Long overdue - I was all in a few years ago with Warp, but after the last couple of years of not addressing this need, I have moved on from Warp. I now DO NOT see the need to embed AI into the terminal when you can have all sorts of TUI doing the same job.
Makes plenty of sense to upstream this (possibly makes more more than forking, although I suppose it's one way of gauging interest and implementation complexity).
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)
Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.
- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly
- The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky
- The command prediction
- The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
A word of warning: I just installed OpenWarp from source, but it looks like it will not let me use my own provider without signing up for an $20/month account -- just like the original Warp
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
A terminal with AI focused on doing terminal-ish stuff is actually kind of useful.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
Claude Code is very capable of making a terminal emulator with exactly (and only) the features you want. I did that for myself and it's now my daily driver. Has a few goodies I care about but nothing much else, and I have no intention of adding features for other people: https://github.com/cartermp/term
I've looked at Warp before and seen that it has some potentially useful features for a command line terminal program, like having each command be its own little history window which you can scroll independently and collapse. (I might have imagined/inferred those from the screenshots of it working though). So an alternative implementation does sound interesting, but I would want it just to be a terminal, not with any AI or agent stuff in it.
I feel this is the wrong way to go about things and I agree that it rude. Why not start by engaging with the warp project and see if some of this work could be upstreamed and if you like warp, target longevity?
"OpenWarp is a community fork of Warp's open-source code. It is not affiliated with Warp Inc. and follows the upstream AGPL / MIT dual license."
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason. Jenkins is a community fork. Mariadb is a community fork. Joomla is a community fork. Illumos was a community fork. Rocky Linux is a community fork. Valkey is a community fork.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is a benefit corporation founded by the original founder of CentOS and other CentOS developers in response to CentOS becoming a stream OS instead of a stable OS.
You'll have to be specific about what dubious ethical decisions you mean. I'm unaware of any, and I feel like I'm pretty tuned into this specific story.
One can claim a trademark without registering it (the difference between ™ and ®). But, if one wanted to sue, you'd probably register it first. But, a claimed trademark that is suitably unique for your product is defensible if you can prove consistent usage pre-dating the new user of that mark.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
Here are some links to the official website of the actual United States Patent and Trademark Office, commonly and distinctly abbreviated "USPTO", whose domain name is duly registered at uspto.gov
Search for "wordmark" "warp", filter for currently live and 009, shows 44 results.
A search for "openwarp" yields 0 results, none dead, none historical; nowhere in the system is this unique name registered.
A banner at top-of-page offers various pointers for consumers on how to discern official US Gov websites from imposters, domain squatters, and name-stealers
I hope they bring back the former UI that allowed you to explicitly toggle "AI / Agent" mode on/off in a terminal session, and gets rid of the Oz / Cloud Agent stuff.
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
What even is Warp now? I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it. Then I think I read it got the RIIR treatment, but there was already Ghostty and Alacritty by then. Now it looks like it’s another AI thing?
Warp was always an AI thing, as I recall - the seem much heavier on AI bandwagon nowadays, but their whole thing was a terminal for teams where you could share knowledge and command palettes and generate stuff.
Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.
I don't think this should be dismissed as a cheap and rude ripoff. I'm no expert in trademarks or the naming convention part of the story, but for the rest: warp is not a great company taking far too long to roll back its weird account requirement, tracking users, enshittifying the core terminal experience with often unwanted AI and other crap features and dismissing annoyances that are brought up by 100eds of users. We need to show companies they need to behave or will be crushed by the community.
Warp founder here. It's cool to see the community excitement here.
Note that we are going to add bring-your-own-model directly into Warp. Would love interested folks to weigh in on the discussion here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/discussions/9619
Long overdue - I was all in a few years ago with Warp, but after the last couple of years of not addressing this need, I have moved on from Warp. I now DO NOT see the need to embed AI into the terminal when you can have all sorts of TUI doing the same job.
What about when SSHing to an external server, or working in a container?
Nanobot will happily ssh to a host and do things on it. I'm sure that's just a skill away for pi or opencode.
This might have changed but Warp was not able to do this without “warpifying” the SSH host.
Makes plenty of sense to upstream this (possibly makes more more than forking, although I suppose it's one way of gauging interest and implementation complexity).
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Also, great example of why you don't take a terminal that requires login as your daily workhorse. It never ends well.
That was a mistake they made initially, but iirc they got rid of it after a while.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
Is it Rust or Node/Electron? That’s one of the key considerations I have these days; I’m over bloatware.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
https://thenewstack.io/developer-review-of-warp-for-windows-...
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)
Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.
Off the top of my head:
- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly - The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky - The command prediction - The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
A word of warning: I just installed OpenWarp from source, but it looks like it will not let me use my own provider without signing up for an $20/month account -- just like the original Warp
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd love a "ThinWarp" -- just the terminal with the great UI, etc.
I can run Claude Code there or whatever. But I personally don't need the AI in the terminal itself.
A terminal with AI focused on doing terminal-ish stuff is actually kind of useful.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
Claude Code is very capable of making a terminal emulator with exactly (and only) the features you want. I did that for myself and it's now my daily driver. Has a few goodies I care about but nothing much else, and I have no intention of adding features for other people: https://github.com/cartermp/term
A personal Mac terminal emulator built for terminal-based AI work.
