Warp Terminal — terminal-only fork

A fork of warpdotdev/warp stripped down to just the terminal.

Auto-update is gone, the AI/agent surfaces are gone, telemetry never runs, and all user state lives next to the binary so the build is genuinely portable. The one thing it adds is saving and streaming output to files, in place of the cloud sharing it removed.

Upstream licensing is unchanged: warpui_core and warpui are MIT (LICENSE-MIT); everything else is AGPL v3 (LICENSE-AGPL).

---

What changed

Area	Effect
Auto-update	No version checks, no download/install code, no update UI, no "out of date" banner
AI / agents	Permanently disabled at the gate; all AI UI and settings pages removed
Onboarding	First launch goes straight to a terminal — no welcome slides, no sign-in/skip screen
Telemetry	Never initialises; no RudderStack traffic and no retry loop
Settings	9 sidebar entries removed (plus MCP servers, reachable only from the Agents group); 6 remain
Shell bootstrap	Works even when the bootstrap script is unsigned or carries Mark-of-the-Web
Storage	Portable — everything beside the binary in data\
Version	Tagged …​.terminal_NN instead of …​.stable_NN
File capture	Cloud "Share block/session" replaced by six commands that save or live-stream output to a local file
Tool panel	Agent conversations and Warp Drive tabs removed; a Session history tab added in their place

Only the warp-oss binary is buildable from this tree. The stable, preview, dev and local binaries call warp_channel_config::load_config!, which shells out to an internal warp-channel-config generator that is not part of the open-source repo. warp-oss is the one entry point with a fully hardcoded ChannelConfig (app/src/bin/oss.rs), and it already ships telemetry_config: None, crash_reporting_config: None and autoupdate_config: None.

---

1. Auto-update removed

Deleted from app/src/autoupdate/: channel_versions.rs and changelog.rs (the only two network callers), mac.rs, linux.rs, windows.rs (all download/install code), plus mod_tests.rs, linux_tests.rs, windows_tests.rs.

app/src/autoupdate/mod.rs is now an inert stub keeping only the type surface the rest of the app references. get_update_state() always returns AutoupdateStage::NoUpdateAvailable, start_polling() is a no-op, and apply_pending_update() always returns false so shutdown proceeds normally.

UI removed from app/src/workspace/view.rs:

• the tab-bar overflow menu that hosted Current version is… / Install update / Update Warp manually (this was the window-caption button)
• the avatar-menu update entries and the avatar's red notification dot
• the tab-bar "Update Warp" pill
• render_autoupdate_banner_element() → returns None unconditionally. This is the function that produced the non-dismissible "Your app is out of date and some features may not work as expected" banner, driven by the server's soft_cutoff.
• the AutoupdateState_UpdateReady keybinding context flag
• constants TAB_BAR_PILL_WIDTH, PILL_FONT_SIZE, UPDATE_READY_TEXT, VERSION_DEPRECATION_BANNER_TEXT, VERSION_DEPRECATION_WITHOUT_PERMISSIONS_BANNER_TEXT

Also: app/src/settings_view/main_page.rs — the version widget's Relaunch / DownloadUpdate / CheckForUpdate actions are no-ops. app/src/changelog_model.rs — the changelog fetch is gone; it hit the same release server.

The TUI updater (crates/warp_tui/src/autoupdate.rs) is untouched — it belongs to a separate binary that this build does not produce.

2. AI and agents disabled

app/src/settings/ai.rs — AISettings::is_any_ai_enabled() returns a constant false, and the backing setting's default flipped to false for the few call sites that read the field directly.

This one gate is consulted by ~200 UI sites and is projected into the keybinding context system as flags::IS_ANY_AI_ENABLED, so every AI command-palette entry and keybinding predicated on that flag disappears with it.

The AI code is still compiled, just unreachable. app/src/ai alone is ~540 files; deleting it would cascade through workspace/view.rs (~28k lines), the settings-view event enum and lib.rs startup. That was judged not worth the risk.

3. Settings pages removed

Each page's should_render() returns false, which removes it from both the sidebar and the content area through the single choke point SettingsView::filtered_pages() in app/src/settings_view/mod.rs — so deep links (warp://settings) and search cannot reach them either.

Page	File
Account	main_page.rs
Agents (umbrella)	ai_page.rs
Code (umbrella)	code_page.rs
Cloud platform (umbrella)	environments_page.rs, platform_page.rs
MCP servers	mcp_servers_page.rs
Referrals	referrals_page.rs
Warp Drive	warp_drive_page.rs
Teams	teams_page.rs
Billing and usage	billing_and_usage_dispatch.rs
Shared blocks	show_blocks_view.rs

In app/src/settings_view/mod.rs the nav_items list was trimmed to match, the Scripting insert was re-anchored (it positioned itself relative to the now-absent SharedBlocks), and #[default] moved from Account to Appearance — Account was the default landing section and would otherwise have opened a blank pane.

