alt Hacker NewsI know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.
And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.
Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience
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I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example.
Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons:
1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE.
2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well.
3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes.
4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box.
5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude.
Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical.
The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.
Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…
Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.
why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI.
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.
can someone please explain this to me?
Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools.
Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".
why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.
can someone please explain this to me?
I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor.
Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?