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Mike Kerzhner
Why is Cursor so much more popular than Windsurf?
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My editor journey has been: 1. Tried out Github copilot in VS Code. Loved it. 2. Then tried out @Cursor after @bernatfortet kept talking about it. Immediately switch to Cursor. 3. Then tried out @Windsurf after @lagap discovered it. Immediately fell in love and switched. Anecdotally, everyone is talking about Cursor. And no one is really talking about Windsurf. On Product Hunt, Cursor has 845 Shoutouts. Windsurf has two? In my experience, Windsurf is the leader at the moment with it's cascade/iterative prompting.
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Bernat Fortet Unanue
I tried windsurf, and it was not a smooth onboarding. Things were missing, it didn't feel like home. When I installed cursor it felt like I had never switched at all. Maybe it's a friction problem, I need to go over the hump of setting Windsurf up. Maybe it's that cursor feels so good right now, that it's hard to imagine something better, and if I have to go through some hoops to try it out, then I need a bunch of faith.
Mike Kerzhner
@bernatfortet I felt the same when you recommended trying out Cursor. I was like: "Copilot is great, why should I use Windsurf." I also second that Windsurf onboarding was not nearly as smooth. I ended up just ditching a bunch of extensions instead of reinstalling those.
steve beyatte
Maybe because @VS Code is so popular it was easier for people to jump on the Cursor train? I know I was using Supermaven for a long time because I didn't want to re-learn keyboard shortcuts and/or have to set up a new editor. Also Cursor became the startup du jour so benefitted from a ton of earned media on Twitter/YouTube/etc. I started using @The Windsurf Editor last week and agree it's 100x better than Cursor. Specifically: - I trust it. It shows me why and how it's making changes. The trust comes from seeing everything as a diff instead of hoping the AI didn't delete anything it shouldn't have. It does the work but I have the control. - It magically has the right amount of context to know how to do things the way the codebase already does things - I was worried about re-learning keyboard shortcuts but I barely even have to use the IDE so that's been a non-issue In short, I agree that Windsurf seems significantly better than Cursor.
Mike Kerzhner
@steveb Windsurf is a VS Code fork. So same onboarding as for Cursor. And situation of not needing to learn new shortcuts. Are you saying Cursor is more popular because Cursor was first? Looks like Windsurf launched in November 2024: https://codeium.com/blog/windsur...
steve beyatte
@mikekerzhner I didn't know WS was a fork, good to know. And yes Cursor had months of "startup du jour" energy in every nook and cranny before WS launched.