Right then. Saw Warp catching an absolute kicking on twitter the other week, dragged-by-its-laces, ridicule-tier sort of stuff. Decided to step in and defend it in the replies. Then realised the defence properly warranted its own write up, because Warp is one of the most underappreciated bits of dev tooling I use, and I am the muggins who keeps coming back to it after every other terminal flirtation.

I have had an on and off relationship with Warp since it shipped. Every time I switch away, either because of community hype or some shiny new emulator landing on Hacker News, I end up drifting back. Always.

The reason it never quite stuck with the tech nerd crowd is simple. The terminal was closed source. In a world where iTerm2 had been the dominant dog since forever, and where the back end of the 2010s saw an explosion of fresh blood (Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, and now Ghostty which seems to be the darling of every dotfiles repo on the internet), a closed-source terminal was a tough sell. Worth a mention too is cmux, which pitches itself on the versatility of tmux for agentic work. cmux is half decent, very buggy, very much a "fix and evolve" sort of opinionated tool. Recommended only if you fancy patching upstream.

There was a period after the beta where Warp made it mandatory to sign up to use the terminal. Sign up. For a terminal. That was, charitably, an absolute garbage move. Off I went back to iTerm and Kitty and the rest. Then one day I clocked that they had quietly removed the mandatory sign-in, so back I drifted. Recently I had another wander, stuck with Ghostty for a fair while because the simplicity is genuinely lovely, and gave cmux a real go because it is doing something interesting for the agentic building era. But every time, Warp pulled me back.

Now Warp gets a lot of stick in nerd circles. Closed source, sign-in friction, the whole bag. And the agentic offering wrapped inside it (the whole reason they built a native terminal in the first place, to compete with Claude Code, Codex and the rest) is, being honest, just okay. Beats Gemini CLI hands down, but probably still third rung in the agent harness leaderboard.

Park the agent bit for a second. Park the sign-in noise. Just look at the terminal itself.

Warp has the best DevX of any terminal I have used. Not close. Let me show you how I actually live in it.

1. Visor mode

Configure a hotkey for visor mode. The § key, sat right below escape on a Mac, is the perfect pick. I have that mapped to pop the terminal in and out, and Cmd plus § brings up my clipboard history in Raycast. Smooth as anything.

I have been using this exact setup in iTerm since the early 2010s, and I am so attached to that mode I genuinely cannot operate a terminal any other way. Anything that asks me to alt-tab to a separate window is dead to me. Warp picks the same pattern up natively, no extra plugin, no scripting. Just works.

2. Settings, the best of both worlds

One of the things people genuinely love about Ghostty is that all settings are just config. Edit the file, reload. Brilliant in theory. In practice, it is a bit of a hassle, especially when you cannot remember whether it is font-size or font_size or font.size.

Warp gives you both. There is a settings.toml you can edit by hand, version control, copy across machines. There is also a Cmd plus comma settings panel that is one keystroke away. Very similar to how VS Code ends up working in practice. After the initial setup, you almost never touch the json again, but it is there if you need to.

3. The blocks system

This is the bit nobody else has cracked properly. Warp organises every command and its output into a discrete atomic unit called a block. You can search within the output of a specific block, copy the entire result with one click, or share a link to a specific command execution. You can save blocks. You can manage them.

If you have ever scrolled through a thousand lines of terminal output trying to find that one stack trace from the build five minutes ago, blocks are a revelation.

Here is a real example of a shared block. One click, one URL, here you go:

That link lives at app.warp.dev/block/PvSacGW2Qd0TvI4wgUGJ1K. Anyone you send it to can read the command and the output without any local setup. A trivial git status here, but it could be anything. A Python script iterating through a dataset and printing its progress. A long kubectl describe for a knackered pod. A terraform plan you want a colleague to glance at before you apply. A failing test run you want pasted into a Jira ticket. One block, one link.

And locally, the same block is addressable too. You can pipe an entire block straight into your Claude Code or Codex session as context, no copy-paste-and-pray. The agent sees exactly what you saw.

Geek Corner

What is a block, really? Most terminals treat their buffer as one giant character stream. Your ls output, your npm test output, the prompt before it, the error after, all one undifferentiated text river. Warp parses where each command starts and ends and wraps the whole command plus output pair in a named, addressable, copyable object. Once you have done that, you can search inside a single output, share a URL to one specific run, jump back five blocks with a keystroke, or pipe a block as context into an agent. The whole "blocks" idea sounds trivial until you realise no other terminal had committed to it as the primitive.

4. Multi-line editing and the best autocomplete in the game

The input area in Warp behaves more like a proper editor than a classical terminal. Multi-line out of the box, syntax aware, no more wrestling with \ at the end of every line just to keep your sanity. Prefer vim keys? Switch the editor mode on. Like the default? Stay there. Cannot be bothered with either? You can just click around with the mouse, it works exactly like you would expect a modern editor to behave. Multi-line bindings, custom shortcuts, mouse selections, all live together happily.

And then there is the autocomplete. Genuinely some of the best I have used. It does not just complete the next argument, it inspects the command itself and tells you what each flag means as you type. Like having man open in a side panel without ever leaving the prompt. Ghost completions on Ghostty are nice too. The other one I really enjoyed back in the day was Fig, which was for a hot minute the best thing going as an alternative to oh-my-zsh. Then Amazon bought it, butchered it into Amazon Q CLI, and quietly stripped out most of the parts that made it brilliant. Sad chapter. Warp inherited that energy and ran with it.

