How Warp Works

1

upterm

The reason you don’t see a feature like blocks (with the exception of Upterm) in most other terminals is because the terminal has no concept of what program is running, or really of anything that’s happening within the shell. At a high level, a terminal reads and writes bytes from a pseudoterminal to interact with the shell. This technology is very antiquated--the shell essentially thinks it is interacting with a physical teletype terminal even though they haven’t been used in practice in over 30 years!

#SSH #Terminal Tools #DevOps Tools 3 social mentions

2

Alacritty

The VT100 spec represents the viewport in terms of rows and columns which naturally leads to most terminals using a grid as their internal data model. We started by forking Alacritty’s model code, which was well suited for us because it was already written in Rust and is tailored to be as performant as possible. Nathan Lilienthal and Joe Wilm, two of the maintainers of Alacritty, were early supporters of Warp and were extremely gracious in reviewing early design docs and providing their technical expertise.

#Remote PC Access #Remote Control #Terminal Tools 56 social mentions

After a very brief experiment with Electron, we quickly pivoted to building in Rust and rendering directly on the GPU using Metal (Mac’s GPU API). As a low-level systems language, Rust was appealing because of its speed and also its strong developer community: using crates.io for package management was a breeze and our entire team (none of whom had written Rust before) onboarded very quickly with tools like Rustlings. More importantly, Rust has a pretty extensive platform support--allowing us to write in a single language and then build for Mac, Linux, Windows, and ultimately the web by compiling to WASM.

#Game Engine #Game Development #3D Game Engine 38 social mentions