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 his 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.”
