Chat
While working within a chat, often I need to ask a question but don’t want to pollute the current session. There is no delete option so if I want to ask a throw away question, I have to manually fork - ask the question there then go back to previous session which is so tedious I never bother.
Hey @alexander.glass, thanks for the suggestion!
Good news: this exact workflow now exists as Side Chats. In the Agents window, type /side in the chat input and Cursor opens a separate chat that starts with your main conversation’s context. Ask your throwaway question there and your main thread stays clean, no manual forking needed.
You can also append the question directly, like /side what does this function do. And if the tangent turns out to matter, you can @-mention the side chat from the main thread to pull its findings back in.
Two notes: side chats live in the Agents window (not the classic IDE-view chat), and the option appears once the conversation has at least one message. More details: Side chats | Cursor Docs