Comment by hmokiguess

20 hours 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.

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

  • 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 :(.

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • > 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.

    • that's fair. we try to be opinionated on the default experience but allow a lot of customizability.

  • > 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

    • They have interesting features, their initial release had snippets, team sharing, time-saver stuff with a nice UX. Same reason one might use Raycast. I was a paying customer for that release, but when they pivoted I cancelled.

    • we have a lot of users who like warp as a place to run other coding agents (e.g. claude code, codex) and have tried to improve the experience for those beyond what a typical terminal offers (e.g. code review, file tree)

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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