I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform.
It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.
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.
At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work great for me
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
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.
- 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 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.
But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:
[1]: https://www.gpui.rs
