7 ms·

2020: every day a new JS framework is announced 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced 2025: every day a new AI IDE vscode fork is announced

pooyamo 10mo ago
>vscode fork I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform. It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.
- fooqux 10mo ago
  Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
  - koiueo 10mo ago
    I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window. IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI. I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix, kakoune and Zed.
    - samsmith4 10mo ago
      Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls
      - koiueo 10mo ago
        From the top of my head in no specific order - Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without clicking and checking. - Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors -- totally unexpected). - Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin, but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't do what they say they do. - It often offers installing some plugins, and I've absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or if I don't. I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.
        badc0ffee 10mo ago
        I think the left toolbar icons do have tooltips, but they show up pretty slowly for me (2-3 seconds).
      - koiueo 10mo ago
        I'd like to retract my critique. I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances. I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident. For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension. Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions. I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago. Thanks for your question :D
        kvirani 10mo ago
        it's rare to see someone circle back with a retraction, even on HN. Kudos
      - Degorath 10mo ago
        Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts. It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example. Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
        meowface 10mo ago
        I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory. That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.
    - 0x696C6961 10mo ago
      https://cursor.com/cli https://cursor.com/cli
      - koiueo 10mo ago
        There are some Enterprise plan shenanigans, so cli is not an option. At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work great for me
  - rafark 10mo ago
    > just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year. I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either. Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.
- botanrice 10mo ago
  How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.
  - koakuma-chan 10mo ago
    It's written from scratch in Rust. It's super fast, polished, etc. A world of difference compared to VSCode.
  - pooyamo 10mo ago
    Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though) [1]: https://www.gpui.rs https://www.gpui.rs
    - wiseowise 10mo ago
      Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.
    - skydhash 10mo ago
      What about the text editing part?
  - roywiggins 10mo ago
    it's fast
    - meowface 10mo ago
      I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I never notice any performance or key input latency with VSC.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort. FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia: https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html
  - asyncze 10mo ago
    [dead]
- charcircuit 10mo ago
  These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents. But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
    - rjtavares 10mo ago
      Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests for user decisions.
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Antigravity is build on top of VSCode, I meant something completely different, not just a "feature" of something else.
        aquariusDue 10mo ago
        It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE built from the ground up for this paradigm shift regardless of tech stack.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now
candiddevmike 10mo ago
AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.
- ryandrake 10mo ago
  I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago
  But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
  - whstl 10mo ago
    Most of VSCode (yes, most) is a mishmash of other OSS products, including Google Chromium! By that logic VSCode itself shouldn't exist.
    - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
      That does make sense.
- rapnie 10mo ago
  > AI UI 2026: every day ...
- ewoodrich 10mo ago
  Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.
- 10mo ago
pdntspa 10mo ago
Why is it so hard for these to be VSCode extensions and not forks?
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.
  - tremon 10mo ago
    *moat
  - dust42 10mo ago
    Still it would be a lot wiser if all the forkers would do one 'AI-enabled' fork together that exposes all the extras that copilot gets. The barrier for testing would be much lower and all the extension makers would also jump onto the train. Likely MS would finally give in and make all the extras available for everyone. But all the fragmentation only helps MS.
    - ewoodrich 10mo ago
      What exactly are the "extras" that Copilot gets? I've had a Github Copilot subscription from work for 1yr+ and switch between the official Copilot and Roo/Kilo Code from time to time. The official Copilot extension has improved a lot in the last 3-6 months but I can't recall ever seeing Copilot do something that Roo/Kilo can't do, or am I missing something obvious?
      - lozenge 10mo ago
        The Copilot extension uses proposed APIs, meaning it's on an allowlist bundled with VS Code. Roo likely enables these early. The API can stay proposed for years before Microsoft opens it up to third party users.
femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
2020: every day a new electron fork is announced 2024: every day a new electron fork is announced 2025: every day a new electron fork is announced
- myhf 10mo ago
  There's only one electron. It looks like separate ones because it's traveling backwards and forwards in time.
  - killjoywashere 10mo ago
    For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
hypeatei 10mo ago
> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced This is still happening. Didn't you see OpenAI's release of Atlas?
CuriouslyC 10mo ago
We need a VS Code fork that just exposes more interfaces, and does nothing else. Then all these forks could just use that with power extensions, and it'd force Microsoft to change its behavior.
- Mogzol 10mo ago
  there are now 15 competing standards
- diegof79 10mo ago
  You just described Eclipse RCP. The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX. When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks. I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)
  - CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    There's actually an ACP that has some traction as well, though I don't think it solves the problem of what the agent can do in vscode: https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome
  - w3news 10mo ago
    Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a lot of extensions. Before Microsoft buy Github, there was no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom. When Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom. VSCode was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to Atom, like Atom was in it's time. Now Antigravity is again a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game changer, just with the Google branding.
nicce 10mo ago
> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced I think this was more accurate around 2012. My local tech magazine had their own fork and they attached CD with the magazine which included the browser.

