workflows VS vtebench

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]

https://github.com/alacritty/vtebench/tree/master

Hey - that's a good point. The thing about terminal benchmarks is that there are many of them, each focusing on a different aspect and producing different results. There's one by alacritty team[1] that we used in our initial tests[2], there's another ones mentioned in the comments above etc. When using vtbench, Warp performed much better than iterm, for example.

Ideally we'd ace all of them, but we're not there yet. Anecdotally, many of our users mention speed/performance improvements over other terminal apps a lot in our Discord!

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/vtebench

The diagram below shows the output of vtebench for scrolling in various terminals. For some reason Hyper generally could not handle running the benchmarks at all and did not terminate after a reasonable amount of time.

It's not easy to measure the performance of terminal apps. But I definitely notice a difference compared to let's say iTerm2, especially when scrolling through large files in Vim. Alacritty claims that it's faster than the competition using vtebench as a benchmarking tool. Kitty claims that the CPU usage is slightly increased compared to xterm (6-8% compared to 5-7%), but that scrolling is smoother.