Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort.

FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:

https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html

Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.

I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window.

IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI.

I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix, kakoune and Zed.

Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls

I'd like to retract my critique.

I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances.

I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident.

For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension. Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions.

I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago.

Thanks for your question :D

it's rare to see someone circle back with a retraction, even on HN. Kudos

From the top of my head in no specific order

- Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without clicking and checking.

- Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors -- totally unexpected).

- Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin, but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't do what they say they do.

- It often offers installing some plugins, and I've absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or if I don't.

I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.

I think the left toolbar icons do have tooltips, but they show up pretty slowly for me (2-3 seconds).

Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts. It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example.

Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.

I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory.

That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.

There are some Enterprise plan shenanigans, so cli is not an option.

At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work great for me

> just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now.

I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year.

I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either.

Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.

How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.

It's written from scratch in Rust. It's super fast, polished, etc. A world of difference compared to VSCode.

Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though)

[1]: https://www.gpui.rs

Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.

What about the text editing part?

it's fast

I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I never notice any performance or key input latency with VSC.

If you work in a team there are some pretty good remote collaboration tooling built into Zed.

And it can load staggeringly large files without falling over on itself.

These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.

Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents.

But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.

Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests for user decisions.

Antigravity is build on top of VSCode, I meant something completely different, not just a "feature" of something else.

It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE built from the ground up for this paradigm shift regardless of tech stack.

> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now