Remaining: Appearance, Features, Keyboard shortcuts, Warpify, Privacy, About.

4. Avatar drop-down trimmed

user_menu_items() in app/src/workspace/view.rs now offers only Settings, Keyboard shortcuts, Documentation and View Warp logs.

Removed: What's new, Feedback, Join our Slack community, Sign up, Upgrade, Billing and usage, Invite a friend, Log out.

The command-palette mirrors of those entries were removed too, from add_overflow_menu_items_as_editable_binding() in app/src/workspace/mod.rs — otherwise they stayed reachable by typing.

5. Onboarding and login bypassed

app/src/root_view.rs — auth_onboarding_state resolves to AuthOnboardingState::Terminal unconditionally on native builds. This bypasses the agent onboarding slides, the post-onboarding sign-in / skip screen (app/src/auth/login_slide.rs) and the Auth screen.

Side effect worth knowing: onboarding was also what wrote default_session_mode = "agent" and a full agent execution-profile block into settings.toml. Skipping it means a fresh profile contains only appearance defaults, and new tabs open as terminals.

6. Telemetry never runs

app/src/server/telemetry/mod.rs — send_batch_messages_to_rudder() returns early when ChannelState::is_telemetry_available() is false.

Nothing was ever transmitted before either: the OSS channel ships telemetry_config: None, so the write key and root URL are empty and every request failed in the HTTP builder. This removes the pointless retry loop, which was logging builder error roughly every 30 seconds.

7. Shell bootstrap: execution policy

app/assets/bundled/bootstrap/pwsh_init_shell.ps1 now sets process-scope Bypass whenever MachinePolicy and UserPolicy are not Restricted. Previously it only relaxed the policy when the effective policy was Restricted.

Why this matters: Warp's released pwsh.ps1 is Authenticode-signed; a self-built one is not. If the source tree came from a downloaded archive it also carries Mark-of-the-Web. Under RemoteSigned that combination makes PowerShell refuse to dot-source the bootstrap, and the terminal hangs forever on "Starting PowerShell Core…" with the error only visible on the shell's stderr, never in warp-oss.log.

Process scope only — nothing is written to machine or user policy, and Group Policy still wins if it is set.

8. Portable storage

crates/warp_core/src/paths.rs adds portable_root(), using the convention VS Code uses: if a directory named data sits next to the executable, all user state goes there. Opt-in and reversible — delete the folder and the app falls straight back to the per-user profile, which is left untouched.

Redirected: config_local_dir(), data_dir(), state_dir(), cache_dir(), gui_config_local_dir(), warp_home_config_dir(). Everything else (themes_dir(), tui_config_local_dir(), tui_state_dir(), the log directory) derives from those.

warp-oss.exe
data\
  config\   settings.toml, keybindings.yaml, user_preferences.json, cli\
  state\    warp.sqlite, logs\, telemetry queue, index snapshots
  cache\
  .warp\    workflows, skills, .mcp.json

Roaming and local are collapsed into one state\ — a portable install has no roaming profile to sync with. Upstream splits these across two roots (%LOCALAPPDATA% and %APPDATA%), which is easy to miss.

9. Build profile and version

Cargo.toml — [profile.rlto] gained strip = "symbols". Note this buys almost nothing on Windows/MSVC, where debug info goes to a separate .pdb rather than into the .exe; it is kept for ELF/Mach-O targets.

The version string is set at build time via GIT_RELEASE_TAG (read through option_env! in crates/warp_core/src/channel/state.rs) — no code change. The channel segment is capture group 3 of the parser's regex in crates/channel_versions/src/lib.rs, and ParsedVersion discards it, so .terminal_01 parses and orders identically to .stable_01.

10. Theme

app/src/themes/default_themes.rs — dark_theme() background restored to 0x000000FF. Upstream changed it to 0x050505FF, which looks washed out on OLED.

11. Save and stream output to files

The one feature this fork adds. It replaces Share block... and Share session..., which uploaded to Warp's cloud and are therefore dead here, with six commands that write the same content to a local file.

