As you can see from the below screenshots the background is blue for some for the text in powershell and gitbash. The background color remains after clearing text.
I have tried disabling gpu, disabling extensions, changing themes, setting it to default. None of them work. Any help is appreciated
Hey, thanks for the report and the detailed screenshots. The blue background behind part of the text is visible, and the fact that it changes with the theme Monokai Pro to orange and stays even after clear points to a terminal GPU rendering artifact xterm.js WebGL, not the shell colors.
You probably disabled hardware acceleration at the app level, that’s a different setting. Try the terminal specific one:
Open Settings Ctrl+Shift+,, find terminal.integrated.gpuAcceleration, and set it to off.
Fully close and reopen Cursor, not Reload Window, but quit and start again.
If you’re on Windows with older GPU drivers, update them. That’s a common trigger for these artifacts.
gpuAcceleration: off switches the terminal to the DOM renderer without the WebGL atlas, and that usually removes the stuck background.
Let me know if it helped. If the background is still there, we’ll gather a bit more info and dig deeper.
Thank you for responding. One important observation is that this appears to be isolated to my environment. There are other users on the same server using Cursor with integrated PowerShell who are not experiencing this behavior. That makes me think the issue may be related to a machine-specific configuration, a particular interaction between Cursor and my local environment.
What I’ve already tried
Set "terminal.integrated.gpuAcceleration": "off"
Fully quit and restart Cursor (not just Reload Window)
Downgrading Cursor from 3.8x to 3.7.x, 36.x, 3.5.x
Deleted %APPDATA%\Cursor and started with a clean profile
I was seeing a persistent colored background (blue/orange depending on the active theme) behind commands in the integrated terminal. The color changed with the theme, appeared in PowerShell and Git Bash, but not in VS Code.
After trying many things (disabling GPU acceleration, downgrading Cursor, resetting Cursor settings, disabling shell integration, etc.), the two steps that ultimately resolved the issue were:
Resetting my PowerShell color configuration/profile back to the defaults.
Removing all installed extensions from Cursor and reinstalling only the ones I actually needed.
After doing both, the terminal rendering returned to normal and the colored background issue disappeared.
I’m not yet certain which extension or PowerShell color customization was the root cause, but if you’re experiencing a similar issue, I’d recommend trying these two steps before spending time on GPU or rendering settings.
Glad you figured it out, and thanks for coming back to share the fix. It’ll really help any user who runs into the same thing.
The symptoms match: the background changed with the theme and didn’t go away after clear, while regular VS Code on the same machine was fine. That points to local config issues, like PowerShell color tweaks plus one of the extensions, not the terminal renderer itself. Your two steps, resetting PowerShell colors to defaults and reinstalling only the extensions you actually need, are a solid recovery path.
I’ll mark your post as the solution so it’s easy to find. If the artifact comes back, reply here and we’ll narrow down which extension or color setting is triggering it.
