Warp Terminal × Next Gen Terminals

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Boss.

Welcome to Syntax. This is a podcast about web development. Today, we're talking about the warp terminals. This is a new terminal app that is honestly very refreshing. It's super awesome. I'm a big fan of it.

And today we are going people always ask, rid. How is it good? What's better about it? And then it's just like, well, when big questions like that get asked because it's just like I can't I could rattle off a few things, but like we literally need a whole hour to explain, why we like it and whatnot. So We're recording this thing and getting on into it. I think I've been using it for about a year now, and I've just been been absolutely loving it. I've got a handful of of gripes. We'll go over those as well because certainly isn't perfect just yet.

How are you doing today, Scott? You are you a big fan as well? Big fan. Actually, rid. They sent me a t shirt a little while ago, and I'm a big fan of that t shirt as well. No. I I've been using Warp now for a little bit, and it honestly, it takes me it takes a lot Get me off of my, Iterm setup because I it's one of those things that I've finally crafted over the the many years that have been using it. But, you know, rid. Warp Warp was really it, especially now that it's opened up a little bit more, the fact that you can make your own themes. And, it definitely feels Maybe a little bit more solid than when I first started using it. So, no, I'm I'm a huge, huge fan of Warp. Also, I'm gonna apologize to anyone out there. I'm I'm getting over what Seems to be like the worst cold known to man. I I have no idea what's going on. I have been I had, like, the worst cough Every single day for the past, like, 7 days, it's so much to the point where it's been keeping me up. So it's like you're coughing all day, you're coughing all night, rid. You can't sleep because you're coughing, and then how are you ever gonna get better? So, yeah, it has been just, like, relentless. So I'm gonna do my very best to not sound super sick today. It seems like I I sound pretty decent right now, but, I will make sure I do not cough into Mike rid.

Alright. Alright. Chris will cut that out for us anyways, but, yeah. Awesome.

I should also say, this is not Sponsored by Warp. There seems to be a thing lately is whenever you like a company or a product or anything like that and you say good things about it, people say, Are they paying you? How much do they pay you to say that? Nothing they did.

They sent me a water bottle, but that was only because I was complaining about Warp on, on Twitter about how the the auto complete is not as good as Fig.

Rid. And I was like, this needs to get better. And the founder of it, we had a call and he's like, he kinda he's kinda was like, oh, yeah. Like, we're we're That's some low hanging fruit. We're definitely gonna fix that type of stuff. And it's cool. He was the principal dev on Google Docs.

So I certainly would like to have him on the show as well just to talk about both like how do you make Google Docs? Like that's unreal. Hey, yeah. As well as Sorry, warp terminal is built in Rust, which is very interesting. I remember when it first came out, I was like, oh, this thing is for sure built in HTML and CSS. And I went looking for the CSS file So I could tweak it and I couldn't find it. Like I almost can always find the CSS file behind these apps. Yeah, right. Somewhere in the resources folder.

Yeah, there is no CSS file because it's not built in that it's built in open GL or something like that. So that's kind of the cool of things. So let's talk about terminals in general real quick. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Before, yeah, before we get it to into depth, yours you said, you know, how do you build Google,

Google Docs or whatever, that was actually one of my interview questions when I interviewed at Google. It was like, if you If you were going to be making a Google Doc and you were tasked with building Google Docs, like, where would you start? What would what what element Would you make the the canvas out of? What how would you communicate with the server? And I was just like, every single answer I gave, I was like, I feel like this is totally I feel like this is a bad answer. I I wish I could look at Google Google Docs right now and rid. Through it because this is just like I did not trust any of my answers, but that was, yeah, interesting interview question there. Let's talk about the Terminal in general,

the terminal's been around forever, and it's way back. And it really hasn't evolved all that much over the years. Rid. There's so many annoyances that I have with the terminal. At the very basic, you can't click where you want your cursor to go in most terminals. You have to use your arrow keys. And I know that some terminals have you hold down a key and click on it, and and that's a little bit better. But like I've always said for the longest time, like, will somebody please v s codify the terminal? Because that's rid. That's the experience that I want inside of the terminal. So that, skipping via keyboard, I wanna be able to use the same keyboard shortcuts that I use in Versus code to Skip to the front of the line on something like that.

The design in the UI of terminals has improved quite a bit over the years. Like, you can get Iterm 2, you can get looking really nice. Oh, yeah.

Hyper looks really nice, and Warp itself Looks really nice. So that's been a big one. There are minimal features. We've sort of been packing features in via prompts and ZSH and all that. It's just been kind of clunky. So Warp is kind of here to modernize what the terminal will look like and how you experience this type of thing. Because quite honestly, especially for web developers, when you're learning web development, we sort of just throw you into this whole new world of what the terminal is and and how to change files and folders and and how to move around, and you can't have spaces in some in it sometimes. And on Windows, it's a whole another world of pain and all that type of stuff. So I'm very happy that Warp is here solving at least some of those.

Rid. It is currently only for Mac.

As all good tools, people always say like, oh, yeah. You can do web development on any rid Anything. And then, like, oh, why do people who have Macs love Macs so much? And it's because of stuff like this. This happens literally with every tool is that the best tools are always for Mac only, at least to begin with, and then they will roll out. So there is a sign up. We'll put it in the link rid for Windows and Linux. So I assume since this thing is built in Rust, it will eventually hit

Windows and Linux as well. Yeah. I could never be a a Windows user. Linux, sure, maybe.

