Cursor is worth switching to if you write a lot of new code and edit across multiple files regularly. It is not worth switching to if you rely heavily on cutting-edge VS Code features, use specific extensions that might behave differently on a fork, or primarily do light editing rather than active development. That is the complete answer. The rest of this article gives you the evidence to evaluate it for your specific situation.
What Cursor Is
Cursor is a VS Code fork. The Cursor team took VS Code's open source codebase, built their AI features on top of it, and ship it as a separate application. This has two important consequences.
First, almost everything you have in VS Code carries over: your extensions, your keybindings, your settings, your themes, your workspace configurations. When you first open Cursor, it offers to import your VS Code settings. One click and you're in a familiar environment.
Second, you're now on a fork maintained by a startup. Cursor tracks VS Code releases but with a lag of approximately two weeks. When Microsoft ships a VS Code update, Cursor users get it roughly two weeks later. For most developers, this lag is irrelevant. For developers who rely on specific VS Code features or extensions that update frequently, it matters.
What You Gain by Switching
Tab autocomplete that is visibly better than Copilot. Cursor's inline autocomplete is the feature most cited by developers who switch. It is powered by Cursor's own model (trained on code) and uses a more aggressive context window — it reads your recent edits, your cursor position, and related files to predict not just the next line but the next logical block. The experience is that completions feel like they understand what you're in the middle of, not just what the current line looks like.
This is the most significant practical difference. If you use Copilot today and find the completions feel generic, Cursor's autocomplete will feel meaningfully better within a few hours of use.
Composer for multi-file editing. Cursor's Composer feature (opened with Cmd+I or Ctrl+I) lets you describe a change and have Cursor edit multiple files simultaneously. You describe what you want, Cursor shows you a diff across all affected files, and you accept or reject changes file by file. This is a better version of Copilot Chat's edit mode — more reliable, better at understanding cross-file dependencies.
@codebase search. Ask Cursor questions about your entire codebase with @codebase. It indexes your project and retrieves relevant context for answers. This is more accurate than Copilot's codebase understanding because Cursor's indexing is more aggressive.
Cursor Rules. You can create a .cursorrules file in your project root that tells Cursor about your codebase conventions, stack, and preferences. Every AI interaction uses these rules as context. This reduces the "why did it use the wrong pattern" problem significantly.
Privacy mode. Cursor's privacy mode sends no code to their servers. All processing happens via direct API calls to the model provider (Anthropic or OpenAI). For sensitive codebases, this is a meaningful guarantee.