How exactly does it help with "terminal-based AI work"?
We have a way of turning off all the AI if you don't like it (Settings > AI > turn it off). I get the desire here.
Why not just use ghostty at that point?
I've looked at Warp before and seen that it has some potentially useful features for a command line terminal program, like having each command be its own little history window which you can scroll independently and collapse. (I might have imagined/inferred those from the screenshots of it working though). So an alternative implementation does sound interesting, but I would want it just to be a terminal, not with any AI or agent stuff in it.
So alas this doesn't appear to be it.
I feel this is the wrong way to go about things and I agree that it rude. Why not start by engaging with the warp project and see if some of this work could be upstreamed and if you like warp, target longevity?
My problem with Warp is that I have to create an account to use my local llm
This project is no different
There can be problems with open source projects run by for-profit companies, but this fork seems a little premature.
"OpenWarp is a community fork of Warp's open-source code. It is not affiliated with Warp Inc. and follows the upstream AGPL / MIT dual license."
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
I would like to introduce my new venture, OpenOpenAi.
I agree on the name, but to me the word community here is used to mean it's not run by a company.
Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason. Jenkins is a community fork. Mariadb is a community fork. Joomla is a community fork. Illumos was a community fork. Rocky Linux is a community fork. Valkey is a community fork.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
Rocky Linux was a corporate fork with numerous dubious ethical decisions early on
Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is a benefit corporation founded by the original founder of CentOS and other CentOS developers in response to CentOS becoming a stream OS instead of a stable OS.
You'll have to be specific about what dubious ethical decisions you mean. I'm unaware of any, and I feel like I'm pretty tuned into this specific story.
It's ok to start new things with aspirations. Spare us such melodrama, such pedantry.
Yep, start a new thing with a new name. Go for it.
Warp is already an Alacritty fork with no acknowledgement. I feel they deserve no respect for this.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939527
But calling it OpenAlacritty would be worse, which is what happened here.
Domain Squatting 2.0
Definitely disagree about rudeness.
Only a trademark violation if a trademark has been registered. IANAL.
One can claim a trademark without registering it (the difference between ™ and ®). But, if one wanted to sue, you'd probably register it first. But, a claimed trademark that is suitably unique for your product is defensible if you can prove consistent usage pre-dating the new user of that mark.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
https://uspto.report/TM/90342558
> WARP® trademark registration is intended to cover the categories of [...] Downloadable computer terminal emulator program [...]
How were they able to register it? So many other things are named Warp, for example Cloudflare Warp.
Cloudflare Warp is also trademarked: https://uspto.report/TM/88455403
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
Here are some links to the official website of the actual United States Patent and Trademark Office, commonly and distinctly abbreviated "USPTO", whose domain name is duly registered at uspto.gov
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90342560
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90342558
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/88455403
Search for "wordmark" "warp", filter for currently live and 009, shows 44 results.
A search for "openwarp" yields 0 results, none dead, none historical; nowhere in the system is this unique name registered.
A banner at top-of-page offers various pointers for consumers on how to discern official US Gov websites from imposters, domain squatters, and name-stealers
Mixing etiquette and copyright.
It is not only rude but also misleading and frankly, stupid.
I was hoping that this was an opensourcing of OS/2. (With the recent DOS announcement, I guess one can only dream.)
An oft-repeated comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940669
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941712
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941782
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941974
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942198
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943175
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947007
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948005
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952979
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970965
So, Warp with telemetry removed?
I hope they bring back the former UI that allowed you to explicitly toggle "AI / Agent" mode on/off in a terminal session, and gets rid of the Oz / Cloud Agent stuff.
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
at this stage, this being a fork instead of a pr is really weird
What does "100% local credentials" mean as a feature?
for somebody not in the know... what is this? the website doesn't seem to explain much. i can add models to warp, but what's warp?
A terminal: https://www.warp.dev/
> Warp is the agentic development environment
So not a terminal?
It's a very competent terminal.
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
You aren’t the only one who didnt get this off the bat. I still don’t understand why I do this instead of just typing Claude my terminal
What even is Warp now? I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it. Then I think I read it got the RIIR treatment, but there was already Ghostty and Alacritty by then. Now it looks like it’s another AI thing?
What the heck is warp???
Warp was always an AI thing, as I recall - the seem much heavier on AI bandwagon nowadays, but their whole thing was a terminal for teams where you could share knowledge and command palettes and generate stuff.
Their "Introducing Warp" post from 2022 actually doesn't mention AI: https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-warp. They introduced Warp AI in 2023: https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-warp-ai
I was pretty interested in it when it was just trying to be a modernized terminal. I still think some of the UI ideas are cool.
Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.
Warp didn't start out as AI, IIRC they started with auto completing terminals.
Related:
Warp is now open-source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936264
Not OS/2.
Yeah :-(
Here I was hoping that somehow IBM had decided to open source it. That would have been fun. But I don't think that will ever happen.
why the fck does openwarp make any sense if warp is alr opened up? lol
call it Worp
I don't think this should be dismissed as a cheap and rude ripoff. I'm no expert in trademarks or the naming convention part of the story, but for the rest: warp is not a great company taking far too long to roll back its weird account requirement, tracking users, enshittifying the core terminal experience with often unwanted AI and other crap features and dismissing annoyances that are brought up by 100eds of users. We need to show companies they need to behave or will be crushed by the community.