Does is matter in practice? Is there stuff you can do in VSCode that isn't possible in Cursor? I'm not a user of either, so honest question.

For one, you can’t debug c# code in cursor without using a hacky third party extension. Because the c# debugger is only licensed to run in official vscode instances. And only way you find out is you try to run c# and get a runtime error saying that it can’t run for that reason, you google/chatgpt the issue, find your way to some old GitHub Issues threads where someone mentioned that’s a possible solution.

I don't know Cursor, but VS Code is a very full-featured editor with many years behind it; I rather doubt an upstart editor could achieve full feature parity with it so quickly.

But that's almost beside the point: even if it had perfectly identical functionality, people would still want to use VS Code, if only for its well-established ecosystem of extensions.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code so most of the UI is identical and it can use the majority of extensions. Some extensions are MS only though and they may start using this as a moat, who knows!

> Some extensions are MS only though

Is that really true? According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931088 ("VSCode Marketplace Web Pages No Longer Allow Direct VSIX Downloads"), you can still manually download extensions via cURL et al, if you really want to. Probably will disappear in the future though.

One example: Microsoft's closed-source Pylance extension (their replacement to the previous open source Python language server) has DRM that will refuse to run on non-Microsoft builds of VS Code.

Wow, I had no idea. Been test driving VS Code for a little while, and while the constant popups/notifications are distracting and annoying, extensions with DRM in them kind of makes it a lot less interesting.

This was the example I was gonna give, thanks.

Also the extension “store” is a clone or something in cursor and I’m pretty sure might not have the same data (installs, current version, etc)

If I was Cursor I’m pretty sure I’d rather not be maintaining a fork of VSCode…

Since it is a fork of VS Code you can install any VS Code extension in Cursor (although manually): https://www.cursor.com/how-to-install-extension

AFAIK, Cursor is a fork of VS Code, so everything you wrote also applies to Cursor. Hence my question.

I read somewhere they had to make a fork because it wasn't possible to implement some features if it was an extension alone. Can't find where I read it though.

Yup. As an example extensions can not read the content of the terminal. The API is there but not allowed to be used in published extensions