Warp is a Rust-based, AI-powered cloud-native terminal with a fully-fledged text editor that works like an IDE. Warp also offers the functionality to create and share workflows within teams via Warp Drive. kitty is a simple, modular, and hackable terminal designed for power keyboard users. kitty supports all modern terminal features and only uses OpenGL for rendering everything. With a powerful framework for scripting, kitty offers the functionality to extend its functionality via small terminal programs. Both Warp and kitty offer a broad set of features, some similar and some unique, resulting in a unique user experience and distinct learning curves.
Warp’s Value Propositions
AI Integration
Warp AI is an explicitly opt-in feature that enables users to debug errors, explain outputs, write scripts, or provide a walk-through of an entire workflow. Users can also use natural language to prompt Warp AI from within the terminal. Warp AI is also capable of providing command suggestions and can help users write commands that they might be unsure about.
Mouse and Cursor Support
Warp offers a robust set of mouse and cursor support features including configuration of mouse scroll events, session navigation via mouse click, smart selection via double-click, and auto-complete suggestion selection via a mouse click just to name a few. Warp even allows you to change the appearance of the cursor.
Warp Drive
Warp Drive is a workspace within the Warp terminal that allows users to save workflows and then share those workflows with a team. All workflows that are stored in the Warp drive sync immediately and are then made available across the team instantly ensuring that everyone always has access to the latest version of the workflow.
Command Correction
Warp’s built-in command correction catches typos and forgotten flags in previously run commands and then provides auto-correct suggestions. Command correction also provides suggestions to mitigate general console errors. Warp’s command correction can even determine the missing permissions required to run a command and then provide suggestions of commands with permissions added.
Secret Redaction
Warp’s Secret Redaction feature automatically attempts to redact secrets and sensitive information in terminal output including passwords, IP addresses, API keys, and PII. This feature detects sensitive information using default regex patterns and then simply uses lock icons to redact the information. Warp also allows you to create and add custom regex secret patterns.
FAQ Section
Is Warp a good terminal?
Warp is an excellent terminal and is especially useful for working with workflows that need to be shared with a team. It also provides AI-based command suggestions, command correction, secret redaction, and vastly superior mouse and cursor support than any other terminal out there.
What is the difference between kitty and warp terminal?
Warp is a terminal with AI built-in and allows teams to collaborate and share commands for onboarding and incident response. It offers nearly everything kitty has to offer and then some.
kitty is mostly targeted toward power keyboard users and is very limited when it comes to mouse and cursor support features but excels when it comes to layout and font control.
Is Warp better than kitty?
Warp is a much more robust and powerful tool compared to kitty. The Warp terminal provides more unique and default features such as AI integrations and collaborative tools than kitty. Customization is also much easier with the Warp terminal via the prompt, theme, and numerous other options.
What is similar to warp dev?
iTerm2, kitty, Impulse, Teleport, and Termius are somewhat similar to Warp, but there are no equal or direct alternatives to the bundle of features that Warp has to offer including AI integration, command correction, Warp Drive, and mouse and cursor support.
