Warp

I write software for myself. I don’t try to think too hard what’s useful to other people; I write a lot of things and see what I like. Some experiments are useless, they seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don’t end up using them.

That’s fine: let a thousand flowers bloom.

One of those experiments was vim slime. At the time, it was a quick hack, something neat … I almost didn’t bother; it seemed “obvious”. It ended up being the most popular blog post I ever wrote, and probably the piece of software I wrote that’s used by the most people.

When I wrote warp, I felt the same way that I did about vim slime: quick hack, fun, but no big deal. I just had too many hosts I could SSH into and no easy way to manage them; I wanted to pick from a list, something that I could put in git and edit by hand.

It seemed so “obvious”, nothing worth showing off, and I didn’t advertise it. People just saw me using it and starting to ask “what is that?” and “can I install that?”.

Warp is just one of the many “vim pickers” I made; I have others, of varying usefulness. They are part of vim dotfiles and involve buying into a lot of my customizations. So, I made an effort and picked the warp “logic” apart, cleaned it up a bit, and I am now sharing it with the world.

The details are in the repo.