The Goal is simple, there should be an actual free editor
Details
- External ID
- 49125918
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- The Goal is simple, there should be an actual free editor
- Website domain
- sylixide.com
- Launched
- July 31, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 20
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7162485065710872
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Hey HN, I'm Saai, one of the creators of Sylix. I made this open-minded version of Cursor where you can get all of the core features of Cursor but in a fully customizable IDE (Ctrl+K, @docs, parallel agents). We love Cursor so much, but there are so many other features we're building, including all things like multi-edit, parallel swaps, agent indexing (but not the traditional one), parallel LSP, or maybe... we might give agents a better understanding of the codebase via multi-semantic memory instead, alongside in-search grep for your system files or workspace. Sylix will be open source once it's stable, but it's a fully customizable tool we've been wanting!Sorry for the delay; well, it's almost a year now. Well, I know developers were waiting for this.The hard part: we're building Sylix not as a traditional fork of VS Code but as a mixer of all things; Sylix is built on top of Monaco Editor along with the Monaco Editor API, backed natively in Rust. The VS Code repo helps a lot, along with its great documentation about the src/workbench files extension, but it's great as we got into it pretty deep. Since we leveraged the monaco-vscode-api, it was easy for us to embed it nicely into our React code. So it was a pretty decent thing for adding a new feature alongside a new UI. For Sylix, all the core systems behind all things built in Rust are done; building just a little polish over the UI is a task since we are not UI designers,s though. Now two things left: a polished UI and the marketplace for Sylix, since we already figured out how we canroute then extension core; just the UI left. One thing we're excited about is how we make things work out after trying over and over a VS Code fork, Void fork, and VS Code 1.58; after trying all those things, it finally works. It's like this: maybe the 6th or 7th version of Sylix works for us.The other benefit is that Sylix is going to be open source once it has a stable version, so we don't need to hide our prompts from what we built. We let you use Cursor's core features and functions right on your machine along with any of your existing subscriptions (like Codex, Claude Code, Kimi K3, DeepSeek) while we are working on it so that you can also use OpenCode Go as a provider. Sylix supports over 120+ models via your own providers; any model you want this lets you completely control your own data, and on-prem, a hosted model.There is a lot to talk about: how we build, and full disclosure, we have passed most of the early phase and currently have around 43 developers using it with their own subscription... thank you to them; we have come so far through their feedback. But we're super excited to cover the gap alongside Cursor.Let us know if there is anything you want to see Cursor-style in an actual Free Editor. Or feel free to shoot us a message.
Enrichment
- Theme
- browser automation and scraping for AI
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- free editor
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a full-fledged, custom AI-powered code editor from scratch in Rust (not a VS Code fork) with low latency, language server protocol support, AST manipulation, and under 35MB footprint requires deep systems engineering and IDE architectural expertise.
What it would actually take: Sylix requires custom GUI rendering in Rust (likely using frameworks like iced, egui, or custom wgpu/vello pipelines), text buffer data structures (piece tables or ropes), and tight LSP (Language Server Protocol) and Tree-sitter integrations. In addition, an embedded AI agent orchestrator manages local context indexing, parallel model calls, and diff application. Building this demands specialized systems programming skills, deep knowledge of compiler protocols, and custom desktop GUI architecture.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Zed, Cursor, VS Code
Concerns raised: Closed-source despite claiming to build in the open, Misleading user numbers (43 vs thousands), Lack of transparency about team identities, Low signal-to-noise ratio on About page, Inconsistent messaging about project status
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 130 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #56 of 131 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 273 days after the earliest competitor.
- 1Code · hn · 2026-01-15 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Fresh · hn · 2025-12-03 · 187 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- We built Cursor, but for data transformations (open source) · hn · 2026-03-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I left VSCode to build an IDE to handle many projects/agents workflow · hn · 2026-07-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- PyMOL-RS · hn · 2026-02-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- <15MB Local-first Interactive LaTeX Scratchpad in the Browser · hn · 2026-09-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Artifact Keeper · hn · 2026-02-06 · 166 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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