Warp: A New Terminal To Boost Developer Productivity
There is a new terminal launching their beta version today and I couldn’t be more excited to talk about my experience using it for an entire week.
Last week, one of the members of the Warp Terminal team reached out to me, asking me to test out a Rust-based terminal his team had been building and give my honest feedback. So here I am, ready to share how the experience went and some cool features that I played around with.
Overall Experience
First, let’s talk about regular old command prompts and terminal windows. Out of the box, they are boring, lack syntax color-coding, can be hard to navigate, and in my personal opinion, not exactly beginner friendly since you need to initially memorize all the basic terminal commands.
Right after downloading Warp and trying it out for the first time, my initial reaction was: This is so similar to a code editor, even all the keyboard shortcuts are the same! Also, I immediately went to browse through all the color themes. Sure, functionality is great, but for me, aesthetic is everything too! Here’s the theme I ended up picking out:
A lot of the content I create is geared towards helping beginners with getting started with programming, including resources and tool suggestions. One of my first thoughts when using the Warp Terminal was: “Wow, this is a great terminal for beginners to use”. The reason I say that, is the terminal comes with autosuggestions for completing commands and navigation around the terminal is significantly easier.
The only thing I see at the moment to this terminal as a major drawback is that is not yet available to all operating systems. Currently it is Mac compatible only, but on their website it says that they are working to extend the terminal to Windows and Linux soon. I’m looking forward to that update, because for a lot of my personal projects I use my Windows desktop machine.
Let’s go over some of the unique and cool features the Warp terminal offers:
Autosuggestions and Completions:
As you can see in the picture above, the terminal offers to finish the rest of the command with the autosuggestions feature. Additionally, it offers a list of common commands, with descriptions included. In my opinion, it’s much easier to look through the list of git commands here in the terminal to remember which command to run vs browsing the web for a refresher.
Find:
It’s super easy to search the contents of your terminal (scoped within that terminal window tab). The search functionality is bottom to top, so the matches with correspond so the more recent terminal values first.
Keyboard Shortcuts:
Warp supports all the same keyboard and mouse bindings that you may be used to using in your text editor. It is also backwards compatible with all the normal terminal keyboard bindings. Additionally, if you want to, you can fully customize the keyboard shortcuts in the settings as well.
This terminal also allows for multi-line commands. You can use SHIFT-ENTER to go to a new line.
Blocks:
The terminal in Warp is designed by grouping commands and their corresponding outputs into blocks. For each block, they have made it easy to copy the command, copy the output, and probably the coolest feature of them all: share the block with others. In the past, when I have run into errors, I will ask my coworkers by pasting the error log into my Teams chat. However, I’m sure you guys know that this becomes a long jumbled unreadable error ( and most of the time a screenshot of the error is a little more digestible). But with blocks, you can share the link to the warp terminal with your coworkers.
So now that you know a little bit about some of the terminal features, I encourage you to download the terminal and give a try for yourself!
Here is a link to their site where you can download: https://www.warp.dev/
Here is a link to their documentation which shares additional features that the terminal provides: https://docs.warp.dev/
Once you’ve downloaded it and tested it out, comment below your thoughts! Would love to hear your opinions on the Warp Terminal.