Command	Binding name	Writes	Keybinding
Save output to file...	Save Output	The block's output, as rendered	Ctrl+Shift+S
Stream output to file...	Stream Output	The same, then keeps appending while the command runs	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S
Save block to file...	Save Block	Command line and output	unbound
Stream block to file...	Stream Block	The same, live (only offered while a command is running)	unbound
Save session to file...	Save Session	Every block in the session	unbound
Stream session to file...	Stream Session	The same, then follows the session across block boundaries	unbound

The two keybindings act on the selected block(s) if there is a selection, otherwise on the last block. Stream degrades to Save when nothing is running. With more than one block selected the labels pluralise and the session commands are hidden.

All six are registered as editable bindings, so they appear in the Terminal section of the Resource Center's keyboard shortcuts panel and in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, where the four unbound ones can be given a key. No default chords were invented for them — the modifier space around Ctrl+Shift+S is already crowded.

New: app/src/terminal/file_capture.rs — scopes, filename-pattern expansion and FileStream, which appends when the rendered text still starts with what it last wrote and rewrites from the recorded offset when it does not (a block's tail can be redrawn in place). app/src/terminal/file_capture_tests.rs covers it with 13 tests.

Changed:

• app/src/terminal/view.rs — the six actions, the wakeup tick that pumps live streams, and session_capture_context_menu_items, one builder shared by all four menus that used to offer session sharing (block right-click, the block "..." button, the input-area right-click and the empty-session menu).
• app/src/terminal/model/block.rs — command_and_output_with_secrets_unobfuscated() and command_line_with_pwd(), which prefixes the command with the directory it ran in, prompt-style, using each block's own recorded pwd and shell type.
• app/src/tab.rs and app/src/workspace/view.rs — the same two session commands on the tab right-click menu, resolving the tab by index so saving another tab's session does not steal focus.
• app/src/terminal/settings.rs — three String settings, SyncToCloud::Never.
• app/src/settings_view/features_page.rs — those three settings under Settings → Features → Session, one text field each.
• app/src/terminal/view/init.rs — all six registered as editable bindings, named terminal:{save,stream}_{output,block,session}_to_file.
• app/src/resource_center/utils.rs — the six names added to TERMINAL_KEYBINDINGS so they land in the panel's Terminal section instead of Fundamentals.
• app/src/resource_center/keybindings_page.rs — build_bindings dropped every binding without a trigger, which would have hidden the four unbound captures. It now keeps those six by name.

Filename patterns

toml key	Default
terminal.file_capture.output_pattern	{command}_{timestamp}.log
terminal.file_capture.block_pattern	{command}_{timestamp}.log
terminal.file_capture.session_pattern	{session-or-command}_{timestamp}.log

Tokens: {command} (first block's command), {timestamp} (now), {finished-timestamp} (last block's finish time), {session-or-command} (the tab name if you renamed it, otherwise the first command). Values are sanitised for the filesystem, and the expansion only seeds the save dialog — the final name is yours. Clearing a field in the settings page restores its default.

Captured files contain secrets in plaintext. The terminal masks them on screen; these files do not. That is deliberate — the point is a faithful transcript — but treat the output as sensitive.

12. Tool panel: Session history

The tool panel (left panel) had four tabs. The two cloud/AI ones are gone and a new one takes their place:

Tab	Shortcut	Status
Project explorer	Alt+1	unchanged
Session history	Alt+2	new
Global search	Alt+3	unchanged
Agent conversations	Alt+2	removed
Warp Drive	Alt+4	removed

Session history lists the commands run in the active session. Each row is three lines — the command, its working directory, then how long it took, its exit code if it failed, and how much output it produced:

cargo build --release
~/projects/app
1m 04s · 612 lines · 38.6 KB

cargo test
~/projects/app
22.1s · exit 101 · 88 lines · 4.2 KB

Failed commands get the same treatment the block list gives a failed block: a red left stripe over a 10% wash. Running commands appear immediately with a ticking duration and growing size. Rows are in terminal order, oldest first.

Exit codes are shown only for commands that failed, in decimal. On Windows a code of 256 or more also gets its hexadecimal form — exit -1073741819 (0xC0000005) — because anything past the 0-255 range a shell can report is a Windows status code, which documentation and search results give in hex. The decimal stays signed while the hex is the unsigned reinterpretation, since those status codes overflow i32. The cutoff is EXIT_CODE_HEX_THRESHOLD in app/src/terminal/session_history.rs.

Selection

Selection is shared with the block list: select in either and the other highlights and scrolls to match. Rows use the block list's own modifier rules — Shift-click extends a range, Ctrl-click toggles one in or out, a plain click selects one. Double-click hands the keyboard to the terminal.

Copy and capture shortcuts work while the panel is focused: Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+S and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S, acting on the shared selection. They are registered under the terminal's own binding names, so Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts shows one row per command, not two.

