Warp Setup, Download and First Run
An exclusive resource for students of Arun's Claude Code Course.
Your computer already came with a terminal, and Claude Code runs inside it perfectly well. This is the one used throughout the course.
- https://www.warp.dev
It runs exactly what your own terminal runs, so nothing you learn here is Warp only. What it adds is that most of it can be done by clicking. It is free, and free here is not a trial that runs out.
Search for Warp and warp.dev comes up first. It already knows whether you are on a Mac, on Windows or on Linux, so there is nothing for you to choose. On a Mac you drag it into your Applications folder the way you would install anything else.
The first-run choices, and what to pick
Tab position. Put them down the side. There is more room there, and you can read the whole name of every one.
Panels. File Explorer and Conversation History are the two worth having. There is a third called code review, which shows what has changed in a project before you save it, and that is a developer's tool rather than yours today.
Colour scheme. Pick one, and there is a switch that follows your computer, so when your Mac goes dark in the evening this goes dark with it.
The sign in. Skip it. An account only carries your settings onto a second computer, and if you want one later it uses the Google or GitHub account you already have.
Warp's own AI. Skip that too. It wants either a key or a paid plan, and the AI you came here for is Claude Code, which runs inside any terminal at all. Choose to set it up later and go through.
Two settings worth changing straight away
Set Warp as your default terminal. Open the Warp menu and choose it. Nothing visible happens, and in a few minutes it saves you a step, because Open in Terminal appears when you right-click a folder.
Font and line height. Settings, then Appearance. Put the terminal font somewhere around 15 or 16, and the line height at about 1.4. A line of text with a bit of air above and below it is easier to come back to after you look away.
Making your project folder
The panel on the left is what the whole install was for. Those are the folders on your machine, and you move this window into any one of them by clicking. Warp asks permission the first time.
Right-click, new folder, and call it something like Claude-Projects. Everything you build lives inside it. A year from now there are going to be a lot of these, and a folder you can find again is a project you can pick back up.
Right-click any folder and there is Open in Terminal, which is there because of the setting you turned on. If you cannot see it on a Mac, go to View and switch on Show Path Bar.
Then type one word, claude, and it asks whether you trust this folder.
Two more things worth switching on
A second window. Command and T opens another one, and each is a separate conversation, so Claude can work on two different projects side by side.
Notifications. Claude Code is not a chat window that answers in a few seconds. Give it a real job and it can be gone for four or five minutes, sometimes ten, and you are not meant to sit and watch it. Turn these on and it comes and finds you when it is done.
Why the folder matters more than tidiness
Whichever folder your terminal is sitting in when you start Claude Code, that folder is the only place Claude Code can write. Not your whole computer. That one folder, and anything inside it.
So the folder you just made is a fence, and you are the one who put it up. Glance at the line just before the cursor before you start, because it is telling you where the fence is.
Do not put your projects inside a folder that syncs to the cloud. iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive. They are wonderful for documents and wrong for this. Git keeps thousands of tiny hidden files inside your project folder and rewrites them constantly, a sync app copies files the moment they change, and it ends up copying them halfway through being written. None of that announces itself. It looks like a project that worked fine for a week and then began behaving strangely.
See Where You Stand
This resource is one piece of a much bigger system.
Take the free Claude Code Readiness Quiz. It is 15 short situations, scored out of 100, and it tests how you handle a job rather than what you know about a tool, so you can take it without ever having opened Claude Code.
Take the Claude Code Readiness Quiz →15 situations · Scored out of 100 · Free