workflows VS upterm

Hi HN,

I’m Aloke, one of the co-creators of commands.dev (https://www.commands.dev/) and an engineer at Warp (https://www.warp.dev/).

Commands.dev is a curated, open-source collection of popular terminal commands that lets you quickly search for hard-to-remember terminal commands by title, tag, and description. Each of these pages are also indexed by Google to provide a consistent, well-formatted alternative to the variety of sources these commands turn up now, like StackOverflow.

As an engineer who uses the terminal frequently, I often have trouble remembering the exact command I want to execute if it’s not easily searchable within my terminal. Some commands that I run infrequently don’t match up with the underlying task they perform, which makes it even harder to find. For example, to undo my last git commit, I have to search for “git reset”, which I never remember because I’m always thinking “undo”ing my last commit instead of “reset”ing.

We built commands.dev so that there would be a centralized place to quickly find and search commands based on their name, description, or category. If you are a Warp user, these commands are also integrated directly into Warp as a feature we call Workflows (https://docs.warp.dev/features/workflows) so that you can quickly search and execute them directly from the terminal.

These commands are open-source (https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows) and we would love contributions to make commands.dev even more useful. So far, we’ve already had 85 commands created by 22 unique contributors.

I’m excited to hear what you think of commands.dev! Our team sincerely hopes this will become a go-to tool on the Internet to consult when developers need to remember a difficult command, either directly on the site or by discovering a commands.dev page when searching Google for help with a command.

If you’re interested, join Warp’s Discord (www.warp.dev/discord) and follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/warpdotdev).

It's a good question, one that we are discussing a bunch.

We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now.

You can see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400 TLDR;

As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go. The community has already been contributing new themes [https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes]. And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. [https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows]

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!

Suprised that no one has mentioned this, but upterm seems to be exactly what you're describing--a terminal emulator that shows a drop-down list of suggestions with explanations. Sadly, only a few commands are supported, and it's no longer being worked on.

Currently haven't gone as far as making some kind of dedicated shell component though. I find it important that normal shells can work fine with in Extraterm. There was a project from a few years back which also mashed GUI/emulator together with the shell side, Upterm. SSH and containers tend to be the natural enemy of having your own shell though.