Warp Review 2025: Wait, Terminals Can Do THAT Now?

OK so this is going to sound dramatic but I need to say it: I had no idea what I was missing. I have been using the default macOS Terminal app for two and a half years. Before that, I used whatever came with Ubuntu. I thought terminals were supposed to look like the 1980s. Black background, green text, a blinking cursor, and a vague sense that you should know more than you do. That was just... the deal, right?

Then a coworker shared their screen during a pair programming session and I saw Warp for the first time. I literally interrupted them mid-sentence to ask "what is that?" Their terminal had blocks. It had colors. The input area was at the bottom, separate from the output, like a chat app. They typed a hash symbol followed by English words and the terminal turned it into a real command. I downloaded Warp that afternoon and I have not opened Terminal.app since.

This review is from the perspective of someone who is not a terminal power user. I am a frontend developer, about three years in, and I use the terminal every day for Git, npm, Docker, and occasional SSH. I am not running custom tmux configs or writing bash scripts for fun. If that is you -- someone who uses the terminal as a tool rather than a lifestyle -- I think you are going to find Warp as surprising as I did.

The First Thing I Could Not Believe: Blocks

In every other terminal I have ever used, the output is just... a wall of text. You run a command, text appears, you run another command, more text appears below it, and it all blends together in one continuous scroll. If you want to find the output of a command you ran fifteen minutes ago, you scroll up and squint and hope you recognize the right chunk of text.

Warp organizes everything into blocks. Each command and its output is a distinct, visually separated unit. Think of it like text messages in a chat -- every command-response pair is its own bubble with clear top and bottom boundaries. You can click on a block to select it. You can collapse it if the output is long and you are done with it. You can copy just one block. You can search within a specific block. You can even share a block as a URL that generates a web page with the command and output formatted nicely.

I know this sounds like a small thing, but it changed how I work in the terminal more than any other single feature. During a debugging session last week, I ran about thirty commands trying to figure out why a Docker container would not start. In my old terminal, that would have been an impossible-to-navigate scroll of mixed commands and error messages. In Warp, I could collapse the irrelevant blocks, jump to the ones that had errors, and focus on what mattered. It probably saved me twenty minutes on that one session alone.

The Second Thing: The Input Area Is a Real Editor

This one blew my mind. In every other terminal, you type at the prompt, which is wherever the cursor happens to be after the last output. The prompt is inline with everything else. If you need to edit a long command, you use the arrow keys to inch through it character by character. Multi-line commands? You add backslashes and pray.

Warp puts the input area at the bottom of the screen in its own dedicated zone, like the compose box in a messaging app. And this input area is actually a proper text editor. I can click to place my cursor. I can select text with the mouse. I can use Cmd+D to select the next occurrence of a word, just like in VS Code. I can write multi-line commands with proper indentation. There is syntax highlighting that color-codes commands, flags, arguments, and file paths in real time.

The first time I used Cmd+Left to jump to the beginning of a line in the Warp input and it actually worked, I pumped my fist. I am not kidding. That shortcut has been muscle memory for me in every other app, and the fact that traditional terminals do not support it has been a low-grade annoyance for my entire career. It sounds trivial until you experience it working correctly for the first time.

The Third Thing: AI That Actually Helps

I was skeptical about this one. "AI-powered terminal" sounds like marketing fluff. But Warp AI is actually useful in ways I did not expect.

The most common way I use it: I press Ctrl+Shift+Space (or just type # followed by what I want in English) and describe what I am trying to do. "Find all .png files in this directory larger than 500KB" -- and Warp generates the actual find command with the right flags. "Show the last 5 Git commits by this author" -- and it writes the git log command. I would estimate I use this three or four times a day, usually for commands I know exist but cannot remember the exact syntax for.

The error debugging is even better. When a command fails and spits out an error, a little "Debug with AI" button appears. Click it, and the AI reads the error, explains what went wrong in plain English, and suggests a fix. Last week, a Docker build failed with a cryptic error about a missing GLIBC version. I clicked the debug button and got back: "Your base image is Alpine Linux, which uses musl instead of glibc. Either switch to a Debian-based image or install glibc compatibility." That would have taken me 15 minutes of googling. It took 3 seconds.

The free plan gives you 100 AI queries per month. I have never come close to running out. For someone like me who uses it a few times a day, 100 is plenty. Power users might hit the limit by mid-month, but the core terminal features work without AI, so it is not like the app stops functioning.

Autocompletion That Knows Things

I used to think tab-completion was the peak of terminal intelligence. Press tab, get file names. Fancy stuff, right?

Warp's autocompletion knows about the specific command you are typing. When I type "git checkout " and start typing a branch name, it suggests branches from my actual repository. When I type "docker run " and start adding flags, it shows a dropdown of available flags with descriptions of what each one does. When I type "npm run " it lists the scripts from my package.json. This is not just tab-completing file paths -- it is context-aware suggestion that understands the tool I am using.

The dropdown shows a brief description next to each suggestion, so when I am looking at "--no-cache" versus "--no-deps" versus "--no-interaction", I can read what each flag does without opening a man page. For someone who does not memorize CLI flags for fun, this is a significant quality-of-life improvement. I feel less stupid using the terminal now, and I think that is a feature worth celebrating.

How It Looks and Feels

I am going to be honest: part of why I stuck with Warp is that it is gorgeous. The default theme has a dark background with these subtle green accent colors that make it look like a terminal from a sci-fi movie, except it is actually usable. The font rendering is crisp. The scrolling is smooth. There is a satisfying visual rhythm to the blocks stacking up as you work.

