• 3 months ago

I used to like Warp and was a paying customer.

It had a simple UI with a clear button / key combo to toggle the “agent mode”. That, plus the fact it could “warpify” my SSH connections made this a useful utility.

Then a couple months ago they completely changed the UI. It doesn’t work as it once did. My saved prompt templates didn’t work as they did before, the agent toggle was gone (you can now start some ‘/agent’ command but it is much less intuitive) and they seem to be focusing on these cloud agents and code editing.

I want none of these things. I loved a simple terminal that let me still execute sudo, let me ssh into remote machines but still bring Claude and OpenAI models to interact with my session.

zachlloyd10• 3 months ago

argh, sorry that we made it worse for you, that definitely was not the intention. we were trying to make the modes clearer.

You can still basically get back to the same way of working if you set new terminal sessions to be "agent sessions" and enable natural language detection. that's how i use it.

drakenot2• 3 months ago

Thank you for that tip, I'll try that.

jdejean• 3 months ago

I loved using Warp. I used it daily for over a year. Setup workflow scripts and customizations, it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to.

Then one day, I opened it up to find the command bar was replaced with a natural language prompt. It changed the behavior subtly, and changed how the prompt looked.

I uninstalled.

I don’t care that you can opt out. My gripe isn’t about AI. I don’t want my tools and workflows changing at random. If you have a new feature, mention it in the “what’s new” log and suggest I opt in.

Not to get meta but I loathe how this sort of thing is commonplace these days. I would pay so much money for app developers to just fucking stop shoveling. Constantly chasing new audiences only stands to ostracize your own. Maybe you care and maybe you don’t. I bounced tho.

My mini vision for Warp when I got really into it was keeping it lightly AI flavored, but leaning into the workflows. The way it multicursors to fill variables was awesome. I don’t care about agents, but I would want to see agents exist as workflows (tools) rather than ephemeral beings like opencode or cursor 3

meowface4• 3 months ago

I agree that was/is an absolutely horrible feature (and it took me way too long to realize I could/should turn it off) and always should've been opt-in, but the current version is honestly quite nice to use. I would not have recommended it a few months ago but I would recommend it now.

looneysquash• 3 months ago

Why would you name yourself Warp without any connection to OS/2?

KingMob2• 3 months ago

Because OS/2 has been dead for decades?

DaSHacka• 3 months ago

I don't think IBM gets exclusive rights to the word "Warp" for all eternity because of a dead operating system from 30 years ago...

KetoManx642• 3 months ago

I found out today that if you block internet access to the warp terminal through opensnitch it will refuse to start, I imagine it does the same thing if you don't have internet access?

I ended up uninstalling it after that. Just silly that my terminal is sending a bunch of analytics and also refuses to start of there's no internet.

Warp is now open-source

Related Stories