AMA: How we built Warp, a Rust-based terminal

Hey Rustaceans! We are the devs behind Warp\*! Ask us anything!

Warp is a new terminal—built almost entirely in Rust—with modern features like:

• Grouped commands and outputs
• Fully-fledged text editor for inputting commands
• Visual menus for history and tab completions

For more technical information about how we built Warp, check out our blog post: How Warp Works

To build Warp, we developed a UI framework in Rust that's rendered via the GPU. We started with Mac, but plan on targeting the Web (via WASM), Windows, and Linux in the future. Some of the interesting challenges we've worked on include:

• Building an editor that's a CRDT so it's set up to be collaborative
• Building a texture atlas of glyphs to render text efficiently
• Interfacing between Objective-C and Rust to create a Mac app with native features like auto-update, multiple windows, and notifications.

We are planning to open source both the app and the UI framework once they are more stable!

Ask us anything!

\* Yes, we know our name is also used for a popular library in the Rust ecosystem 😀 In fact, part of our stack uses it as a dependency!