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Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

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Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#1

Post by andrewpareles »

Hey HN, I'm Andrew, one of the creators of Void. I made this open source version of Cursor where you can get all of Cursor's core features but in a fully-customizable IDE (ctrl+k, ctrl+L). We love Cursor but there are so many other features we want to build, like allowing AI to edit multiple files at once, or giving AI better understanding of your file system. Void is the open-source, fully customizable tool we've been wanting.

The hard part: we're building Void as a fork of vscode. The repo has great documentation for extensions, but going deeper gets pretty involved. All of the code is OOP-based, and they mount DOM nodes the old-school way (which is what React was supposed to solve..). So adding new UI features isn't exactly trivial. Microsoft also made its extension marketplace closed-source so we (and Cursor) have to hack our way through it. One thing we're excited about is refactoring and creating docs so that it's much easier for anyone to contribute.

The other benefit of open source is we don't need to hide how our prompts are built, so we can transfer the private API logic that Cursor has right onto your local machine. This lets you host a model on-prem and have your data stay completely private. It also means you can go directly to LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) instead of going through us as a middleman.

There's still a lot to build, and full disclosure, we are very early stage. But we're super excited about building and have a working prototype that we're quickly adding features to.

Let us know if there's anything you want to see in a Cursor-style editor. Or feel free to shoot us a pull request. Cheers!

Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative
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Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#4

Post by BoorishBears »

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode.

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.

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#5

Post by prasoonds »

This is cool! I'm a regular user of Cursor (I barely write any code now - just prompt and tab tab tab).

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.

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#6

Post by bilekas »

BoorishBears wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode. 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.

Jetbrains isn't open source and this seems to be a fork of vscode, not an extension so there's a bit more control on what's being done here.

Edit : This is only my guess, I have no internal knowledge of Cursor.

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#7

Post by kkarpkkarp »

BoorishBears wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode. 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.

Supermaven[1] has addons for vscode as well for jetbrains (and neovim). And it is so good that I quickly decided for their paid plan

[1] https://supermaven.com/

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#8

Post by esperent »

BoorishBears wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode. 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.

Try out the Claude dev vscode extension. It's much better than Continue in my experience.

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#9

Post by selcuka »

BoorishBears wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode. 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.

JetBrains + CoPilot integration is pretty good.

Re: Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative

#10

Post by hansoolo »

BoorishBears wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one in targeting Jetbrains IDEs as seriously as Cursor has targeted vscode. 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.

AFAIK jetbrains has an AI Assistant now, too. But I cannot say anything about how it works.
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