But as an Android user for a long time, that was, like, always the worst thing about App announcements. You'd always have that, like, tempered like, oh, this wonderful new app, and I know I'm probably not going to see it for who knows how long. Even Instagram took, like, rid. A year to get for Android. I mean, it's just yeah.

One of those things. Alright. Some of the terminals now, we'll talk about what we have used and have used in the past.

I was on Iterm for Iterm 2 for probably 6 or 7 years.

I did a like a 2 year rid. With hyper, I was pretty excited about that. But over time, hyper, I was just was it was good. I really liked it and it looked nice, but ready. I was not using any of the plugins and whatnot. A couple here and there, but then they broke and I didn't feel like fixing it.

And Hyper itself Was so if you don't know, Hyper was like a React based terminal that you can download for your desktop. It's from Vercel.

They've since stopped development on it for probably a year or 2 now. But there's 1 guy I went and looked at. There's 1 guy maintaining it and keeping it going. So it's still a good option, But I certainly I probably would not pick it

off today. Yeah. And also, you know, the performance was never great for me. I picked it up. And I always had, like, a little bit of, like I I did the classic install all the plug ins right away and be like, oh, this thing's slow.

Then I stopped using it. But then Iterm actually had ended up getting a lot of the same sort of plug ins that you had in, Hyper anyways, Like being able to see your CPU and those kinds of things in the bottom toolbar and adding little, little niceties. So I wasn't missing too much by not using hyper, You know, whatever you gain from, cool little, fun little things you're losing in performance anyways. Totally. You know, For Windows, a lot of people recommended to me the Windows terminal because they recently kind of got a new version of this thing. I don't I don't know how long ago, but At first, I wasn't super impressed, but, you know, when I dove into it and you're able to tweak things pretty significantly, it does feel a lot like Iterm. It's it's not maybe you know, coming from the Mac world where where terminals, even Iterm has been around for a long time. But beyond Iterm, we we've had, like, a lot of nice terminals in Mac. So the Windows terminal being, like, acceptable to me Was like, okay. This is fine. But a lot of people Windows World were saying, like, this is it. This is the thing, and it's fine. It's good. But I wouldn't necessarily say it it Holds a flame to,

warp here. Other ones are the Mac terminal that's built in.

I'll see a lot of people use it. It's it's fine. It's fine. Alacriti, I don't you you put this one in there. What's that? Yeah. Elacriti is another one. You know, a little while ago, I did a deep dive into the different

apps people were using, and Elacriti was one that a lot of people seem to use.

And I gotta really wonder why. It doesn't necessarily seem like it's doing anything super special.

It's Open GL based.

It's fine again. It it doesn't feel super modern, but when there's other options, it it feels like there there are other options. This one Yeah. People use a lot in Windows.

And, yeah, I guess now that the Windows terminal itself is way better, maybe that was the whole point. Rid. Maybe this thing was the maybe this was the option before Windows Terminal got better. Oh, yeah. I I also wonder if people are using that

to run Vim because a lot of people run their editor literally inside their terminal. And that's why some of these terminals don't even have tabs.

That's because all of that is part of

the itself.

Yeah. And then the last 1, probably most popular, maybe most popular is Versus code terminal. So Versus code has its own terminal built right in.

I have never been able to get into using the Versus code terminal Simply because maybe this has changed. I don't want it part of my editor. I want it to pop out. I want to be able to tab over to it. I want to put it on a different monitor, rid.

I want it to be its own thing. So, the one thing that keeps making you want to go back to theor go to the Versus Code terminal is the They have like automatic debug attaching where you can put breakpoints and whatnot. And that's pretty nice. You don't have to set up the whole Versus Code debug thing.

But other than that, no. Yeah. There are times. But like you, you know, v s code's, like, slow enough for me as it is. Like, I don't want to in burden it anymore.

And, typically, I I think the apps that are handling command command line stuff, terminal apps, they're well, they're they they could be rid. Not electron apps. And I'm happy with that. Yeah. Let's go through some of the term,

the terms terminal terms here, because we can sometimes say these words. You don't know what part of it is. And also, like, often people say, like, how do you get your terminal to look like yours? Rid. And first of all, I have an entire course because people ask me that all the time, command line power user .com, but also, like, it's You know, it's a lot of things put together. So the first one is a shell.

The shell is the software that runs in your terminal. It's the actual software that is running on your computer, and that is generally going to be ZSH or ZSH for all you all Americans.

And that's the one that's built into macOS now, and that's the one that I would say most web developers use.

But there also is Phish.

Bash was the most popular one for many, many years and probably is if you sign into literally anything, any server. You're getting a bash prompt.

Then on Windows, we have command prompt, there's PowerShell, and then Likely you, the developer listening to this, should be using it's called WSL Windows Subsystem Linux. So that literally runs Linux on your Windows computer so that you get a Linux environment or a Unix environment rid for your shell and you can run all the stuff that we're talking about on it as well. You don't have to figure out, oh, what's the What's the equivalent to delete a directory in Windows? Or or how do you copy something in Windows? You know, like, what's the equivalent? You don't have to know the equivalent. It's the same everywhere If you're yeah. WSL. PowerShell not something I've invested any time

in learning myself.