FWIW, the Warp terminal will be free for individuals. We would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. So no paywalls around SSH or anything like that. The types of features we could eventually charge for are team features.
Our bet is that the moat is going to be the team features, like:
- Sharing hard-to-remember workflows
- Wikis and READMEs that run directly in the terminal
- Session sharing for joint debugging
Our bet is their companies are willing to pay for these. BTW, even these team features will likely be free up to some level of usage and only charged in a company context.
> The types of features we could eventually charge for are team features.
You can probably maximize community acceptance if you provide clients that do not use these features as actual FOSS and only start incorporating closed-source pieces for those features. With things like client keys etc to restrict server access.
A bit like the Chrome/Chromium thing was intended initially.
Those get codified into ansible and deployed on CI/CD pipelines. This is an anti-feature. The day that someone suggests using a terminal to manage hard-to-remember workflows is the day I start a huge crusade to fix whatever process led to introducing yet another tool.
> - Sharing hard-to-remember workflows
= Make better scripts and put in CI
> - Wikis and READMEs that run directly in the terminal
No thank you
> - Session sharing for joint debugging
= That's more for development.. not for shell access
> Our bet is their companies are willing to pay for these. BTW, even these team features will likely be free up to some level of usage and only charged in a company context.
I actually don't want them. I migrated from many apps that do too much to apps that do one thing really well.
(Not affiliated with Warp but care about this particular thing)
Shell scripts implies, well, a particular shell. If everyone is on similar OSes, maybe that works for you, but as a Windows user, "pile of bash scripts" might as well be "doesn't work for you." I use a terminal for my daily work, but don't have bash installed on my machine.
That said, I haven't tried Warp yet specifically because it's Mac-only right now. Even within that context, Warp integrates with Bash, Zsh, or Fish, which do have their own extensions to POSIX shell, but at least you can rely on Bash being installed.
That would also now force everyone to use this proprietary product instead of whatever they're familiar with.
For mac <-> linux, posix-compliant scripts mostly work in my experience but you have to account for different versions of gnu utils. For linux <-> windows, if it's small you could just write a powershell script, or use something like python on both, no?
I fail to see how these features are nice enough to force people to use a proprietary terminal that, for now, is compatible with existing bash/zsh shells.
Yes, that is true, but it does seem like that's what their strategy is. If you're using these collaboration tools at your job, you'd have to be using the product already. So that's less of a problem than it would be for say, scripts included with some sort of open source project.
My point is mostly that shell isn't cross-platform, and this is one way you could address that. But it's not a generalized solution, absolutely.
(and yeah, something like Python is better than trying to keep multiple of the same scripts in different languages, for sure. You can do it if you wanted though, if they're small and you're willing to commit to it, I'm not sure I've ever seen it really pulled off.)
basically every operating system has a posix shell by default except windows, but it has been ported there multiple times, samba existed for decades and WSL is on the rise. It may sound a little more irritating but they deserve it for still running windows :p /hj
(besides you can just host an ssh server)
I mean, I could also tell you "Just download and run PowerShell, it's ported to Linux", but you also know that would make you feel like a second-class citizen, because you know it's not something as good as something that actually works on your platform in a real sense.
Why would it be easier to port Warp to a new system compared to Bash, Python, Perl, etc.? These tools are widely used to automate workflows and are already ported to any system you would probably care to develop on.
So programs/workflows written in Warp will be portable without much effort, in some way that an equivalent shell or python script isn't? Why do you think that?
Ok, maybe I misunderstand what a "workflow" is. Since we are talking about replacing shell scripts with "workflows", I assumed that they are a kind of programming facility of about similar power as shell scripts. But that may be incorrect.
> You aren't the one porting Warp, but you are the one porting the shell script.
It sounds like your are saying somthing like "Warp scripts/workflows require almost no effort to port, compared to the shell scripts they replace". I was interested to learn how this can be the case. Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.
I may also be too; like I said, I haven't used Warp yet. Just read their docs. "Workflows" are described in their docs as effectively 'aliases with better docs that integrate with a search bar', and are defined in a YAML file. They don't actually show said YAML file, so I don't know how complex they are. If they give you the full power of the underlying shell, then yeah, you're back at the exact same problem, but if it's stuff like "invoke this program with this set of arguments," which is what their examples seem like, then I'd expect it to work with any shell as long as that program is installed.
> Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.
And perhaps mine is. The docs aren't in-depth and I don't own a Mac. But really, ultimately, "are workflows more portable" isn't a question I personally am wed to; it's that "shell scripts are only portable via UNIXes and there's a much bigger world out there" that I am, and I am hoping that workflows are more portable than shell scripts. In practice, they may be, or they may not be, but since they're in a layer above the shell, it's possible that they're not shell-specific.
That's a great question! Version controlled shell scripts are very useful (and in fact workflows in Warp can also be version controlled) but they still have a few problems:
1) Documentation--when a repo has a lot of shell scripts, it can be very difficult to know which command to run in certain situations. Even if each shell script has documentation, there's no way to find that documentation natively from the terminal itself.
2) Searching--you can only execute commands from the terminal based on the shell script name but there's no easy way to search for a script based on _what_ it does or any other metadata.
FWIW, the Warp terminal will be free for individuals. We would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. So no paywalls around SSH or anything like that. The types of features we could eventually charge for are team features.
Our bet is that the moat is going to be the team features, like:
- Sharing hard-to-remember workflows
- Wikis and READMEs that run directly in the terminal
- Session sharing for joint debugging
Our bet is their companies are willing to pay for these. BTW, even these team features will likely be free up to some level of usage and only charged in a company context.