You can customize everything. Themes (there are hundreds, and the community makes more on GitHub), fonts, opacity, blur effects, prompt styling. It integrates with Starship and Oh My Posh if you already have a custom prompt configured. I spent about an hour customizing my setup when I first installed Warp, and I have not touched it since. It just looks right.

The performance is notable too. Warp is built in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering, which means it stays smooth even when a command dumps thousands of lines of output. I ran a test where I catted a 50,000-line log file and Warp did not stutter. My old Terminal.app would have frozen for a few seconds on that same file.

The Workflows Feature

Workflows are saved command templates that you can parameterize and share. For example, our team has a deployment workflow that runs a sequence of Git, Docker, and kubectl commands with variables for the environment name, Docker tag, and Kubernetes namespace. Instead of remembering the exact sequence every time, I open the workflow, fill in the variables, and Warp runs the commands in order.

There is also a library of community-contributed workflows for common tasks. I found workflows for setting up new Node.js projects, SSH key management, Docker cleanup routines, and AWS CLI operations. It is like having a snippet library but for the terminal, which is something I did not know I needed until I had it.

Now for the Honest Frustrations

I love Warp, but I have to be real about what bothers me.

The login requirement is weird. When you first install Warp, it asks you to create an account and sign in. For a terminal app. The thing where you type commands that might include passwords, API keys, and SSH connections. Yes, Warp says they do not log your commands and the app works offline after initial login, but the principle feels off. A terminal should not need to know who you are. My coworker who recommended Warp to me specifically warned me about this, and it almost stopped me from trying it. I am glad I got past it, but I understand why some people will not.

It is closed-source. You cannot inspect the code to verify what it does or does not send to Warp's servers. For security-conscious developers or anyone working with sensitive infrastructure, this is a real concern, not a hypothetical one. iTerm2 is open source. Alacritty is open source. Kitty is open source. Warp is not, and that matters.

No Windows support yet. I work on a Mac so this does not affect me, but half my team uses Windows and they cannot use Warp. It creates an inconsistency in our workflow that I do not love. The Warp team has said Windows is coming, but as of January 2025 it is not here.

Some things break. I tried using tmux inside Warp and the block model got confused. Certain interactive CLI tools that do not play nicely with Warp's rendering system. These edge cases are getting fewer with each update, but they exist.

The Team plan costs 22 dollars per user per month. For a terminal. I struggle with this one. The free Individual plan is great and complete for personal use, but the team features -- shared workflows, collaborative sessions, shared environment variables -- cost more than many entire SaaS products. That is a hard sell to a manager who needs to approve it, and I think Warp needs to prove more value at the team level before that price feels justified.

How Warp Changed My Terminal Habits (A Story)

Let me tell you about last Tuesday. I was trying to set up a new development environment for a project that required Node 20, Python 3.12, and a specific version of PostgreSQL. In my old terminal life, I would have had four browser tabs open with different installation guides, copying commands one at a time, scrolling past walls of installation output to see if anything went wrong.

In Warp, I typed "#install nvm and use Node 20" and it gave me the commands. I ran them, and the output went into a block that I could collapse once I confirmed it worked. Then "#install Python 3.12 using pyenv" -- another collapsed block. The whole setup took 15 minutes instead of the 40 it usually takes, because I was not context-switching between browser and terminal, and the AI handled the "what is the exact command for this?" friction that usually slows me down.

When the Postgres installation failed (a permissions issue), the debug button explained the problem and I fixed it in 30 seconds. Previous me would have spent 10 minutes on Stack Overflow.

This is what I mean when I say Warp changed my relationship with the terminal. It went from a tool I used with mild anxiety to one I use with confidence. I actually enjoy working in the terminal now, which is a sentence I never thought I would write.

Warp vs. iTerm2: An Unscientific Comparison

I used iTerm2 briefly before settling on Terminal.app (yes, I know, judge me), and a lot of people I respect swear by it. So how does Warp compare?

iTerm2 is free, open source, battle-tested over 15+ years, has zero privacy concerns, and works with literally everything. It is the Toyota Camry of terminals: reliable, practical, no surprises. Warp is the Tesla: exciting, modern, occasionally confusing, requires you to log in, and some people have strong opinions about the company behind it.

For features, it is not even close. Warp has blocks, the modern editor, AI, intelligent autocompletion, and workflows. iTerm2 has none of that. iTerm2 does have split panes, profiles, triggers, and configurability that Warp mostly matches but with a different philosophy. iTerm2 says "here is a powerful terminal, configure it however you want." Warp says "here is a modern terminal experience, and it works great out of the box."

If you value open source and privacy above everything: iTerm2. If you want the most modern, feature-rich terminal experience available right now: Warp. That really is the whole decision.

Should You Try It?

Yes. Absolutely yes. Even if you end up going back to your old terminal, you should try Warp for a week just to see what a modern terminal can be. The free plan has everything you need for personal use. The worst that happens is you see a few features you did not know existed and you go back to your familiar setup with slightly higher expectations.

If you are a junior or mid-level developer like me who uses the terminal every day but has never bothered to optimize the experience: Warp is going to feel like upgrading from a flip phone to a smartphone. That is genuinely how big the jump feels.

If you are a senior developer with a carefully tuned tmux + Neovim + custom shell setup that you have been perfecting for a decade: Warp probably is not for you, and that is fine. You have already solved the problems Warp solves, just in a different way.

If you are on Windows: sorry. Not yet. Keep an eye on it.