After hearing so much about Cursor, and then reading your comment, I decided to give it a try. Here's my honest, first ever time trying to use it:

- I go to its website and neither on the homepage nor the features tab does it bother listing what languages the IDE is even for. Is it Python? C? HTML? It's an IDE .. for what? What languages? What project types? How can they not list this basic fact?

- Oh well, click the big Download link, and it downloads an app image file. No idea what to do with this, never seen one before, have to google it.

- Mark the file as executable and run it and get a cryptic error: "The setuid sandbox is not running as root" and it errors out.

- Back to google, google for that error message. Find various Cusor bug reports and people complaining about it but they haven't bothered fixing it.

- Find a workaround, to pass in a –no-sandbox arg when running Cursor, and now I get it to launch.

- It opens up but the text is incredibly small on my (4K) monitor and the text coloring is a dark grey that's almost indistinguishable from the background color, immediately go look for settings to fix it. There's ~50 settings results for "font" or "size", I change a few of them and it seems to make no impact to the UI font and I quickly give up and just want to try the editor.

- I read online that I need a "CMake Tools" extension to open a CMake project. In cursor I open the extensions marketplace and search for "CMake" and there's zero results. I try to open a CMakeLists file anyways and it opens it as a text file and then prompts me to install a "CMake Tools" extension. Ok? Why didn't it show up in the marketplace before?

- I click the popup about the CMake Tools extension it opens the marketplace page for it, showing me the details about it. Whilst I'm reading the details for example to see who the author of the extension is, whether it's even a legit extension or not, the reviews of it, it just automatically installs it by default without me clicking the Install button that was on the page.

- After installing the extension the CMake file I opened is just in a tab but hasn't imported the CMake project, so I close it and re-open it from the File->Open menu.

- It again just opens the file as a plain text file and doesn't actually try to import the CMake project in any way, I don't see any popup or button or call to action to actually import the CMake project in any way.

- I give up and just switch back to my normal IDE

The CMake (and C++) integration story for VS Code is not great... I ran into lots of issues when I tried some years ago, and now this happened too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788125 I assume you can still get everything to kind of work, but be ready to commit to a fair bit of fiddling with extension settings.

I get that you found it frustrating. But speaking as somebody who’s not used Cursor and is genuinely interested in hearing unbiased perspectives about it, your “review” isn’t helpful. It boils down to “I couldn’t get it to work.” Given that lots of people have gotten it to work, that sounds like a you problem.

It's a VSCode fork that ships in a single file executable on all platforms. It's almost identical to (one of?) the most used IDEs in the industry

Half of your bullet points above are you being intentionally obtuse to be grumpy in this comment.

This is curmudgeonly af. Sorry you couldn’t figure out how to use a massively popular program that my 14-year-old neighbor seems to have got running just fine.

Ditto, I love JetBrains, but cannot ignore Cursor. I use the IntelliJ shortcuts / Darcula extensions to help with familiarity.

Among the ones you mentioned, I also tried Gemini Code Assist JetBrains extension, but it doesn't integrate anywhere close to what Cursor does. (Direct code inserts, rollbacks, checkpoints, context integration) Zzzzz come on JetBrains

The subscription costs are worth it?

I use it mostly as smarter autocomplete and it's still absolutely worth it. I really tried having it write unit tests in Go, write simple Astro websites, etc, but I'm never satisfied with how dumb it is when "vibe coding", so I use it as Intellisense on steroids for now, but I don't doubt it will become even better soon. The chat feature is fantastic and between it and the contextual help I barely ever have to reach for actual (code) documentation.

Depends mostly upon what you're doing.

Having done go and python in jetbrains and vscode, I definitely enjoy the experience in jetbrains more. A lot of java people like IntelliJ for their Java and Kotlin support.

OTOH, copilot has been not as good on Jetbrains as it has been on vscode. Updates are delayed to give VSCode a first mover advantage to VSCode.

Google Gemini Code assist plugin last week still sucked, didn't try it today.

Copilot can also use Gemini Pro 2.5, but they delayed the release of the plugin for Jetbrains, and only have a context of 10 files I believe for the edit mode.

And I thought I read somewhere that Jetbrains AI Assistant can use gemini AI pro, it's limited to a context window of 200,000. I might be wrong on that.

Junie is reasonably good, but still has issues with understanding large code blocks of more than a couple of kilobytes. But it applies the changes first, without letting you do a review of the code. The only real way to do it, is to check in the code in git, then let it run, and then look at the results.

I've asked Junie to fix unit tests using brave mode, and it seems more than capable with that.

I think the trick with Junie is small defined tasks, rather than large bullet points. Or at least have a detailed plan which you can paste in, and reasonably detailed so it won't have to guess or infer what it is you want.

But generally speaking, I've had far better luck with Google Gemini Pro 2.5 on code generation than with some of the others lately.

Edited to add: Github Copilot added agent mode. I'm going to try it now.

It’s just $20, that’s almost free compared to cost of human labor

Have you tried Continue?