Ask HN: Anyone else went through the AI-editor carousel back to the terminal?

3 points by amoriodi 3mo ago ↗ HN

My path over the last year or so:

  Cursor → Windsurf → VSCode + Claude → Warp → cmux → nvim + Claude Code

Short version of what didn't stick:

- Cursor: felt like a worse VSCode with AI bolted on

- Windsurf: laggy enough to break flow

- VSCode + Claude extension: actually the best of the bunch for a while, but started feeling like overkill once I realized 90% of what I used was the editor + chat sidebar

- Warp: opinionated block UI and telemetry never sat right

- cmux: lags unbearably, and I ended up babysitting parallel agents more than coding

Dropped all the way down to nvim with Claude Code as a sidebar and that's been the stickiest by a wide margin. Feels closer to pair programming than to orchestration or autocomplete.

Current stack:

- Ghostty (native splits, no multiplexer) + moonfly theme

- zsh + Starship, zoxide/eza/bat/fd/rg, fzf history

- Neovim on kickstart.nvim with lualine, neo-tree, telescope

- Claude Code as an nvim sidebar, via subscription (not API)

Dotfiles: https://github.com/Doldrums/dotfiles

Questions:

1. Anyone else went through the carousel and came back to a plain editor? Or did one of them actually stick?

2. Sidebar chat vs inline Cursor-style vs ghost autocomplete which mode of AI actually helps you ship?

3. For people still on VSCode + Claude extension, am I missing something by dropping to nvim, or is it really just taste?

4. Anything I haven't tried that I should? Helix, Zed, Aider, Continue, I keep seeing these mentioned but haven't made the jump.

What did you try that didn't stick?