Void: Open-source Cursor alternative

There&#x27;s so much happening in this space, but I still haven&#x27;t seen what would be the killer feature for me: dual-mode operation in IDE and CLI.<p>In a project where I already have a lot of linting brought into the editor, I want to be able to reuse that linting in a headless mode: start something at the CLI, then hop into the IDE when it says it&#x27;s done or needs help. I&#x27;d be able to see the conversation up to that point and the agent would be able to see my linting errors before I start using it in the IDE. For a large, existing codebase that will require a lot of guardrails for an agent to be successful, it&#x27;s disheartening to imagine splitting customization efforts between separate CLI and IDE tools.<p>For me so far, cursor&#x27;s still the state of the art. But it&#x27;s hard to go all-in on it if I&#x27;ll also have to go all-in on a CLI system in parallel. Do any of the tools that are coming out have the kind of dual-mode operation I&#x27;m interested in? There&#x27;s so many it&#x27;s hard to even evaluate them all.

Feedback 1: The README really needs more details. What does it do&#x2F;not do? Don&#x27;t assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor alternative, does it support all of Cursor&#x27;s features?<p>As a non-Cursor user who does AI programming, there is nothing there to make me want to try it out.<p>Feedback 2: I feel any new agentic AI tool for programming should have a comparison against Aider[1] which for me is the tool to benchmark against. Can you give a compelling reason to use this over Aider? Don&#x27;t just say &quot;VSCode&quot; - I&#x27;m sure there are extensions for VSCode that work with Aider.<p>As an example of the questions I have:<p>- Does it have something like Aider&#x27;s repomap (or better)?<p>- To what granularity can I limit the context?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aider.chat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aider.chat&#x2F;</a>

It feels like everyone and their mother is building coding agents these days. Curious how this compares to others like Cline, VS Code Copilot&#x27;s Agent mode, Roo Code, Kilo Code, Zed, etc. Not to mention those that are closed source, CLI based, etc. Any standout features?

Zed (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zed.dev&#x2F;agentic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zed.dev&#x2F;agentic</a>) also released agentic code edits (similar to Cursor) which I tried and really like.

One thing I noticed is that there&#x27;s no cost tracking, so it&#x27;s very hard to predict how much you&#x27;re spending. This is fine on tools like Cursor that are all inclusive, but is something that is really necessary if you&#x27;re bringing your own API keys.<p>Is this feature on the roadmap?

Is there some benefit from forking vscode instead of creating an extension?

I&#x27;ve just installed it and tried to have it create a hello world using gemma3:27b-it-qat through ollama but it refused to do it claiming it doesn&#x27;t have access to my filesystem.<p>Then I opened an existing file and asked it to modify a function to return a fixed value and it did the same.<p>I&#x27;m an absolute newb in this space so if I&#x27;m doing something stupid I&#x27;d appreciate it if you helped me correct it because I already had the C&#x2F;C++ extension complain that it can only be used in &quot;proper vscode&quot; (I imported my settings from vscode using the wizard) and when this didn&#x27;t work either it didn&#x27;t spark joy as Marie Kondo would say.<p>Please don&#x27;t get me wrong, I gave this a try because I like the idea of having a proper local open source IDE where I can run my own models (even if it&#x27;s slower) and have control over my data. I&#x27;m genuinely interested in making this work.<p>Thanks!

May I ask why did you decide against starting with (Eclipse) Theia instead of VSCode?<p>It&#x27;s compatible but has better integration and modularity, and doing so might insulate you a bit from your rather large competitor controlling your destiny.<p>Or is the exit to be bought by Microsoft? By OpenAI? And thus to more closely integrate?<p>If you&#x27;re open-source but derivative, can they not simply steal your ideas? Or will your value depend on having a lasting hold on your customers?<p>I&#x27;m really happy there are full-fledged IDE alternatives, but I find the hub-and-spoke model where VSCode&#x2F;MS is the only decider of integration patterns is a real problem. LSP has been a race to the bottom, feature-wise, though it really simplified IDE support for small languages.

This is very cool and I&#x27;m always happy to see more competition in this space. That said, two suggestions:<p>- The logo looks like it was inspired directly from the Cursor logo and modified slightly. I would suggest changing it.<p>- It might be wise to brand yourself as your own thing, not just an &quot;open source Cursor&quot;. I tend to have the expectation that &quot;open source [X]&quot; projects are worse than &quot;[X]&quot;. Probably unfair, I know.

How is it that the open source Cursor &#x27;alternative&#x27; doesn&#x27;t have a linux option (either via AppImage, as Cursor offers, or something like a flatpak). I understand that open source does not automatically mean linux, but it is like, weird right?

Related:<p><i>Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor&#x2F;GitHub Copilot alternative</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41563958">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41563958</a> - Sept 2024 (154 comments)

Projects like this are great because open source versions need to figure out the right way to do things, rather than the hacky, closed, proprietary alternatives that pop up first and are just trying to consume as many users as possible to get a most quickly.<p>In that case, a shitty, closed system is good actually because it&#x27;s another thing your users will need to &quot;give up&quot; if they move to an alternative. By contrast, an open ide like void will hopefully make headway on an open interface between ides and the llm agents in such a way that it can be adapted by neovim people like me or anyone else for that matter

Given Void is backed by Ycombinator, what’s the business plan to start generating revenue?

