Improve UI, reduce clutter

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#4,894 2 comments 8 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Domain
frontend

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by reviewing the terminal block and autocomplete UI implementations alongside the linked mockup; the work is done only after the team agrees on a narrower design and the resulting command/output boundaries and UI styling are implemented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement triaged
Dupe Check
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:

Screenshot 2024-05-08 at 11 05 44
How important is this feature to you?

4

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

None

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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PR metrics pending

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