Cursor: A Game-Changing Prompt-First Code Editor

--- type: transcript date: 2023-03-28 youtube_id: Q7oaTW7sqfU --- # Transcript: Cursor: A Game-Changing Prompt-First Code Editor in this video I just wanted to do a quick first look at cursor which is a new text editor that just came out that leverages GitHub copilot under the hood with this text editor you'll see that there is an incredible amount of momentum already on this I believe it was just released last week There's 8 000 stars on GitHub and there's almost 20 contributors actively working on this project now one thing to show with this project the main call outs here is write diff and chat now what I've noticed with this text editor is it really takes a language as a primary input so what do I mean by that instead of writing out code manually like let test equal string Etc it takes a prompt as the primary input or at least it encourages that so if we go ahead and look at the text editor here I'll just erase that you'll see right off the bat you'll have JavaScript or python example to choose from once you install it and if we go ahead and click command K we can see we have that instruction for the code to generate so if I just say create a react form let's just start simple like that and we go down there you'll see that it goes and inputs this form pretty quickly and if I was just to demonstrate how this would look in uh GitHub copilot if I said create a react form I'll go down here and you'll see line by line it will give me suggestions now to be fair to GitHub co-pilot you could also say create form and I could do command enter and then it would synthesize outputs and give me a number of different options that I could potentially choose from so you can see here it's a sort of a different interface but off the bat some of the examples aren't at least the initial examples weren't exactly what I would want further down here it looks more in line with what I would be looking for but again this is a pretty broad input and maybe not the best example but if I just erase that here and let's just say let's use the example that they gave here so let's say an error pop-up so if we go here you'll see it quickly generates that now the interesting part with this so if I go and highlight the code I can edit it with again the keyboard shortcut so this is a brand new uh text editor me so I'm still getting used to the keyboard shortcuts but if I go ahead and edit it and click command k and I say make this accessible so you can see here that when I highlighted it it gives me this diffing which is a pretty interesting approach to how to interact with these llm models so just like um working with Git in vs code if you're you know working on a project with multiple individuals this might be the approach that you're sort of familiar with when you're pulling things and pushing things in a shared repo here so if I just go through the example of what's being changed I can go line by line and accept the differences and you can see here there's not sort of extraneous code that GitHub copilot can sometimes generate when you're using the brushes feature and it didn't really take anything away which is something that GitHub brushes I have noticed will do so another thing with this is you can also chat with it so if I say chat and just say what is this doing you can imagine now in this example you know we just wrote this so we know what it's doing but you can imagine maybe there's a function or a piece of code in a library that you're working with other individuals where you see something and you're not initially clear what it is you might spend a few minutes trying to decipher it this can sort of speed up that process and the nice thing with this is you don't have to take it and copy and paste it into something like say chat gbt it's right within your editor so it's very quick and uh easy to use so and just to also point out I just downloaded this today and there are some bugs so with the terminal if I just went to type LS there is this issue right now at least on my version of it where it's having this double character input on the terminal I think I saw there's a handful of issues on this by the time you see this video This Might already be resolved so just something to keep in mind it's very new so just give it the benefit of the doubt there's like I mentioned there's a ton of developers work on this so it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds like will Microsoft and GitHub co-pilot X there to incorporate these features considering how much momentum something like this has gained will this become something that just gets refined around the edges and becomes the editor of choice let me know your thoughts if you like this video please like comment subscribe and until the next one