[Question] Why a full editor rather than VSCode extension?

[Ahmed-Ali]

This is not meant to be criticism but I am trying to understand the benefit of switching to a new editor. So far all the features I am seeing (this applies to Cursor and Windsurf too) can be another extension in VSCode rather than yet another fork of VSCode.

So the question is: what are the real benefits of having a separate full editor that's just fork of vscode instead of a vscode extension?

[kingchenc]

I am not the creator, but I can share my own perspective:

This is a great question and one that has come up a lot recently with editors like Cursor and Windsurf.

The main reason for building a full editor instead of just an extension is the freedom and deep integration it offers. VSCode extensions are sandboxed and cannot fully customize the UI, intercept low level behavior, or deeply integrate AI workflows the way a standalone editor can.

A forked editor gives complete control over the interface, allows for tighter performance optimizations especially for AI, and enables features that would be impossible or at least very clunky within the limitations of the VSCode extension API.

It is more effort to maintain, but in return you can build an experience that feels truly AI native rather than just an AI layer on top of an existing editor.

[Ahmed-Ali]

Thank you for sharing your perspective! I totally get what you mean. One example I am personally struggling with is Cline (a vscode extension for agnatic llm) keep failing to read the terminal output and because of that I have to manually copy & paste the terminal output so it can move on to the next step. Yet, I see other examples that works just fine (Co-pilot and Roo Code the two I can call on top of my head). Yet, I found myself having 4+ editors and all are forks of VSCode with each has very few unique variables. That makes me feel like:

• There must be something fundamentally different that I can't see. Didn't see proof of that yet.
• This approach hasn't been fully assessed for mass adaption. At one point as a developer I will just have to stick to one thing and potentially accept to miss out on the features offered by others. There must be better way, IMO

[AlexBlack772]

One of limitation of VS is that Сommand+K mode is only available to the co-pilot in the original VS, so none of the extensions have that mode, only forked editors like Cursor,Windsurf and Void

[msmirnyagin]

this will be decided soon: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIEditor

[andrewpareles]

We started Void as a full IDE so we could have more control over the full UX and UI. A lot of the AI features in Void either hook into VSCode's internals, or show UI that wouldn't look/feel as nice as an extension.

I think a full editor will continue being important as LLMs get better, but we're definitely not wed to VSCode. If raw code is not what people are primarily going to look at in the future then we're open to changing from an IDE to another type of application (this is something we're thinking a lot about right now).