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by netcraft 234 days ago
I love cursor, the tab completion and agent mode. But I really dislike vscode after using intellij for so many years. I really wish the underlying editor was better, or I could get cursor features in intellij instead. The editing of the files is mostly fine, but its everything else around it that a full IDE provides thats just so much better. Right now its intellij + claude code for me, and its fine, but I wish I could get the AI power of cursor in a better package.
2 comments
pbowyer 234 days ago
Intellij's tab-complete is coming along; it's hit and miss if it will work but for similar edits I'm finding it picks up the pattern quickly and I can tab - tab - tab to make them happen.

Still not up to Cursor standards though :)

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DefineOutside 233 days ago
I find Cursor's tab completion to be distracting enough with multi-line changes that I just disabled it, while I use IntelliJ's tab completion regularly.

Cursor's tab completion is better, but it doesn't seem to have a concept of not trying to tab complete. IntelliJ is correct half the time for completing the rest of the line and only suggests when it is somewhat confident in its answer.

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pbowyer 233 days ago
I agree about the multi-line blocks Cursor proposes. Like it gets the first two lines right and then after that it's nonsense. I'd rather it stuck with a single line change at a time, and let me press enter before it predicts again.
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Jcampuzano2 234 days ago
Building off of VSCode was probably Cursors silver bullet and the best decision they could have ever made.

It made migrating for everyone using VSCode (probably the single most popular editor) or another vscode forked editor (but at the time it was basically all VSCode) as simple as install and import settings.

I do not think Cursor would have done nearly as well as it has if it didn't. So even though it can be subpar in some areas due to VSCodes baggage, its probably staying that way for a while.

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netcraft 234 days ago
I dont disagree with anything you said. If I was in their shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing.

Maybe my complaint is that I wish vscode had more features like intellij, or that intellij was the open source baseline a lot of other things could be built on.

Intellij is not without its cruft and problems, dont get me wrong. But its git integration, search, navigation, database tools - I could go on - all of these features are just so much nicer than what vscode offers.

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