Why Cursor - Installing & Setting Up

00:00 You may already have a good idea why you want to try out an AI-assisted coding tool, but why Cursor specifically? And there’s probably a couple of points, but two that I want to mention is that it has a familiar interface.

00:13 If you’ve been working with VSCode or any IDE that is similar to VSCode, you’ll feel right at home. And also you can import your settings and use all the keyboard shortcuts that you’re already familiar with.

00:25 So this gives you a big boost in productivity right away. Secondly, it’s vendor-agnostic, which means that you can use models from all sorts of different AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and also others.

00:39 And you can switch between them for different tasks. You may find that you like working with one model more than another, but then maybe there’s an update to that model and it doesn’t behave the way that you want anymore.

00:49 Then you can switch over to something else, or even just use one model for one task and another model for a different task. Also, it is quite a mature product with a lot of users, so it’s worth it to try out if you’re curious about AI-assisted coding.

01:05 So as a first step, go to cursor.com and download the program so that you can install it on your system. The page is going to look something like this. I’m here on a Mac, so it shows me that I can download for macOS, but Cursor exists for all major platforms, so you should just be able to download it for your system.

01:24 After you’ve downloaded and installed Cursor, you’ll be prompted to sign in. So you need to have an account on cursor.com in order to use the IDE. So you need to click on ‘sign in.’ You’ll be prompted to log in in your browser, and you can choose how you want to log into Cursor.

01:42 If you don’t have an account yet, you need to create one, then enter your email or use any of the other sign-in methods and then log in.

01:50 Once you’re logged in, you’ll see “log in” is gone, and instead it tells you what tier you’re on. So for me it says Pro here. If you’re on the free version, it’ll say Free.

02:02 The features are very similar. You have much lower usage limits in the free tier, and there are some models that you can’t select with the lower paid tiers.

02:11 This is also true for the tier that I’m on, so there are a couple of more expensive models that I can’t use with this tier. Now, before you do anything more, I would suggest to switch on privacy mode.

02:23 If you open the command palette by pressing Command + Shift + P and then type “settings”,

02:31 then you can open the Cursor settings.

02:34 You can also access them through Cursor and Settings through the menu, inside of Settings in the General tab, you can scroll all the way to the bottom to get to the Privacy section.

02:48 And here you have the option to switch on privacy mode. By default, this will be set to share data, which sends back usage data to the company, and then it uses it to improve the coding models and the editor.

03:03 But if you want to opt out of training, then you can switch to privacy mode to make sure that the code that you write and your project information is not used for training any models.

03:14 Go ahead and close the settings, and with that, you’re ready to open a project. Just click on Open Project and select a new empty folder,

03:26 and click on Open, and then you are in the main interface. In the next lesson, I’ll walk you over what you can see in this interface and what the different parts of it mean.