How Warp Works

Warp is a high-performance terminal built with Rust, designed for increased productivity and ease of use. It features a full text editor for command inputs, visually grouped blocks for commands and output, and compatibility with popular shells like Bash, ZSH, and Fish. The foundation of Warp includes the UI, blocks, and input editor, which will enable future features such as infinite history, real-time collaboration, and shared environment variables. The development team chose Rust due to its speed, strong community support, and platform compatibility. They opted for GPU rendering over CPU rendering to achieve better performance, especially when handling complex UI elements. Warp's custom UI framework was built in Rust, allowing it to be rendered on various platforms, including the web via WebGL. Warp also supports blocks, a feature that separates commands and their output into separate grids for easy management. The terminal uses precmd and preexec hooks from shells like Zsh and Fish to parse metadata about each command and create new blocks within Warp's data model. The input editor is built as a full-fledged text editor, enabling features such as multiple cursors and selections. It uses a SumTree data structure for efficient querying of buffer text and display text at any given point in the editor. The operation-based CRDT design allows for real-time collaboration within the editor. Looking forward, Warp aims to leverage its platform compatibility and performance capabilities to implement features like infinite history, real-time collaboration, and shared environment variables.