Chat Introduction
What is Cursor Chat?
Cursor’s chat lets you ask questions or solve problems in your codebase with the most capable language models, all in your editor. For language models to give good answers, they need to know specific things that are relevant to your codebase — context.
Cursor has several built in features to provide context in chat, such as automatically including context across your entire codebase, searching the web, indexing documentation, and user-specified references to code blocks. They are built to eliminate the tedious copy-pasting otherwise necessary for working with language models on code.
By default, Cursor Chat is in the AI pane, which is on the opposite side of your primary sidebar. You can toggle the AI pane by pressing Ctrl/⌘ + L, which focuses onto the chat when opened.
To submit your query, press Enter.
User and AI Messages
User messages contain the text you type, along with the context you’ve referenced. You can go back to any previous user messages to edit and rerun your queries. This will overwrite any messages after that and regenerate new ones.
AI messages are the responses generated from the AI model you’ve picked. They are paired with the user message before them. AI messages may contain parsed code blocks which can be added to your codebase with instant apply.
All user/AI messages together in the same thread are called a chat thread, and each chat thread is saved in your chat history.
Chat History
By pressing on the “Previous Chats” button on the top right of the AI pane, or by pressing Ctrl/⌘ + Alt/Option + L, you can see the chat history. You can click on any chat thread to go back and see the messages that make up that thread,
and you can also modify the title of the thread by clicking the pen icon, or delete the thread by clicking the garbage can icon upon hovering over the thread in the history.
The title of a Cursor thread is just the first few words of the first user message.
Default Context
By default, Cursor Chat includes the current file as context. You can submit a query without including any context by pressing Alt/Option Enter on submit,
or turn on Default to no context under Cursor Settings > Features > Chat. Chats that begin with a no-context request will not add context for any messages.
As you type, you can see what will be included in context in the pills below the input box.
Adding Context
By default, user messages will contain the text you type, along with the context you’ve referenced. You can add more custom context to each bubble with @ symbols, and by default, the current viewing file will be used as context as well in the user message.
See the @ symbols pages for more information.
Slash Edit
You can initiate your chat message with the /edit coommand and describe the change you’d like to make to your current file.
The differences between this and Cmd K is that this uses a custom model that skips unchanged sections, ensuring a quicker response over the entire file.
AI Fix in Chat
A convenient feature to fix linter errors in your codebase is to use the AI fix in chat. To do this, hover over the error in the editor, and click the blue AI fix button that shows up.
The keyboard shortcut for this would be to do Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + E.
Long Context Chat (Beta)
You can enable long context chat by going to Cursor Settings > Beta > Long Context Chat. With this enabled, you can toggle different chat modes through Ctrl/⌘ ..
Long context chat allows you to include entire folders as context, since the supported models have a larger context window. Check out more about the long context only models here.