Agent commands skipping the integrated terminal on Windows with Legacy on

Support Bug Reports
,
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

A few days ago, agent commands still landed in my normal integrated terminal (PowerShell at the bottom of the IDE). Now the same command only shows up in the chat, in a command block. The terminal stays empty and the prompt doesn’t move. The command does run — just not where I need it. Legacy Terminal Tool is on. This started before 3.18.18, not only on this build.

Steps to Reproduce

opened a new agent chat in the IDE (also tried Agents Window — same result).
i’ve commanded the agent with this prompt:

Execute only this one command. No files, no searches, no extra steps.

with the term:

echo CURSOR-TERM-TEST-OK

I watched the integrated pwsh terminal and the command block in chat.
But again of the agent behaviors what shouldn’t happened:
The agent reproduced his command in the chat > INSTEAD which it should has to shown the command output in the > Cursor IDE

With > CURSOR-TERM-TEST-OK.

So at All ?
The Integrated Cursor Terminal IDE: showed or produced nothing instead ahead ^^ !

i already tried without a change: Legacy Terminal Tool on; cursor.terminal.usePreviewBox false; “cursor.terminal.useLegacyTerminal”: true in user settings; Run Mode Run Everything; full restart + new chat. Workspace .vscode/settings.json has no cursor.terminal.* and no terminal.integrated.*.

Expected Behavior

The echo should appear in the integrated Terminal panel, in the same pwsh session I can see and use.

Operating System:
Windows, Windows_NT x64 10.0.28000.
Shell is set to: > PowerShell 7 (pwsh.exe) as THE default and automation profile.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.18.18 (system setup)
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: 2d3dade56d5a1c639eb0912c7df049254af712a0
Date: 2026-08-29T21:42:14.189Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Nightly
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.291
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.28000

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Grok 4.6

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey @Blizzme, thanks for the detailed report. What you’re seeing is expected behavior in the current versions, not something you set up wrong.

By default, the agent runs commands in a separate shell session, and the output is streamed into the command block in chat. The visible integrated pwsh terminal isn’t used, so it stays empty. Quick one-off commands like echo CURSOR-TERM-TEST-OK always go only to chat. Long-running or background commands like a dev server show up in the panel as real terminals, which is probably what you saw a couple days ago.

A couple notes about the Legacy Terminal Tool:

  1. The real toggle is a checkbox, not a settings.json entry. The keys you added cursor.terminal.useLegacyTerminal, cursor.terminal.usePreviewBox don’t affect this. Please check the checkbox here: Cursor Settings > Agents > Inline Editing & Terminal > “Legacy Terminal Tool”, then do a full restart after enabling it, close Cursor, make sure there are no remaining processes in Task Manager, then launch it again.

  2. Setting expectations: even with Legacy enabled, the agent terminal is read-only by design by default. It’s not meant for typing directly into it. So if your goal is to see commands and type into the same session the agent is using, it might not work the way you expect. There’s no per-chat view to open the agent’s terminal in the panel in the current layout yet.

If you need full control over the session like env and manual input, the most reliable option for now is to run that in your own terminal via Terminal > New Terminal in parallel.

We’re tracking this direction and I’ll pass your report along as an extra signal. More context on how it works here: View / interact with terminal for a particular agent chat?