Filtering

The query field holds the regex and case-sensitive toggles and a clear button, laid out like the find bar and the block filter. Below it are five toggles in two groups:

• scope — command, working directory, output. Independent; command and directory start on, output starts off because it is the only one that has to read every block's text. With it on, rows show a match count.
• on-select — what happens when you select a row:

filter-on-select	find-on-select	behaviour
off	off	scroll to the block only
on	off	open the block filter toolbar, pre-filled
off	on	open the find bar, scoped to that block
on	on	apply the filter silently, and open the find bar

These fire only for a plain click in the panel. A modified click is building a selection, and a selection made in the terminal must not silently filter the output of a block you merely clicked on there.

Where the code lives

New: app/src/terminal/session_history.rs (the row snapshot type, output size measurement, and the duration/byte formatting, with unit tests in session_history_tests.rs) and app/src/workspace/view/session_history.rs (the panel itself).

Changed:

• app/src/workspace/view.rs — compute_left_panel_views no longer offers the two removed tabs; restoring a session onto one falls back to Project explorer.
• app/src/workspace/view/left_panel.rs — the SessionHistory tab, its toolbelt button (Icon::History) and its render/focus wiring.
• app/src/terminal/view.rs — the panel-facing API: session_history_entries, block_output_size, reveal_block_from_session_history, the filter/find entry points, and select_block_from_session_history, which shares the block list's modifier rules via apply_modified_block_selection so the two cannot drift.
• app/src/terminal/block_list_element.rs — a SessionHistoryRow menu source carrying a row-relative position, so the block menu can open over the panel.
• app/src/workspace/mod.rs — eight bindings in the panel's context, repeating the terminal bindings' names and descriptions so the keybindings page dedupes them into one row each.
• app/src/settings/code.rs — code.editor.show_session_history.

The ToolPanelView::WarpDrive and ::ConversationListView variants still exist, and their panel views are still compiled. They are unreachable: keeping them lets tab state persisted before the removal still deserialize instead of being discarded.

13. Housekeeping

Compiler warnings introduced by the removals were cleaned up: unused imports and variables removed, five dead constants deleted, and genuinely unreachable code (the changelog parsing methods, the settings-umbrella machinery) annotated with #[allow(dead_code)] and a comment explaining why. app/src builds warning-free.

New files: script/windows/portable/install.ps1 and uninstall.ps1 — optional convenience only (Start Menu shortcut, Unblock-File, optional PATH entry). The portable folder runs without them.

---

Building (Windows)

Two scripts wrap everything below. Prefer them — the flags are easy to get wrong, and getting them wrong produces a binary that looks fine on the build machine and is broken everywhere else.

.\script\windows\build-portable.ps1            # derives the next tag and builds
.\script\windows\package-release.ps1           # zips it, hashes it, writes notes
.\script\windows\package-release.ps1 -Build    # both in one step

build-portable.ps1 refuses to finish unless the linked binary reports the tag it was asked for and links as PE subsystem 2, which is the only direct evidence that release_bundle applied. package-release.ps1 takes the version from the exe rather than a parameter, so an archive cannot claim a version the binary does not have; it audits the staged folder for user data before archiving, and asks claude to write the release notes from the commits since the previous release tag. Neither script creates a tag or pushes anything.

The rest of this section is what those scripts do, and why.

Prerequisites: Rust 1.98.1 (pinned by rust-toolchain.toml), VS Build Tools with the MSVC toolchain and a Windows SDK, CMake, protoc, NASM. LLVM/libclang is not needed — bindgen only runs when the target OS is macOS (crates/warpui/build.rs).

$env:CARGO_FULL_PROFILE = 'rlto'      # app/build.rs stages the Windows DLLs here
$env:CARGO_BIN_NAME     = 'stable'    # picks app\channels\<name>\icon -> the exe icon
$env:WARP_APP_NAME      = 'WarpOss'
$env:GIT_RELEASE_TAG    = 'v0.2026.08.08.00.00.terminal_01'

cargo build -p warp --profile rlto --bin warp-oss --features release_bundle,gui

Do not pass --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc. app/build.rs stages conpty.dll, dxcompiler.dll, dxil.dll and x64\OpenConsole.exe into target\<profile>\, which does not include the target triple — omitting the flag puts the exe in the same place and the layout builds itself.

release_bundle is required, not optional: it enables rust-embed's debug-embed, without which assets are read from absolute build-machine paths and the binary is not portable. It also sets windows_subsystem = "windows" so no console window flashes.

