So, what is Cursor or Cursor AI, as it's also sometimes called?
Well, it's an IDE, a code editor with deep AI integration.
So unlike Visual Studio Code, where you can install the GitHub Copilot extension as a
plugin, Cursor is an IDE that was built to embrace AI in every part of it, you could
say.
In the end, it offers similar features like GitHub Copilot did.
It gives you smart code completion, code generation, code aware chat, but as you will see, it adds
some extra features here and there and makes all these features a bit more efficient than
GitHub Copilot, though it's of course also important to understand that GitHub Copilot
is also under active development, so it will only get more powerful in the future and ultimately
both might be equal in functionality or power.
It's also worth noting that the Cursor IDE is technically not an editor that has been
built from the ground up by the Cursor team, instead it's a so-called fork, a copy, you
could say, of VS Code, which is an open source code editor, which is why you can copy it.
And it's a copy where the Cursor team then built certain AI features into the editor
so that these features are a bit more integrated than they were if they were added just through
a plugin.
But in the end, it's the same foundation, the same base code editor, which also means
that if you install Cursor, it very much looks and feels and works like VS Code because in
the end, it's the same editor with extra features added to it.
Now to get started with Cursor, you can head over to cursor.com and there, as you can see,
you can download it for free, though I will say right away that if you actually want to
use these AI features, you will very likely have to pay for it.
But I'll get back to that soon.
Now you can get an overview of the most important AI features that are offered by Cursor right
here on the starting page or if you click on features, but I'll actually jump to the pricing
page instead because we'll explore those important features throughout the next lectures.
And here on the pricing page, you can learn that right now when I'm recording this, and
of course, you should take a look at this page when you're viewing this video.
But right now there is a free plan which you can use so that you can use Cursor for free.
But there are pretty harsh restrictions here regarding how many AI requests you can send
and you do send an AI request whenever you use Cursor's autocompletion or its chat and
so on.
So that's pretty restrictive here.
Now you therefore very likely will need to upgrade to the pro plan at a certain point
in time and I'm using the pro plan for this course so that I don't have these restrictions.
You will have to upgrade to that very likely if you really want to use Cursor without all
these limitations you have over here.
You still have some limitations here with that pro plan, though those also likely will
change over time.
But in my experience, it's a pretty great plan to use Cursor as a main IDE and these
restrictions haven't been too problematic for me here.
Though of course, if you want pretty much no restrictions at all, maybe VS Code and
GitHub Copilot is the way to go.
Anyways, here for this course I'm using pro, you can also follow along without it,
but you will then probably hit some limits at certain points and you'll get a warning
in the editor that you need to upgrade if you want to continue using these AI features.
So what you can then do is download the IDE, it's available for all operating systems,
just like VS Code, and you also might want to sign up and create such a plan and sign
up for such a plan if you want to use all the features.