I would like to suggest adding a text selection and quote feature for Agent responses in Cursor IDE.
Currently, when the Agent provides a long or detailed response, users often want to continue discussing only a specific sentence, paragraph, technical decision, or implementation detail. It would be very helpful if users could select any part of an Agent-generated response and directly quote or insert that selected text into the chat input box, similar to replying to a specific part of a message.
For example, after selecting a paragraph from the Agent’s response, a small action such as “Quote in Chat”, “Ask about Selection”, or “Reply to Selection” could appear. Clicking it would insert the selected content into the input box as a quoted reference, allowing the user to immediately ask a follow-up question about that exact part.
This feature would make conversations with the Agent much more precise and efficient, especially when discussing software architecture, implementation plans, debugging analysis, code design decisions, or other complex technical topics. Instead of manually copying and pasting parts of the Agent’s response or describing which section the user is referring to, the conversation could stay directly anchored to the relevant context.
I believe this would significantly improve the usability of Cursor’s Agent for deep technical discussions, iterative solution refinement, and detailed understanding of Agent-generated answers.
Hey, thanks for the feature request. Good news, you can already do this in the Agents Window.
Select any part of the agent’s reply and a small toolbar will show up with Add to Chat, or press Ctrl+L while the text is selected. The selection will be inserted into the input as a quoted chip, so you can ask a follow-up about that specific part. If you hover the message, there’s also a Reply action if you want to quote the whole message.
If you’re using the classic editor layout with chat in the sidebar, the selection toolbar isn’t available there yet. Can you confirm which layout you’re using? I’ll pass it on to the team.
Thanks for the clarification. I’m using the classic editor layout with Agent chat in the sidebar.
So my request is specifically to bring the existing selection → Add to Chat / quote feature from the Agents Window to the classic sidebar chat as well. I use the sidebar layout most of the time, and this would make it much easier to discuss specific parts of long Agent responses without manually copying and pasting them.
Thanks for clarifying the layout. Yep, that’s right: in the classic editor layout with chat in the sidebar, there’s no selection toolbar yet. It’s only available in the Agents Window. So your request makes sense: bring the existing select to Add to Chat or quote flow into the classic sidebar.
Until this ships in the sidebar, the only way to use it right now is to work in the Agents Window. There, highlight to Add to Chat is available, or use Ctrl+L with selected text, and hover to Reply is also available.
If there’s an update for the classic layout, I’ll follow up in the thread.
Thank you very much for taking the time to look into this and for clarifying how the feature currently works.
I really appreciate your explanation and the workaround using the Agents Window. It’s also great to know that my request makes sense and that bringing the existing “Add to Chat” / quote workflow into the classic sidebar could be considered.
I use the classic editor layout quite often, so having this functionality directly in the sidebar would make detailed follow-up discussions with the Agent much more convenient and efficient.
Thanks again for your attention and support. I’ll look forward to any future updates on this feature.