Rethinking the Terminal

The Warp AI agent takes the guesswork out of working at the command line. We show you how to build a simple website with one prompt.

- By Ali Imran Nagori

The terminal is the heart and soul of any Linux system.

Initially, I didn't like the blue-black terminal screen. It looked intimidating, cryptic, and, frankly, a bit boring. As I got used to the terminal, I realized that the terminal is where the real magic happens.

After years of using the terminal, I still found myself typing the same commands, forgetting obscure flags, and consulting man pages for help until I recently stumbled upon Warp [1], an AI coding and terminal agent. Warp has changed the way I do things. From command suggestions to building an entire project, Warp is now my one-stop solution.

Warp is not just another fancy shell wrapper. Warp incorporates the intelligence of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude into its toolkit. It's a modern terminal with the look and feel of a modern IDE, which makes it as pleasant as it is powerful.

In this article, I'll walk you through some of Warp's features that made me switch over and never look back. While I'm at it, I'll show you how I used Warp to build a simple portfolio website.

Plain English with Clear Explanations

When working in a terminal, I often forget the exact syntax for complex commands. With Warp, I just type what I want to do using natural language commands. For example, I can give it a simple statement in plain English such as “List all hidden files in the current directory,” and Warp will respond by suggesting the following command:

ls -la .*

Better yet, Warp breaks down what each part means (see Figure 1). Thanks to Warp’s clear explanations, Warp eliminates the need for guesswork or googling.

Context-Aware Suggestions