Cursor's JetBrains plugin survives the IntelliJ test — barely
A month of using Cursor inside IntelliJ Ultimate and PyCharm Pro. The features that translate, the ones that do not, and what JetBrains users are actually getting.
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In this article
Cursor shipped a JetBrains plugin in March. I have used it inside IntelliJ Ultimate (Kotlin, Java) and PyCharm Pro (Python) for the last 30 days. The headline answer: it works, the worst day was the day it shipped, and the gap to the native VS Code experience has narrowed faster than I expected.
What the plugin does, in present tense. Inline completion is wired through the same /completion endpoint as the VS Code product. Composer (the multi-file refactoring surface) opens in a side panel that resembles the JetBrains tool-window pattern. The chat surface is in a separate panel. The .cursorrules file is honored. The keybinding is Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on macOS), the same as VS Code, and JetBrains users will mostly not have a conflict because that combination was not in the default IntelliJ keymap.
What translates
Inline completion is at parity. I cannot reliably tell whether I am in the VS Code product or the IntelliJ plugin when I am writing TypeScript. Composer is at 80%; the side panel works, the diff preview is good, the apply-to-file is good, and the multi-file edit surface is acceptable. The chat is at parity.
What does not
- The Composer "structural search and replace" feature does not yet integrate with IntelliJ's structural search. JetBrains users have a strictly better tool for that and Cursor is asking them to ignore it.
- The "ask the codebase" feature uses Cursor's indexer rather than IntelliJ's. The IntelliJ index is, on a Java codebase, the better one. The plugin should fall back to it for the symbol-graph queries it currently misses.
- JetBrains debugger integration is not there. If you debug, you switch back to JetBrains-native tooling and lose the chat context.
The recommendation. If you are a JetBrains user who would otherwise have switched to VS Code for Cursor, the plugin is now good enough that you do not need to. If you have not used Cursor and are thinking about it, the VS Code product is still the canonical experience by about 6 weeks of release cadence. Both are real products. Neither is finished.
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