Terminals

A terminal emulator draws a grid of characters, passes your keystrokes to a shell and obeys the escape sequences programs print to move the cursor or change colour, conventions that go back to hardware terminals such as DEC’s VT100 (1978). Because it only sees characters, a classic terminal doesn’t know where one command’s output ends and the next begins.

Shell integration fixes that: the shell prints marks such as OSC 133;A (prompt start) and OSC 133;D (command finished, with its exit code), so the terminal can jump between commands, show failures and copy one command’s output. Warp goes further and keeps each command and its output as a separate block. Newer terminals also render on the GPU, and some, such as kitty and Ghostty, show images through the kitty graphics protocol.

Terminals are also where command-line coding agents run. Warp now ships its own agent and gives third-party CLI agents such as Claude Code and Codex first-class support, so the terminal has become a place to supervise agents as well as to run commands.