I tried out and switched to a new terminal program.
I recently came across a newer terminal emulator program for Mac. It’s called the Warp Terminal. It aims to be a modern terminal app, so I gave it a try. And I really like it!
A couple years ago, I was checking out the alternative terminal space to look for an upgrade on the system Terminal.app.
I tried many, but none were really what I was looking for, so I ended up going with the one that was the most popular, tried and tested, iTerm.
iTerm is a great application, which excels at being a traditional style terminal, with every configuration option you might imagine.
I’ve been pretty happy with it.
Alternatively, the warp terminal seems to be exactly the program I was really looking for at that time. To me it resembles apps like “Slack”; a sticky text editor at the bottom of the window with “messages” that scroll up from the bottom in blocks. Speaking of sticky, when the output of a command exceeds the window size, the command also is sticky at the top of the screen.
Warp has many other interesting features, but the most notable in my opinion are:
- A fully featured text editor, instead of a standard command prompt. This allows things like mouse selection, multi cursor, multi select, multi-line editing out of the box.
- Command argument “intellisense”. They’ve essentially taken the man pages for many of the most common commands, and a IDE style auto-complete dropdown list, with help about each flag or option.
- While being a modern web-aware application, it is not built with web technologies (as many other new terminals seem to be).
The only real complaint I have is the one everyone seems to raise when discussing it - you have to create an account and log in to use it. This is a bit off-putting and seems out of place for a terminal application, but is supposed to enable some kinds of sharing in the future. I’m sure it factors in to their eventual monetization strategy as well somehow. But, they are transparent about all the metrics and you can in fact disable them in settings.
In summary, I’d highly recommend anyone to check it out, and see for themselves. And maybe use a fake email to sign up if you aren’t sure. There isn’t too much customization yet (especially when coming from iTerm!) but the application is still new and I’m excited to see where it goes.