5. Warp Drive

This is the killer one. No matter what kind of dev you are, you have a dumpyard. A mental scratchpad of commands, snippets, half-finished prompts, that one curl invocation you wrote at three in the morning and now cannot remember. Less so these days because the agents handle most of it, but still.

Warp Drive gives you a proper home for that. Notebooks for cheatsheets. Workflows for the slightly more sophisticated bits. You can author markdown documents that embed runnable commands, click the little play arrow next to a command in the markdown, and it runs in your terminal. Got a variable in there? No worries, Warp interpolates it from your environment automatically. Wire it up with Bitwarden and you have got yourself an absolute machine of a terminal.

It is easily the best place I have found for cheatsheets, command sheets, prompts and the general dumpyard of stuff. All searchable. All synced across machines if you want it to be. Now, I would not say it is the best knowledge management system going. My main flow is still Obsidian with an inbox folder feeding into a Zettelkasten structure for anything that needs to stick. But Warp Drive sits beautifully pre-inbox. It is where stuff lives before I have decided whether it deserves to be remembered.

And the agentic side of Warp lives inside Warp Drive too. Prompts, MCP servers (and if you are reading this and still wiring MCPs by hand, go read why mcporter eats this for breakfast), rules, skills, the whole bag, all managed through the same surface. I have not tested the teams feature properly but you can guess from the name. It is a shared drive of stuff (if you actually want version control over that, you would be better off with git, but for quick team sharing the integrated version is grand). My personal use is dumpyard, prompts, and saving blocks from point 3.

Feels like: that drawer in your kitchen that has the screwdriver, the takeaway menus, the spare keys and the half-dead batteries. Except this one is searchable, syncs to your laptop, and runs the screwdriver for you when you click it.

6. Session sharing

Warp lets you share a live terminal session. Genuinely think this is going to be table stakes in the agentic engineering age. Pair programming with another human, debugging with a colleague three time zones away, or just letting someone observe what your agent fleet is doing. Every terminal will have it by default within the year, mark it down.

If you are worried about any of this leaving your machine, by the way, you can switch sync off entirely. Privacy concerns are a fair conversation but the controls are there.

And now for the rebirth

Warp is now open source.

That is the line. That is the bit that flips the whole conversation on its head. The single biggest reason this thing was underappreciated, the closed-source veil, gone. The nerds who would not touch it on principle suddenly have nothing to grumble about. And honestly, some of the features they have shipped on the open-source rail are absolutely smashing.

Vertical tabs that actually work

Apart from cmux, no other terminal has done vertical tabs properly. Most of them treat the tab strip like a browser, horizontal, cramped, no information density. Warp went vertical and on top of that, recognised that in the agentic era, agents themselves are first-class primitives in the workspace.

Look at that. Claude Code icon. Codex icon. GitHub Copilot icon. All detected automatically. I did not configure any of it. The terminal knows what is running inside each tab.

Rich metadata in every tab

You can configure the tab view to show directory, last prompt, or a multi-line rich block with proper metadata.

That detailed view is the best attempt at vertical tabs I have seen anywhere. I will probably nick the layout idea for agents-in-a-box. The whole point of agents-in-a-box is being a TUI you can run inside any terminal emulator and treat as your IDE, so this kind of polished agent-aware list view is exactly what I have been after.

Status badges on agents

Each agent gets a little status pill. In progress, done, waiting. Clean DevX, no fluff. Tells you at a glance which of your seventeen parallel sessions actually needs you right now.

Inline code review

That tiny widget opens a proper code review window inline. Like a baby IDE living inside your terminal. Diff, accept, reject, the lot. Very neat for the "agent just wrote some code, do I want it" loop.

Notification inbox

This is the one that genuinely got me. A unified notification inbox that pulls events from every agent running in the workspace. Codex needs input. Copilot finished a task. Claude is waiting for permission. All in one place, all natively rendered. Across vendors. In one terminal.

That is the kind of thing that should have been obvious to literally everyone for the last two years, and somehow nobody else has done it.

Feels like: finally getting a single dashboard for fifteen agents you would otherwise be tabbing through one by one wondering which one is the muppet that needs your attention.

I am wedded to this now

That is genuinely the headline. After years of on and off, after the sign-in chapter and the closed-source grumbling, the open-source pivot has shifted Warp from "fine terminal with a half-decent agent feature" to "the most agent-aware terminal on the market". And because it is open source, I can finally hack on the bits that are still missing.

Things I would like to see (or build)

1. Tabs auto-coloured by folder hierarchy. Same folder, same colour. iTerm makes this easy with a tab_color() function you load in zsh, backed by a .tabcolour.sh script. I think one of the oh-my-zsh themes offered it too. There is almost certainly a version of this buried in my dotfiles. Now that Warp is open source, this could be a proper first-class feature rather than a shell-side hack.

2. TTS announcements for parallel sessions. When you have got fifteen, twenty agent sessions running, the notification inbox is great but a quick voice cue ("codex is waiting on you in the cargo workspace") would be the actual killer feature. Cheap to prototype now that the source is open.

That is the lot. If you have been sleeping on Warp because of the sign-in baggage or the closed-source position, give it another go. It is genuinely a different conversation now. And in twelve months when every other terminal has copied the agent-aware tab strip and the unified notification inbox, you can tell people you were on it first.