Warp AI terminal review
Table of contents
The good
It works
The core experience works out of the box as advertised: it's pretty intuitive to get help with complex commmands, ask about errors and get back useful responses that help you to move forward more quickly.
It's pretty
It's also great to see first-class theming support and I will say that warp looks great out of the box - even using the default theme.
The painful
No tmux compatibility currently
I'm an avowed tmux user. I love being able to quickly section off a new piece of screen real estate and have it be a full fledged terminal in which I can interact with Docker images or SSH to a remote server or read a man page or write a script.
I like the way tmux allows me to flow my workspace to the size of my current task - when I'm focused on writing code or text I can zoom in and allow that task to take up my whole screen.
When I need to do side by side comparisons or plumb data between files and projects, I can open up as many panes as I need to get the job done.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Warp does not support Tmux and it's not clear how far away that support will be.
Sort of awkward to run on Linux
I have another quibble about the default experience of running warp on Linux currently:
It's currently a bit awkward, because I launch the warp-terminal binary from my current terminal emulator, meaning that I get a somewhat janky experience and an extra floating window to manage.
Sure, I could work around this - but the tmux issue prevents me from making the jump to warp as my daily driver.
You need to log in to your terminal
I know this will bother a lot of other folks even more than it bugs me, but one of the things I love about my current workflow is that hitting my control+enter hotkey gives me a fresh terminal in under a second - I can hit that key and just start typing.
Warp's onboarding worked fine - there were no major issues or dark patterns - but it does give me pause to need to log into my terminal and it makes me wonder how gracefully warp degrades when it cannot phone home.
Getting locked out of your terminal due to a remote issue would be a bridge too far for many developers.
Looking forward
I'm impressed by warp's core UX and definitely see the value.
While I do pride myself on constantly learning more about the command line, terminal emulators and how to best leverage them for productivity, it's sort of a no-brainer to marry the current wave of LLMs and fine-tuned models with a common developer pain point: not knowing how to fix something in their terminal.
Not every developer wants to be a terminal nerd - but they do want to get stuff done more efficiently and with less suffering than before.
I can see warp being a great tool to helping folks accomplish that.
Check out my detailed comparison of the top AI-assisted developer tools.