VS Code with standard copilot for tab completion and Aider in a terminal window for all the heavier lifts, asking questions, architecting etc. And it’s cheap! I’ve been using it with OpenRouter (lets you easily switch models and providers) and my $10 of credits lasted weeks. Granted, I also use Claude a lot in the browser.
The reason many prefer Cursor over VSCode + GitHub Copilot is because of how much faster Cursor is for tab completion. They use some smaller models that are latency optimized specifically to make the tab completion feel as fast as possible.
Copilot's tab completion is significantly worse than cursor's in my experience (only tried free copilot)
Paid Copilot is pretty crap too to be honest. I don’t know why it’s so bad.