Ability to run Warp with administrator rights on Windows

[Harquell]

Pre-submit Checks

• I have searched Warp feature requests and there are no duplicates
• I have searched Warp docs and my feature is not there

Describe the solution you'd like?

Running a terminal session with administrator rights on Windows is a requirement for some tasks.

Right now, I wasn't able to find any way of running either warp as an admin with all sessions within the window running with elevated privileges nor any way of running a tab as an admin.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I can't use Warp as my main terminal as long as this is not implemented on windows.
Unlike any unix based system, you can sudo things or change the user of the session.

On windows this is simply not doable.
It makes it impossible to run system wide scripts within Warp.

Additional context

(For example, the Windows Terminal can be run either as current user or admin as shown in the screenshot)

Operating system (OS)

Windows

How important is this feature to you?

4

Warp Internal (ignore) - linear-label:39cc6478-1249-4ee7-950b-c428edfeecd1

None

[dannyneira]

Hi @Harquell You can currently right-click on the Warp icon and run as administrator. To do this by default, you can right-click > open file location to see the shortcut, then right-click the shortcut > properties > compatibility > Run this program as an administrator.

CleanShot.2025-04-04.at.15.48.28.mp4

Warp will not show the "Administrator" on the tab, but you can verify that it's an elevated powershell with the following command:

[Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Claims | Where-Object { $_.Value -eq "S-1-5-32-544" } | Select-Object -First 1 | ForEach-Object { Write-Output "PowerShell is running with Administrator privileges" }; if (-not $?) { Write-Output "PowerShell is running without Administrator privileges" }

I hope this helps! Please let me know if this fits your use case, if not please explain how what you want is different.

To anyone else interested in this feature, please add a 👍 to the original post at the top to signal that you want this feature, and subscribe if you'd like to be notified.

[lemon-sundae]

Hi @Harquell You can currently right-click on the Warp icon and run as administrator. To do this by default, you can right-click > open file location to see the shortcut, then right-click the shortcut > properties > compatibility > Run this program as an administrator.
CleanShot.2025-04-04.at.15.48.28.mp4

Warp will not show the "Administrator" on the tab, but you can verify that it's an elevated powershell with the following command:

[Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Claims | Where-Object { $_.Value -eq "S-1-5-32-544" } | Select-Object -First 1 | ForEach-Object { Write-Output "PowerShell is running with Administrator privileges" }; if (-not $?) { Write-Output "PowerShell is running without Administrator privileges" }

I hope this helps! Please let me know if this fits your use case, if not please explain how what you want is different.

To anyone else interested in this feature, please add a 👍 to the original post at the top to signal that you want this feature, and subscribe if you'd like to be notified.

I don't think this is the case. Opening the start menu and then right-click to choose to run as administrator is quite inconvenient, while running under administrator priviledge by default is unafe and improper. I think it is better to add an option in Warp's taskbar context menu

or somewhere in the Warp window.

[Harquell]

Hi @dannyneira
Thanks for the reply.

Hi @Harquell You can currently right-click on the Warp icon and run as administrator. To do this by default, you can right-click > open file location to see the shortcut, then right-click the shortcut > properties > compatibility > Run this program as an administrator.

While warp is probably running with administrator privileges, the shell is still not elevated.
When trying to run a chocolatey upgrade command for example, I get the following error :

[dannyneira]

@lemon-sundae heard @Harquell, I dont think we can add that option of "Run as Administrator" to the taskbar, but I imagine it could be in Warp, like w/Windows Terminal.

As a stopgap, I recommend you look into Sudo for Windows, this may help with the use case of elevating for specific commands, but not by default.

[lemon-sundae]

@lemon-sundae heard @Harquell, I dont think we can add that option of "Run as Administrator" to the taskbar, but I imagine it could be in Warp, like w/Windows Terminal.

This is good, thanks.

As a stopgap, I recommend you look into Sudo for Windows, this may help with the use case of elevating for specific commands, but not by default.

I am already using sudo for Windows actually, but it does not work well with Warp. When sudo-ed, it just run the program seperately and the new window automatically closes after it's done, just like double-clicking a command line program in the explorer. Which means I cannot see the outputs. I wonder if there is a possible sulution to enhance this behavior.

[dannyneira]

@lemon-sundae in the Windows System > For Developers > Sudo settings, configure the applications to run Inline. This should allow them to run/stay within Warp so that you see the output.