Warp vs kitty Feature Expansion
| Feature | Warp | kitty |
|---|---|---|
| AI Integration | Fully integrated Warp AI that explains output from the terminal, suggests error fixes, automatically writes scripts for you by taking input via natural language, walks you through installation setups, and shows examples of how to achieve a desired output or how a command can be written to achieve a specific task. | kitty doesn't offer any AI Integrations but with the help of kitty terminal programs called kittens, a limited set of features such as terminal suggestions can be implemented and extended within a kitty terminal. For features that are currently unavailable, custom kittens can be developed based on your specific needs. |
| Notifications & Audible Bell | Warp can initiate customizable desktop notifications if you are away from the app, which allows you to quickly refocus when a sufficiently meaningful event takes place in the Warp terminal. Notification can also be configured to initiate after a set time period or when a command completes and you need to enter a password to proceed. | kitty does have the ability to set up desktop notifications but the feature is very limited and doesn't provide any sound feedback. It uses extensible escape code (OSC 99) to implement notifications, the setting up of which is fairly complicated compared to the simple configuration that Warp offers using UI. |
| Secret Redaction | Warp's Secret Redaction, using a list of regex patterns, detects sensitive data in the output of your terminal and then replaces the sensitive data on the screen with lock icons and even prevents the sensitive data from being copied. You can click on the lock icon to display a tooltip to reveal the secret. | kitty doesn't have anything similar to the Secret Redaction features that Warp has but it does contain Mark functionality, which highlights the texts in long-running command outputs. In theory, the Mark feature can be extended using kitten to redact in addition to marking any specific text using regular expressions. |
| Markdown Viewer | Warp has the ability to display Markdown files directly in a split pane. Warp treats any locally stored file with .md or .markdown extension as a Markdown file. You can also tweak the configuration in Warp to allow Warp to open markdown files with an external editor or Warp's built-in markdown viewer. | kitty doesn't have any built-in support for opening markdown files in a split pane. The only method that kitty offers is to use kitty's terminal graphic protocol to integrate third-party packages such as mdcat to open and view any markdown files formatted with images within the terminal itself. |
| Sessions | Warp allows you to configure sessions via a beautifully crafted UI. Warp's Launch Configurations supports saving a configuration of windows, tabs, and panes to open later. Session Navigation enables you to easily navigate to any session in Warp. Session Restoration automatically restores the window and tabs from your previous session. | kitty allows you to create a session file with which you can control the tabs, terminal window layout, working directory, startup programs, and more but with several limitations. One of the limitations is that the launch command when used in a session file cannot create new OS windows or tabs. |
| Keyboard Shortcuts | In addition to a plethora of built-in keyboard shortcuts, Warp comes equipped with some Warp-specific keyboard shortcuts including Warp Essentials, Block, and Input Editor shortcuts. Warp also offers you the ability to create your own personal customizable shortcuts. In Warp, you also have the ability to remap existing keyboard shortcuts. | kitty also comes with numerous built-in keyboard shortcuts and offers its users the ability to map actions to any key press or mouse action using a configuration file. Copy/Paste actions, Debugging actions, Layout actions, Mark actions, and several Misc. actions can be mapped to any key or combination of keys. |
| Command History | While running, Warp isolates the history of each shell session and combines the history upon closing. Hitting ↑ in the input editor brings up the history. If you type anything in the command history, Warp will use fuzzy search to filter commands and turn regular text to bold if there is a match. | kitty supports a basic command history search. To access the history you can use the ↑ keyboard to bring up the history. kitty also allows you to search the history in more detail with the ctrl+shift+h shortcut, which opens the command history in a pager program. |
| Syntax and Error Highlighting | Warp supports syntax highlighting by coloring each part of a command to help differentiate between sub-commands, options/flags, arguments, and variables. Warp also highlights errors in commands that are typed within the input editor. Warp automatically recognizes each part of the command as you type and syntactically highlights them | kitty doesn't come with any built-in syntax and error highlighting feature like Warp does, rather kitty allows its users to manually add such configurations via shell plugins. |
| Shell Integration | Warp supports bash, fish, zsh docker exec, gcloud compute ssh, eb ssh, and poetry shell integration as subshells, which are interactive shell sessions that are spawned and run within the context of an existing, running shell. Warp will prompt you and invite you to "Warpify" the subshell which makes all of the modern IDE features of Warp available in that subshell. | kitty has the ability to integrate closely within common shells, such as zsh, fish, and bash to enable features such as jumping to previous prompts in the scrollback, and viewing the output of the last command in a pager such as less. |
| Split Panes | The Split Panes feature allows you to divide a tab into multiple rectangular panes, each of which is a unique terminal session. You can split panes to the right with CMD-D and down with SHIFT-CMD-D or in any direction by right-clicking on any pane. | kitty comes built-in with seven different pane layouts: Fat, Grid, Horizontal, Split, Stack, Tall, and Vertical. By default, all layouts are enabled and you can switch between layouts using the ctrl+shift+l key combination. |
Conclusion
Warp is much more powerful out-of-the-box and offers an AI-powered cloud-native terminal solution with seamless collaboration and extensive customization. While kitty can be customized and extended to include a robust set of features, Warp offers powerful default features such as team collaboration, AI Integration, sound alerts, secret redaction, markdown viewer, syntax and error highlighting, and configurable sessions.
