The Void IDE, Open-Source Alternative to Cursor, Released in Beta | Hacker News Reader

The Void IDE, Open-Source Alternative to Cursor, Released in Beta

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32 pointsrmason11 comments

"Backed by Y Combinator, Void IDE is a fork of Visual Studio Code."

Having used Cursor and Windsurf for projects, and more recently having tried OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, and Claude Code (winner: Claude Code) to build another project, I've mostly landed on the opinion that the "Yet Another VS Code Fork" strategy is an evolutionary dead end.

It turns out that I like my IDE, and that (as far as I've seen) there are virtually no benefits to the wholesale replacement of said IDE. Integration with popular IDEs is welcome, but now that I've experienced both, thinking of repositories rather than replacement AIDEs as the hub for AI assistants just makes so much more sense.

Actually I found using just VS Code with Roo/Cline and/or Windsurf etc. along with OpenRouter to be just as good as Cursor, if not better.

Cursor seems to be really good at doing the TAB completion and it seems to work well... until it doesn't. Sometimes it's totally sleeping and not even giving me the option. And sometimes its too late. And these days I found it to be intrusive enough to be annoying and making changes that I didn't want, and ended up turning into a joke.

I immediately switched to VSCode and kept most of the AI assistance at a much lower cost. And some automation is not present - but it doesn't get in my way either.

Cline seems to be the best of them all, but pay-per-token can get pretty expensive pretty fast if you actively use the agentic mode.

You can use Cursor + Roo/Cline to get the best of both, although you need to tweak the pane layout and keybindings a bit. That's what I did for a few months before switching to Zed.

I can't imagine what features anyone could add to VSCode that would convince me switch to it. I've used it, I hated it, I switched back. These AI enabled forks feel incredibly lazy to me.

After using Claude Code I am convinced that future is no IDE. Claude Code runs on your terminal and has access to all terminal tooling. It can even write short scripts for future repetitive tasks. I even use it for running shell commands where I don't remember the exact command.

Roo/cline also has this with the advantage of also having an ide.

Agreed. I tried cline but roo code has been massively better at same tasks. The added features are also really nice.

Why not both? Claude Code's agent with Cursor's UI harness would be killer, I think. The current CC IDE integration is a poor approximation, imo. The Cursor diff experience is good, as is its tab complete. Claude Code's agent is far superior though. I just want all the things.

I'm tired. I started hoping github copilot would gain ground just to use vscode again, because Cursor editor experience is a severe downgrade over current vscode (slower, issues with extensions, no settings sync)

GitHub Copilot is open source

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