Improve UI, reduce clutter

[beorn]

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Describe the solution you'd like?

Warp's UI adds a lot of clutter to the terminal output making it hard to see where the boundaries between commands and their output is (vs using a regular prompt). It's really hard to quickly scan to see what the commands are. I've made a simple mockup to show some ways to reduce clutter:

• historical prompt
  • don't repeat it if it's the same as the previous command
  • faded it out more
  • put it on the right so it doesn't compete with the command
• differentiate better what is a command by
  • giving it a hanging "bullet" (which can be the usual % or # to show user/root status)
  • giving it a bit of vertical spacing before the output starts
  • moving the prompt to the right so it doesn't compete with the commands
  • slightly tweaking the background color of the command area

Some other ideas not shown (but see comment below for more/better ideas):

• perhaps using alternating background colors for each block (command+output) instead of lines to separate them - this will make each command+output block stand out and you may not need yet another background color for the command vs output
• when a block is selected, the background color change is rather a lot - perhaps just use a box border for this
• the auto-complete UI popup is using the same background color as the terminal - it would be better to have all UI use a unified "UI color" that's different from the background and foreground (perhaps the selection color) so it stands out more

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm put off by the clutter warp adds vs using a regular terminal+shell. Warp has the opportunity to reduce clutter vs the traditional solution, but I think it does the opposite. The structure of repeated command+output doesn't "pop out" easily from a cursory glance, but requires detailed scanning.

The UI for autocomplete blends in with the content - it doesn't stand out. I'm often typing commands without actually looking at the command line - I need to know when autocomplete kicks in as it requires me to look at the UI to make selections instead of just typing blindly, so it would be great if the UI "grabs my attention" more.

Additional context

See current vs proposed ideas:

How important is this feature to you?

4

Warp Internal (ignore) - linear-label:39cc6478-1249-4ee7-950b-c428edfeecd1

None

[dannyneira]

Thanks for the detailed feature request @beorn!

To anyone else interested in this feature, please add a 👍 to the original post at the top to signal that you want this feature, and subscribe if you'd like to be notified.

[beorn]

Some more examples. To make commands more easily to differentiate from their output it may be nice to keep (at least historical) commands in the same "UI color" instead of being so colorized...

Not shown here, but other ideas:

• Some other meta information (time to execute, user/group id, cwd, git status, env vars, etc...) could be visible in a pane upon hovering over the command, or the prompt "bullet".
• Sections with backgrounded commands could stay pinned to the top but folded, so you can go back and see what their current output is. You could perhaps do away with multi-command-runners this way.
• For consistency's sake, the last/current command line block should probably also be shown in "highlight/focus color" - as this is where keyboard input will be directed. (Currently only blocks except the last can be clicked on to be highlighted.)