Agent chat Chinese text renders bold (PingFang Medium fallback); editor Chinese stays Regular

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

After a recent Cursor update, all Chinese text in the Agent window looks bold, while the same Chinese characters in the editor stay at normal Regular weight.

English in the Agent window only looks slightly heavier (Medium). Chinese looks distinctly bold. This is not a theme “bold keywords” issue — the entire Agent transcript, including plain prose, is thick.

This started after upgrading Cursor. I did not change editor.fontWeight or install a new CJK font.

Likely cause: Agent/chat uses a separate UI font stack (Cursor Gothic / Inter / SF Pro / system-ui) at font-weight 500. Those faces have no CJK glyphs, so Chinese falls back to PingFang SC Medium on macOS. The editor uses Regular (400), so its CJK fallback is PingFang SC Regular and looks normal.

editor.fontFamily / editor.fontWeight do not affect Agent chat. This matches official guidance that editor font settings do not apply to chat.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. On macOS, open Cursor 3.19.x with a light theme (I use Visual Studio Light).
  2. Open any source file and type Chinese, e.g. 字体加粗测试. Editor weight looks normal.
  3. Open the Agent panel and send the same Chinese sentence, or ask the agent to reply in Chinese.
  4. Compare the two side by side.

Expected Behavior

Chinese in Agent chat should render at Regular weight, same as the editor (PingFang SC Regular / weight 400), not Medium/Bold.

There should either:

  • use font-weight: 400 for Agent prose, or
  • include an explicit CJK fallback such as “PingFang SC” at Regular, or
  • expose UI / chat font-weight (not just Text Size / UI Font Family).

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.19.7
VSCode Version: 1.128.0
Commit: 90de2327392570a5f5f625c656c6749d228e6430
Date: 2026-09-02T23:03:07.739Z
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0
macOS 15.6.1 (24G90), Apple M3 Max

Additional Information

Theme: Visual Studio Light
editor.fontSize: 13
No custom editor.fontFamily / editor.fontWeight (defaults)
Editor Chinese: normal
Agent Chinese: all bold

Related: Agent and editor already use different font paths

I could not find an existing report for this CJK Medium-fallback case.

Workaround I have not found in official settings: Classic IDE layout has no chat font-weight control. Cursor Settings → Appearance → Typography → UI Font Family (Agents window layout) may help if I switch the UI font to PingFang SC, but that still will not fix Medium vs Regular if chat stays at weight 500.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

screenshot follow as

image
image1520×1392 345 KB

7

Hey @cscs
This isn’t intended behavior, and it’s nothing you misconfigured. We’ve let the team know and it’s an issue we’re tracking.

Quick fix to get Chinese back to Regular right now: Cursor Settings → Appearance → Typography → UI Font Family, and set it to -apple-system. The extra weight only kicks in while you’re on the default UI font, so setting a custom one drops it back to Regular (and -apple-system keeps the same look otherwise). Turning off Font Smoothing in that same section works too.

Let me know if that sorts it out!

9

None of the font family options seems to correspond to “Apply System.”

image
image1562×1018 61.6 KB

And

The reported issue occurs when I set the font family to “System Font.”

10

@mohitjain can you review this issue again ? And is there any fix progress ?