Commands are not detected in the global cursor directory

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I store my universal skills and agents in ~/.cursor/, which is advertised as supported for commands by the documentation: Commands | Cursor Docs

However, the commands stored in ~/.cursor/commands are not picked up by Cursor IDE.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open a new folder.
  2. Go to Cursor Setting → Rules, Sills, Subagents
  3. Click ‘New Command’ and enter any name. The newly created command should be under <workspace_dir>/.cursor/commands
  4. Move the command to the global directory (home):
    mv ./.cursor/commands ~/.cursor/
  5. Observe the command no longer being available in Cursor Settings

Expected Behavior

I would expect commands to be available when placed under ~/.cursor/commands, either directly or with commands being a symlink.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.4.28
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: f3f5cec40024283013878b50c4f9be4002e0b580
Date: 2026-02-03T00:56:18.293Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.2.7
Chromium: 142.0.7444.235
Node.js: 22.21.1
V8: 14.2.231.21-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

SSH: global commands from remote ~/.cursor/commands/ not loaded (rules work)
3

Reading claude docs, it seems like they deprecated commands in favor of skills. Is this the case in Cursor too?

4

Hey, thanks for the report. This looks like a bug, ~/.cursor/commands should work. I’ll pass it to the team.

A couple quick clarifications for the report:

  1. Can you share the folder structure of ~/.cursor/commands/? Are the files .md?
  2. After moving the file, did you restart Cursor?

On the second question, no, Commands in Cursor aren’t deprecated. Commands and Skills are different things:

  • Commands: repeatable workflows, triggered via / in chat, stable
  • Skills: portable knowledge packages for the agent

More on the difference: Skills vs. Commands [vs. Rules]

For now, the workaround is to keep commands at the project level in .cursor/commands/.

7
  1. My repro uses the default structure that Cursor uses when clicking the ‘Add command’ button:
    ```
    ➜ ls -al ~/.cursor/commands
    total 12
    drwxrwxr-x 2 jakub jakub 4096 Feb 5 15:32 .
    drwxrwxr-x 7 jakub jakub 4096 Feb 5 15:33 ..
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 jakub jakub 18 Feb 5 15:33 say-hi.md
    ```
  2. Yes and it didn’t pick up the commands.

This is over remote SSH, if that matters.

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