Once upon a time, a few decades ago, powering on a computer presented you with a blinking cursor and not much else. You couldn’t get anything done without memorizing commands, mastering their syntax, and typing them into a text-centric environment known as a command-line interface. And then, starting in the mid-1980s, that daunting requirement was swept away by mouse-driven graphical user interfaces such as Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows.

But even though the command line long ago fell out of mainstream consciousness, it never went away. Like the old-timey straight-edge razor, it’s an antiquated, no-frills tool that retains a devoted following.

Most people who still swear by it are developers and other highly technical types. They prize its efficiency and the access it offers to a computer’s lowest-level capabilities—the kind of stuff a graphical interface shields us amateurs from to prevent us from getting into trouble. And so plenty of people get some of their most vital work done by typing into an interface that’s remained largely unchanged over the years.

“The way I describe [the command line] to people who don’t know what it is is that it’s the black screen with the green text that hackers use in movies to diffuse bombs and do stuff like that,” says Zach Lloyd, the founder and CEO of a New York City-based startup named Warp. He’s spent way more time thinking about the interface’s fundamental nature than the average geek, because Warp’s goal is to modernize it without destroying the stripped-down virtues that have kept it relevant for so long.

Lloyd’s principal credential as a technologist is the seven years he spent at Google. He spent most of this time there overseeing development of its Google Sheets spreadsheet, another durable computing staple that the company helped drag into the 21st century by making it web-based and inherently collaborative.

What Warp has built is a new terminal app—software that lets you interact with your own computer, and others on the network via the command line. (Both Windows PCs and Macs still ship with a terminal, even if typical users never venture near it.) The very name “terminal” is a throwback to the days when people used computing devices called terminals to log into minicomputers and mainframes.

“When you’re running a terminal, you’re running a program that is basically emulating the behavior of a piece of hardware that hasn’t been manufactured since, I don’t know, the 80s,” says Lloyd. “You’re opening up a portal to how computers used to work. And from a usability perspective, it’s not a very good tool.”

Currently available only for Macs, Warp’s software is a snappy native MacOS app written in Rust, a programming language prized for its ability to produce high-performance code. It improves on existing, bare-bones terminal experiences by introducing a bunch of conveniences, some of which resemble ones available in current text editors—another venerable class of tool still in wide use by techies. “We’re just trying to make the interface less weird, and work more like a modern app,” says Lloyd.

For example, as you hit a key, Warp provides auto-complete suggestions of commands you may be intending to type. It divides everything you do into blocks of text, allowing you to copy chunks of your interactions with a single click rather than painstakingly highlighting strings of text. A permalink feature lets you share replays of your sessions, which is handy for showing a coworker how you accomplished something. There are themes for customizing the software’s look and feel—not a big whoop in most software categories, but still a novelty in command-line world.

Oh, and then there’s artificial intelligence. Like every other tech company with a pulse, Warp is hopping on the generative-AI bandwagon inspired by the arrival of ChatGPT. It’s a particularly logical trend for the company to embrace: For all the mind-bending power of OpenAI’s chatbot and its offshoots and rivals, using them involves typing requests and getting text back in return, just as you do in a terminal session.

The emergence of AI bots is “fascinating for us, because all of these large language models are essentially command-line interfaces,” says Lloyd. “And the terminal, the thing that we’re working on, is kind of the ideal way to interface with them.”

In their traditional form, command-line interfaces assume you already know how to use them. They’re also so unforgiving that a single typo prevents them from understanding you (or, occasionally, leads them to perform some task you didn’t intend, with potentially disastrous consequences).

Based on OpenAI’s GPT technology, Warp’s Warp AI bot is designed to facilitate terminal interactions in several ways. Rather than memorizing every command and option the command line puts at your disposal, you can tell the bot what you’re trying to accomplish in plain language and have it craft the precise instruction you need. If you do type something and get an error message, it can help figure out what went wrong. Instead of comprehending only one command at a time, it grasps the history of your session and takes it into account as it guides you, much as ChatGPT understands the flow of a conversation.

“When we started the company, generative AI stuff was not a thing,” says Lloyd. “It’s become a core part of our strategy, because of the speed of the technology advances over the past few years.”

BUILDING A BUSINESS

Warp, which is officially still in beta, isn’t sharing any hard stats about how many users it’s attracted since it launched in July 2021. But it’s well-positioned to go viral among the technologists who live inside terminal apps.

“To state the obvious, developer tools are generally used in the workplace,” says Andrew Reed, a partner at VC titan Sequoia. “And in general, people’s terminals are up every day. Therefore, people know if you have a brand new, very unique-looking terminal. People see it and notice. So it kind of spreads within companies that way.”

Sequoia is optimistic enough about Warp’s prospects that it recently led the company’s $50 million Series B round of funding. Other investors include three high-profile tech CEOs in a position to appreciate the value of a good terminal program: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Figma’s Dylan Field, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff (who also happens to be Lloyd’s second cousin).

While the free version of Warp provides quite a bit of functionality, the company’s future depends on convincing companies to pay to deploy the app across their organizations. This week, it’s taking a step in that direction by releasing a preview of a collaboration feature known as Warp Drive. It also plans to ship Linux and browser-based editions of the app by the end of this year, with a Windows version following in 2024.

The mere act of having decided to reinvigorate the command-line interface has gotten Warp off to a promising start. At the same time, it’s shown how much more there is to do, in a way that might not have been so obvious if the company hadn’t taken a fresh look at such a quietly essential piece of technology.

Warp has “already accomplished the goal of [answering the question] ‘How do you make the terminal 10X better?”” says investor Field. “There’s basic workflows they still have to get in there. But it’s a really, really good product if you’re a developer.”