As a data scientist, my main gripe with all these AI-centric IDEs is that they don’t provide data centric tools for exploring complex data structures inherent to data science. AI cannot tell me about my data, only my code.<p>I’ll be sticking with VSCode until:<p>- Notebooks are first class objects. I develop Python packages but notebooks are essential for scratch work in data centric workflows<p>- I can explore at least 2D data structures interactively (including parquet). The Data Wrangler in VSCode is great for this

We gotta stop making full vscodes, and just make extensions... Bleh

If this isn’t as good as or better than Avante.nvim, I’m going to be quite sad.

On a tangent, I get the feeling that the more senior you are, the less likely you are to end up using one of these VIDEs. If you do use any coding assistants at all, it will mostly be for the auto-complete feature - no &#x27;agent mode&#x27; malarkey.<p>Would you say this is true?

Given that there&#x27;s a dozen agentic coding IDEs, I only use Cursor because of the few features they have like auto-identification of the next cursor location (I find myself hitting tab-tab-tab-tab a lot, it speeds up repetitive edits). Are there any other IDEs that implement these QOL features, including Void (given it touts itself specifically as a Cursor alternative)?

A trajectory question: do we still have the debate that whether open-source software takes away SDE jobs or makes the pie grow bigger to create more jobs? The booming OS community in the past seem have created multiple billion-dollar markets. On the other hand, we have a lot less growth than before now, and I was wondering if OSS has started to suppressing the demand of SDEs.

Can you tell me what&#x27;s the difference between this and Continue?

I&#x27;ve got a great setup going with Emacs and Aidermacs[1]. I just can&#x27;t stand using VS Code, it&#x27;s impossible to configure to my liking.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MatthewZMD&#x2F;aidermacs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MatthewZMD&#x2F;aidermacs</a>

Make it disable all the telemetry by default

Been following this project from very earlier on. It&#x27;s awesome to see how much ground you covered in just a few months!

Can you use OpenRouter with this?

This is realy cool and checks my privacy boxes, great name too. I will be testing it out and will consider contributing.<p>One thing i&#x27;d really like to have is a manual order for folders or even files in the explorer view.

Would be helpful for you to be in homebrew.

I subscribed to the mailing list of void long ago to be notified once the alpha opens, but i&#x27;ve never recieved anything. I forgot about it until today.

The irony of an open source alternative to a fork of an open source project is hopefully not lost here

Any particular reason why they forked VSCode and not Theia?

fwiw here&#x27;s a more structured&#x2F;organized version of this thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extraakt.com&#x2F;extraakts&#x2F;void-ai-coding-tool-discussion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extraakt.com&#x2F;extraakts&#x2F;void-ai-coding-tool-discussio...</a>

The branding looks quiet strange and very conflicting with voidzero.dev

Disappointing name! You are colliding with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voidlinux.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voidlinux.org&#x2F;</a> among probably many other much more significant pieces of software.

And just that much maot each AI wrapper has.

Oh wow this is nice, will try it out.<p>Ycombinator backed too I guess Vibe coding is here to stay

Here have 10B$

Nice - also open competition is always good for users!

If this supports connecting with locally hosted models this is actually a HUGE deal

one of these is gonna have malware and we&#x27;ll wonder how we never saw it

I don&#x27;t know anything about the project, I use Zed editor, but I think the logo is really cool.

BYOK<p>We live in the age of dev tools

Congrats void!!

Mandatory reminder that &quot;agentic coding&quot; works way worse than just using the LLM directly, steering it ad needed, filling the gaps, and so forth. The value is in the semantical capabilities of the LLM itself: wrapping it will make it more convenient to use, but always less powerful.

&gt; Welcome to Void.<p>Flaskbacks to that pretty good Voyager episode.

Open source and not available on Linux?

I’ve been using Claude coder, I like this exp way more than these ai ides way more.

Another one? People saw that 3B windsurf money.

no linux version? pfft. rookies

Here comes another. Everyone saw that 3B Windsurf money and production go brrr

VSCode death by a thousand forks.

they always start as open source to bait users. how long until this one also turns into BaitWare? I hope it won&#x27;t since it&#x27;s backed by Y Combinator and has an Apache 2 license.

If I move off Cursor, it&#x27;s def not going to be to another vs-code derivative. Zed has it right - build it from the ground up, otherwise, MS is going to kneecap you at some point.

Yet another vscode fork…

I created an OSS ai coding platform as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brokk.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brokk.ai</a><p>But it&#x27;s a different take, Brokk is built to let humans supervise AI more effectively rather than optimizing for humans reading and writing code by hand. So it&#x27;s not a VS Code fork, it&#x27;s not really an IDE in the traditional sense at all.<p>Intro video with demo here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Pw92v-uN5xI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Pw92v-uN5xI</a>

[flagged]

The time to sell a VSCode fork for 3B was a week ago. If someone wants to move off of VSCode, why would they move to a fork of it instead of to Zed, JetBrains, or a return to the terminal?<p>Next big sale is going to be something like &quot;Chrome Fork + AI + integrated inter-app MCP&quot;. Brave is eh, Arc is being left to die on its own, and Firefox is... doing nothing.

Why no linux build? It is just vscode in ts right? And it is an electron app right?