Cursor alternative, EU-based or privacy-focused?

General
1

I like Cursor’s autocomplete and have experimented Mistral’s Vibe (their Claude competitor, one could say).

I’m not into “vibe coding” in the sense that I don’t like asking an LLM to build huge swaths of things, but I sometimes use Cursor’s agent feature to add similar features (imagine I already have a bunch of settings for somethings, and I ask it to add a new setting for something else. With the right pointers this is helpful and does save me time — I already have all the foundation set and basically saves me from “grunt work” that’s easy/quick to verify and low complexity/cognition to build).

Mistral’s Vibe worked well enough for this, but isn’t as neatly integrated, so I’d like to know if there’s something like a Cursor alternative that’s privacy-focused and/or EU-based, as I’d prefer that to Cursor (especially with the recent SpaceX deal, and how many privacy-related bugs they’ve shipped recently that they can’t seem to fix, like not being able to delete chat history).

I tried Zed and really liked its speed and simplicity, but the autocomplete is much worse (using Zed’s or even using Mistral’s — it seems UX-limited). Void has been discontinued and I haven’t tried VS Code recently because last time I opened it, it tried to force Copilot down my throat so much I almost puked.

Am I looking for something that doesn’t exist? Will I just need to keep using Cursor and hope it doesn’t “go bad”? Should I just go back to VS Code or Vs Codium?

Thank you for your suggestions!

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Why do you want it to be EU-based?

If you’re based in the EU, then the last thing you should want is an EU-based service that shares information with the EU governments.

3

I prefer to “buy local” as much as possible, to stimulate local economies.

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I don’t use A.I. tools when I am developing. I can’t help there. I can say avoid VS Code. It’s a terrible code editor now. Microsoft has stuffed it with A.I. bloat and telemetry. You can turn off these settings but it’s a pain.

Other choices without me knowing your OS or the primary languages you use:

  1. VS Codium (free/open source) Not sure about the A.I. features. More privacy than VS Code without telemetry. Not all VS Code extensions will be available (niche ones).
  2. Webstorm / PyCharm (free) From EU company, Jetbrains, based in the Netherlands. Jetbrains has a ton of IDE’s for different languages. To my knowledge they don’t have an all in one code editor*, Webstorm used to cost £60 if I remember correctly. PyCharm comes with a pro option for £200/year. The AI free plan comes with their IDE’s. More info on JetBrains AI and the list of features, pricing, and availability for each IDE. You have to disable data collection in the settings. “Settings | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings | Data Sharing”.
  3. Neovim / Helix (free) Options for VIM devs. Here’s a list of A.I. plugins for neovim. No telemetry that I know of. A build yourself option.

Never pay for an IDE out of pocket. Your company will pay for it. If you aren’t working I’d stick with a free option. Nearly all IDE’s and code editors are free.

*An IDE is an integrated development environment. A code editor is not the same. A code editor is closer to a text editor with syntax highlighting and auto complete usually requiring several extensions or plugins to add language specific auto complete suggestions and debugging tools. An IDE is more robust out of the box and language specific which is why JetBrains has a lot of products, they build IDE’s not editors.

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Thank you for the suggestions @Providenci_Zulauf17 . I might end up stuck with VS Codium if Cursor’s situation worsens. Indeed I didn’t state a preference for code editor vs IDE, but I generally prefer the former, as it’s easier on the resources, and I like to keep things simple. I’ve used VIM for a while a few years ago, but didn’t particularly enjoy it.

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