AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Former – Open-source Cursor for SQL
Hey everyone, Elliott and Matty here. We’ve built Former, an open source AI-first SQL Editor. The repo is available at https://github.com/former-labs/former and our home page is https://formerlabs.com/. We built Former to provide an AI-first development environment for working with data. We’ve seen incredible applications of AI to the software engineering space with Cursor, Windsurf, and others, but we believe that focussing on a product just for data teams is needed for their unique workflows. Former is starting as a full SQL editor experience with an…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hey HN, I'm Andrew, one of the creators of Void. I made this open source version of Cursor where you can get all of Cursor's core features but in a fully-customizable IDE (ctrl+k, ctrl+L). We love Cursor but there are so many other features we want to build, like allowing AI to edit multiple files at once, or giving AI better understanding of your file system. Void is the open-source, fully customizable tool we've been wanting. The hard part: we're building Void as a fork of vscode. The repo has great documentation for extensions, but going deeper gets pretty involved. All of the code is…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I have spent large parts of the last 10+ years building an SQL Editor. The tool is targeted at data analysts, a lot of effort has gone into charting, visualizing and excel export. If this sounds useful to you, it's Free, please give it a try and let me know any feedback.
2024 · timestored.com · its alternatives →
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Cursor 2.0▲957Our first coding model and new interface for agents
Oct 2025 · cursor.com · its alternatives →
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I have been working on SQL Explorer, an open source, Django-based reporting and query tool for (gulp!) almost ten years. It's a tool that fits just right for me and many others, and I love and use almost every day. Write SQL, share results, do some analysis, get insight. No surprises. A live demo instance is here (no login or anything required): https://demo.sqlexplorer.io/ And here's a fairly unprofessional, but very enthusiastic, video tour: https://sql-explorer.s3.amazonaws.com/Sql+Explorer+5.mp4 The UI is constrained enough that there's very little to learn,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Using SQL's Turing Completeness to Build Tetris. Contribute to nuno-faria/tetris-sql development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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theORQL▲170Cursor for frontend. Build and debug in Chrome and VS Code.
Feb 2026 · theorql.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we're Andrew and Mat and we're building Void, an open source Cursor alternative. Our editor is an open-source VSCode fork. Our primary goal is to create a fully-featured AI editor where you can keep your data completely private. Going open source is really important because it let us take the logic that would normally live on a server, like prompt building or message handling, and run it on your local machine instead. This way you can do things like self-host Llama 3.1 or Gemma and never have your data leave your computer. You can also just send your prompts directly to foundational…
2024 · voideditor.com · its alternatives →
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I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We’re Jorge and Will from Lotas (https://www.lotas.ai/), and we’ve built Erdos, a secure AI-powered data science IDE that’s fully open source (https://www.lotas.ai/erdos). A few months ago, we shared Rao, an AI coding assistant for RStudio (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44638510). We built Rao to bring the Cursor-like experience to RStudio users. Now we want to take the next step and deliver a tool for the entire data science community that handles Python, R, SQL, and Julia workflows. Erdos is a fork of VS Code designed for data…
Oct 2025 · lotas.ai · its alternatives →
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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…
Jul 2026 · sylixide.com · its alternatives →
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While Cursor has already revolutionized coding, you can still configure it to perform even better based on your language and framework. That's why we created Cursor Directory, a collection of the best cursor rules for your framework and language from the community. It's fully open source and you can contribute to it by submitting your own rules. Just copy and add a .cursorrules file to your project root! Let me know what you think!
2024 · cursor.directory · its alternatives →
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While Cursor is picking off and a lot of developers trying it out. I believe that a vast amount of beginners still struggle with a lot of basics and how to use the app. So I have compiled a few demos from the docs, and X tweets, and recorded a few myself so beginners can see how the cursor works. The website is open source, and my first time contributing, so if there are any mistakes or improvements to be made please let me know! thanks :)
2025 · cursorintro.com · its alternatives →
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I'm Anand, co-founder and CTO of Altimate AI. My co-founder Pradnesh and I are open-sourcing Altimate Code. AMA. Why we built this: Pradnesh and I have been building tooling for data engineers for three years: dbt Power User and Datamates vscode extensions with combined 750k+ installs, running against real Fortune 500 data estates. The pattern we kept seeing: general-purpose agents can write SQL, but they have no model of what the SQL does. No lineage. No schema context. No understanding of what's in a dbt manifest. That's not a prompt problem; it's a missing tool layer problem. The numbers…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Code Modern. Code Legacy. Code Firmware. - open-source AI-native IDE with agentic coding, Power Mode, legacy modernization, and firmware development - NeuralInverse/neuralinverse
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN community! Over the past year, AI copilots like Cursor and Windsurf have fueled a dramatic shift in software engineering workflows. And yet, many technical users in adjacent fields like data science and analytics have been unable to reap the rewards of this revolution. It turns out that the existing tools are a poor match for analytical workloads. Beyond that Cursor and similar tools have very poor support for Jupyter notebooks, data science is a fundamentally different discipline from software engineering and we believe it requires a correspondingly different tool. We're excited to…
2025 · sphinx.ai · its alternatives →
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Agentic & No-Code Data Transformations. Contribute to Zipstack/visitran development by creating an account on GitHub.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I just launched a new free SQL practice platform today called DataLemur! I'm the author of Ace the Data Science Interview, and a lot of our readers wanted to practice the SQL questions from the book, so we decided to make DataLemur free and open! Even if you aren't job hunting, these tricky SQL questions are pretty fun to practice on.
2022 · datalemur.com · its alternatives →
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Installed OpenAI's new GPT-4o model on Cursor This thing is very fast! Look how quick it reads the codebase 🤯 Excited to play some more with it 🚀
2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →