Is there a technical limitation of the extension APIs or is it easier to “market” a new editor than an editor extension?
While adoption for individuals and small companies might be easy, a lot of bigger places already have other integrations with existing IDEs and displacing those for yet another IDE will be a hard ask
>Microsoft also made its extension marketplace closed-source
Ehm, Open VSX Registry exists.
There are quite a few extensions and AI editors offering the snippet-like 'tab autocomplete', but Cursor are the only ones afaik who have nailed the full file no-look 'tab-tab-tab-tab autofix' workflow, with what I assume must be a combination of monaco/vscode hackery similar to what you're doing, and their own tuned model (i.e. not an off-the-shelf llm). Is this the piece you're going after when you say 'all of Cursor's core features', or are you primarily focused on something else?
On the topic of extensions, as an occasional user of Cursor I noticed that they've always been able to quite happily 'import' extensions you've already downloaded to a local VSCode profile, which makes sense, but they've occasionally struggled to use the same marketplace APIs for searching for extensions. I'm not sure what you're hoping for here, but I'd suggest you settle for that approach as a starting point. Also be conscious that you're dealing with Microsoft, so be mindful of things like their brand guidelines[0], and avoid telling the world that you're 'hacking away' at their APIs. These things may seem insignificant and it's true that they probably won't cause you a problem unless you're successful.
Lastly, assuming that you're hoping to recruit contributors (which I assume is some of the motivation behind this post): you really need to sanitise your Github workflow and your repo CI. Your commit history[1] currently seems to mostly consist of you updating your docs and committing straight to your main branch with no review process or checks, and the only commit I can see that does have any kind of check in place, your initial commit, has a failed monaco check that you seem to have subsequently just disabled. You'll need to tidy this up a _lot_ and establish a testing baseline if you want to successfully scale the project or attract the calibre of contributor you'll need to be successful.
Hope that helps, best of luck with the project!
[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/brand [1]: https://github.com/voideditor/void/commits/main/
Are there limitations in the extension APIs that make it hard to implement?
Can't you just do your own "Copilot" extension and plumb in an instance to ollama? Isn't that what Continue does? https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Continue...
What is the plan when VS Code introduces all your features?
I'm sick of dev tools being built around web browsers. We used to have fully native apps in the 90s and 00s that didn't require so much complexity compared to today.
Edit:
Forgot to mention that it also is powered by vim under the hood, but that's a strength in my eyes.
I'd imagine Jetbrains users are much more willing to pay, and the non-AI intelligence Webstorm has baked in save me almost as much cognitive load as Cursor does if not more compared to base vscode.
I tried Continue but it wasn't very smooth at all.
One critical question to the users:
Is Void able to understand the source code files from the project as a whole?
What I mean is being able to read the project, and then make suggestions based on the code that was written and propose new functions? For example, I would see it as fantastic to write unit tests where I'd say: "Please write a unit test that is verifying the functions on ABC.class" or "update the unit tests for ABC.class".
I know it is difficult for an LLM to create a valid result on the first try, but at least it does same me a lot of time creating a skeleton with most of the functions and samples already there. Most times just have to fine tune or fix a few parts but can say it amplifies my output speed by at least 10x to have that kind of functionality.
What is your impression? Can it read all source code files on the project?
I don't know about VS Code, but I remember Atom was refactored to use manual DOM updates because the performance penalty of using React wasn't worth it.[1] By the way, isn't OOP by far the most popular paradigm for building desktop UIs? I imagine VS Code is a difficult codebase to work with that has a lot of intricate code (as is usually the case with large software projects), but that's a strange piece of criticism :-)
The thing that's really keeping me in Cursor (vs decamping for Zed) is NOT the Cmd K or the sidebar chat. It's actual Cursor's Tab autocomplete model. I've tried many other tab completion models and Cursor Tab blows them out of the water. Supermaven's new release is promising, however.
For the use-case you're solving for (issues with code-privacy), I think something like https://codeium.com/ does already allow for on-prem deployments with enterprise support. I'm trying to think of who would be served well by a fork of VSCode vs Continue.dev or something like a codeium VPS deployment.
So I went a’hunting, and settled on the Codeium vscode plug-in free plan which while not as good as cursor/sonnet combination but is quite capable and their “free” models are capable enough for what I am working on (believe they even use a llama 3.1 model— I think they have various models, but left it on the “base model” and it’s been pretty good)
And well, complain about it on hn obviously.
The success of Void is tied to how well you implement the part in which AI reasons about multiple files. This is where all the sauce is in Cursor at the moment imo.
> Host your own models locally, or communicate directly with your favorites.
Looks fantastic, will happily try this!
> allowing AI to edit multiple files at once
Cursor already modifies multiple files at the same time. I typically do this by pressing cmd+shift+I and in the left side of the window the required files will be shown as they're being modified.
For the marketplace, can you not use Open VSX [1]?
Hard sell to choose you especially as a full on editor replacement (as well as a copilot replacement) without a demo or even gifs.
Hard pass.
Sorry but you can pry IDEA from my cold dead hands or at least VSCode doesn't hold a candle to it IMHO. And no, I'm not looking for a discussion on VSCode vs IDEA.
Building a new code editor for a single feature is a dead end in my opinion.
They're simply throwing money at similar projects in the same space, hoping one will stick, without any special insight or reason why one should be more successful over another.
However, I found Theia (https://theia-ide.org) on HN (like a bunch of other cool things; this is one way I justify the time I spend/sink on this site) and find it a much better fit for our OSS goals (foundation owned, open-source marketplace) with full mod-ability while being compatible to VSCode extensions API (in theory). I recommend you look into it for your app.