Hey, thanks for the detailed feature request. Good news: part of what you’re asking for already exists, it’s just hidden behind a non-default sidebar grouping.
Try this: in the Agents window sidebar, switch grouping to Group by: Workspace via the Customize sidebar menu. After that, right-click the project and you’ll see Open in IDE. It opens or focuses an editor window scoped to that project folder, and it works for both local and SSH or WSL. Under the default Repository grouping, this option doesn’t show up, so it’s easy to miss.
For the second part, when you have multiple editor windows open and Cursor focuses the wrong workspace, that’s a known bug and there’s no fix timeline yet. The same case is discussed here: The Open IDE action is not working as expected when having multiple cursor instances open. As a workaround, open the editor window you want first, then open the project inside that window.
Let me know if switching to Group by: Workspace helps.