pooyamo 10mo ago

>vscode fork I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform. It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.

fooqux 10mo ago
Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
- koiueo 10mo ago
  I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window. IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI. I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix, kakoune and Zed.
  - samsmith4 10mo ago
    Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls
    - koiueo 10mo ago
      From the top of my head in no specific order - Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without clicking and checking. - Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors -- totally unexpected). - Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin, but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't do what they say they do. - It often offers installing some plugins, and I've absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or if I don't. I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.
      - badc0ffee 10mo ago
        I think the left toolbar icons do have tooltips, but they show up pretty slowly for me (2-3 seconds).
    - koiueo 10mo ago
      I'd like to retract my critique. I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances. I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident. For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension. Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions. I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago. Thanks for your question :D
      - kvirani 10mo ago
        it's rare to see someone circle back with a retraction, even on HN. Kudos
    - Degorath 10mo ago
      Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts. It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example. Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
      - meowface 10mo ago
        I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory. That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.
  - 0x696C6961 10mo ago
    https://cursor.com/cli https://cursor.com/cli
    - koiueo 10mo ago
      There are some Enterprise plan shenanigans, so cli is not an option. At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work great for me
- rafark 10mo ago
  > just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year. I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either. Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.
botanrice 10mo ago
How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.
- koakuma-chan 10mo ago
  It's written from scratch in Rust. It's super fast, polished, etc. A world of difference compared to VSCode.
- pooyamo 10mo ago
  Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though) [1]: https://www.gpui.rs https://www.gpui.rs
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    What about the text editing part?
- roywiggins 10mo ago
  it's fast
  - meowface 10mo ago
    I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I never notice any performance or key input latency with VSC.
bsimpson 10mo ago
Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort. FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia: https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html
- asyncze 10mo ago
  [dead]
charcircuit 10mo ago
These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents. But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
  - rjtavares 10mo ago
    Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests for user decisions.
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Antigravity is build on top of VSCode, I meant something completely different, not just a "feature" of something else.
      - aquariusDue 10mo ago
        It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE built from the ground up for this paradigm shift regardless of tech stack.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now

candiddevmike 10mo ago

AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.

ryandrake 10mo ago
I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.
NewsaHackO 10mo ago
But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
- whstl 10mo ago
  Most of VSCode (yes, most) is a mishmash of other OSS products, including Google Chromium! By that logic VSCode itself shouldn't exist.
  - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
    That does make sense.
rapnie 10mo ago
> AI UI 2026: every day ...
ewoodrich 10mo ago
Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.
10mo ago

pdntspa 10mo ago

Why is it so hard for these to be VSCode extensions and not forks?

Etheryte 10mo ago
Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.
- tremon 10mo ago
  *moat
- dust42 10mo ago
  Still it would be a lot wiser if all the forkers would do one 'AI-enabled' fork together that exposes all the extras that copilot gets. The barrier for testing would be much lower and all the extension makers would also jump onto the train. Likely MS would finally give in and make all the extras available for everyone. But all the fragmentation only helps MS.
  - ewoodrich 10mo ago
    What exactly are the "extras" that Copilot gets? I've had a Github Copilot subscription from work for 1yr+ and switch between the official Copilot and Roo/Kilo Code from time to time. The official Copilot extension has improved a lot in the last 3-6 months but I can't recall ever seeing Copilot do something that Roo/Kilo can't do, or am I missing something obvious?
    - lozenge 10mo ago
      The Copilot extension uses proposed APIs, meaning it's on an allowlist bundled with VS Code. Roo likely enables these early. The API can stay proposed for years before Microsoft opens it up to third party users.

femiagbabiaka 10mo ago

2020: every day a new electron fork is announced 2024: every day a new electron fork is announced 2025: every day a new electron fork is announced

myhf 10mo ago
There's only one electron. It looks like separate ones because it's traveling backwards and forwards in time.
- killjoywashere 10mo ago
  For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

hypeatei 10mo ago

> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced This is still happening. Didn't you see OpenAI's release of Atlas?

CuriouslyC 10mo ago

We need a VS Code fork that just exposes more interfaces, and does nothing else. Then all these forks could just use that with power extensions, and it'd force Microsoft to change its behavior.

Mogzol 10mo ago
there are now 15 competing standards
diegof79 10mo ago
You just described Eclipse RCP. The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX. When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks. I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)
- CuriouslyC 10mo ago
  There's actually an ACP that has some traction as well, though I don't think it solves the problem of what the agent can do in vscode: https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome
- w3news 10mo ago
  Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a lot of extensions. Before Microsoft buy Github, there was no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom. When Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom. VSCode was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to Atom, like Atom was in it's time. Now Antigravity is again a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game changer, just with the Google branding.

nicce 10mo ago

> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced I think this was more accurate around 2012. My local tech magazine had their own fork and they attached CD with the magazine which included the browser.