Can an outdated Terminal be taught new methods? Fig, an organization out of Y Combinator’s S20 class, has raised a $2.2M seed spherical to show that it could actually. Their purpose: increase (however don’t attempt to exchange) the command line terminal that so many individuals use daily and make it extra highly effective and simple to make use of — particularly for groups.

The first of those augmentations is autocomplete. Start typing your command and it’ll reply with a narrowing drop down of issues that may full it, saving you the keystrokes, time and mind juice required to completely keep in mind the myriad terminal instructions you may use all through your work day.

If you’re altering directories, for instance, it could actually assist end paths as you sort; with Git, it could actually maintain observe of your most not too long ago tapped branches. If you end up punching in the identical Google Cloud or AWS instructions 10 instances a day, it’ll put them a faucet away. The autocomplete performance tied to every command line instrument might be tweaked to your liking and shared with the broader group. Everything might be completed with out taking your palms off the keyboard, for many who are inclined to keep away from reaching for a mouse.

Autocomplete is a good function, although maybe not sufficient to gasoline a complete firm — however it’s simply the first step, says the workforce. Fig founder Brendan Falk tells me the purpose is to construct out an “app ecosystem” for firms that use the terminal as a key a part of their each day workflow, charging groups a month-to-month subscription charge. They’ve constructed a platform for shareable Markdown-based apps that may a consumer can launch from the terminal, giving them a visible interface that may be stuffed out and adjusted earlier than piping output again into the terminal. Autocomplete, as they see it, is simply the foot within the door.

“Suddenly I’ve written a little script, but it’s visual, it’s discoverable, I can share that with my team,” says Falk. “Building these internal tools for your development team is really where we want to go here … things like sharing scripts, sharing deployment workflows, sharing monitoring commands. All of this boilerplate stuff that is spread throughout your system, that really is focused within your terminal and should be contained within the terminal.”

Here’s a tweet from Fig exhibiting that visible interface in movement:

The workforce didn’t initially set out with their sights set on the terminal. Falk tells me that he and co-founder Matt Schrage had pivoted from thought to thought for months, constructing out issues like a private CRM, prediction markets and a inventory alternate for creators. “We had all of the bad college kid ideas,” Falk says, “but they were just not problems we had. They were ideas, as opposed to problems people had.”

A bunch of pivots later, says Falk, they realized that every pivot had them again within the terminal typing the identical instructions, following the identical difficult workflows to spin up a brand new venture. “The terminal came out in 1978 and hasn’t really changed since.” notes Falk. “Yet literally every hardware engineer, software engineer, data scientist is using it.” Could that be the issue they went after?

It appears there’s an viewers for it; whereas Fig continues to be in personal beta, Falk tells me they at present have tens of hundreds of customers on the waitlist to get entry.

This spherical was led by General Catalyst, and backed by YC, SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins and a bevy of present/former tech execs together with Adobe CPO Scott Belsky, Stripe CPO Will Gaybrick, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, former Github CTO Jason Warner, former Heroku CEO Adam Gross, Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen and Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz.

Fig works with macOS’ built-in terminal app out of the field, however they’ve additionally acquired add-on integrations to make it work inside issues like VSCode, Hyper and iTerm. It gained’t work on Windows or Linux simply but, however the workforce says assist for them is on the roadmap.