Staging a portable folder

warp-oss.exe            conpty.dll        dxcompiler.dll   dxil.dll
msvcp140.dll            vcruntime140.dll  vcruntime140_1.dll
pwsh.ps1  icon.ico      x64\OpenConsole.exe
data\                   <- presence of this folder enables portable mode

The first four come from target\rlto\ (already staged by build.rs); the VC++ runtime DLLs come from app\assets\windows\x64\. Fonts, themes, images and shell bootstrap scripts are embedded in the exe — nothing else to copy.

Run Unblock-File over the staged folder if the source tree came from a downloaded archive, otherwise the exe trips SmartScreen on first run.

---

Building (Linux and macOS)

script/portable/build-portable.sh            # derives the next tag and builds
script/portable/package-release.sh           # stages and archives it
script/portable/package-release.sh --build   # both in one step

Same contract as the Windows pair: the build script owns the flags and verifies them against the linked binary, and the package script reads the tag out of the binary rather than taking it as an argument. Artifacts are warp-terminal-<tag>-linux-x64.tar.gz and warp-terminal-<tag>-macos-arm64.tar.gz, each holding the binary, a data/ marker, and on Linux an optional install.sh that adds a desktop entry and icon under $HOME.

Three differences from the Windows build, all deliberate:

• No gui feature. gui = ["voice_input"] does not gate the GUI front-end, so a terminal-only build has no use for it, and leaving it out keeps ALSA off the runtime dependency list. release_bundle is still required, for debug-embed.
• CARGO_PROFILE_RLTO_DEBUG=0. ThinLTO with debuginfo needs more than 16 GB and the final rustc gets OOM-killed — on a 16 GB VM and on GitHub's runners alike. Line tables are the dominant consumer. The cost is that panics on these platforms carry addresses rather than file:line; Windows keeps debug = 1.
• macOS binaries are ad-hoc codesigned (codesign --sign -). An unsigned arm64 Mach-O is killed by the kernel, so this is required rather than cosmetic. Only the binary is signed and no bundle resources are sealed, so the app writing into a sibling data/ at runtime cannot invalidate the signature. No .app is produced: app/src/bin/oss.rs embeds its own Info.plist through embed_plist, so the bare binary already carries CFBundleIdentifier and the rest.

Linux runtime dependencies

The binary dlopens its windowing and graphics libraries rather than linking them, so ldd lists only seven entries and a missing one shows up as a failure to open a window rather than as a load error. On a minimal Ubuntu install:

sudo apt install libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxi6 libxcursor1                  libxkbcommon0 libxkbcommon-x11-0                  libwayland-client0 libwayland-egl1 libegl1                  libvulkan1 mesa-vulkan-drivers fontconfig

A Vulkan driver is needed as well as the loader — a present libvulkan1 with nothing behind it fails the same way. script/portable/install.sh checks for all of these and prints the apt line for whatever is missing, so it is worth running once even if you do not want the desktop entry.

Linux build dependencies come from script/linux/install_build_deps. If the checkout sits on a network or VM share, set CARGO_TARGET_DIR to a local path first — building into a share is slow, and if that share is also a Windows checkout it mixes two platforms' artifacts in one profile directory.

.github/workflows/build-portable.yml runs both on ubuntu-24.04 and macos-14, on a pushed v0.*.terminal_* tag or on manual dispatch. Windows is not in CI: the local PowerShell script already does it in about twelve minutes with a warm cache.

Building on Ubuntu 24.04 rather than 26.04 is deliberate — the older glibc means the artifact also runs on newer distributions, which the reverse would not.

---

Known limitations

• Session history is per-session. It reads the live block list, so it does not survive a restart, it swaps when you change tab, and blocks trimmed by terminal.maximum_grid_size drop out of it. The sqlite commands table would persist across restarts but stores no output size, which is one of the columns the tab shows.
• Output-scope filtering is the slow one. Matching against command and directory is free; matching against output has to read every block's text. It is off by default for that reason.
• Not zero-footprint. app/src/app_services/windows/mod.rs calls register_uri_handler() at startup, writing the warposs:// handler to HKCU\Software\Classes. Per-user, but outside the portable folder.
• The Resource Center panel still has community entries — its footer offers Join our Slack community and Feedback, and its main page has an Invite a friend to Warp card that dispatches to the (now removed) referrals page.
• The binary is ~350 MB. Roughly 61 MB is embedded assets; the rest is compiled code, including the unreachable AI stack. Deleting app/src/ai is the only real lever.
• Unsigned. SmartScreen will warn on first run of a copy that carries Mark-of-the-Web.
• Upstream warnings remain in crates/warpui_core (8) and crates/warp_terminal (1). They predate this fork and were left alone.