Installing FTR10 Hermes VSCode takes less than a minute. The extension is available on the VS Code Marketplace, Open VSX, and directly inside the Cursor editor. Once installed, the extension auto-detects your Hermes Agent binary and installs any remaining ACP dependencies on first connect — no manual pip commands required in most cases.
Prerequisites — check these before installing:
- Hermes Agent must be installed and the
hermes binary must be on your PATH. You can verify this by running hermes --version in a terminal. If hermes is installed somewhere non-standard, you can override the path later via the hermes.path setting.
- VS Code 1.85 or later or Cursor (any recent version).
Install the extension
- Open the Extensions panel with
Ctrl+Shift+X (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+X (macOS).
- Search for FTR10 Hermes VSCode (or just FTR10).
- Click Install on the result published by FTR10.
Prefer a direct link? Open the VS Code Marketplace page in your browser and click Install — your editor will handle the rest.
- Open the Extensions panel inside Cursor (same
Ctrl+Shift+X shortcut).
- Search for FTR10 Hermes VSCode.
- Click Install.
Cursor pulls extensions from Open VSX. If the search returns no results, install from the Open VSX listing directly.
- Visit open-vsx.org/extension/FTR10/FTR10-Hermes-VSCode.
- Click Download to get the
.vsix file.
- In VS Code or Cursor, open the Command Palette (
Ctrl+Shift+P) and run Extensions: Install from VSIX…, then select the downloaded file.
Verify installation
After installing, confirm everything is wired up correctly.
-
Open a terminal and run:
If this fails, Hermes Agent is not on your
PATH. Set the full path using the hermes.path setting before continuing.
-
Click the Hermes Agent icon in the Activity Bar (the left-side icon strip). The Hermes sidebar should open.
-
Watch the status pill at the top of the panel. It will cycle through Connecting… and Initializing… before turning green and reading Ready. The first initialization can take up to 1–3 minutes while plugin dependencies load.
Once you see Ready, type a message and press Enter to confirm the connection is live.
ACP dependencies
The extension communicates with the agent over the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which requires the agent-client-protocol Python package. On first connect, the extension detects whether the package is present and runs pip install agent-client-protocol==0.9.0 automatically if it is missing.
If automatic installation fails — for example, because your Python environment uses a virtual env or a non-standard pip location — run the following command in a terminal to diagnose the issue:
This command reports exactly which dependencies are missing and what steps are needed to resolve them.
Use Environment detection (the search icon in the Hermes toolbar, or run Hermes: Detect Environment from the Command Palette) to run a full end-to-end scan of your Hermes install — hermes --version, hermes acp --check, and dependency status — all from inside VS Code. A progress indicator shows you where the scan is up to, and the results surface any actionable issues directly in the panel.