Cursor 2.1.50 ignores rules in .git/info/exclude on Mac, NOT on Windows' WSL

[Texarkanine]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Recently, Cursor has stopped providing rules in subdirectories of .cursor/rules that are listed in .git/info/exclude to the agent, on the Mac (Darwin) cursor but not on Cursor running in WSL on my Windows 11 machine.

Previously, .git/info/exclude did NOT result in Rules being ignored anywhere.

Now, Cursor on my Mac doesn’t provide any of the rules to my Agents. Agents in Cursor on my Windows WSL still get the rules.

I also cannot @mention the rules to force the agent to use them; they aren’t in the list of files available to mention.

Steps to Reproduce

GitHub - Texarkanine/ignored-cursor-rule-test contains a minimal reproduction. It’s important to use the prompt provided, as most agents are smart enough to, on such a small repo, actually look on disk and find and read the rules anyway.

In real use-cases on big repositories with a reasonably-full context window, they don’t do that as often and the missing rules become more apparent.

You can take that prompt to your own large repos or in-progress conversations and check.

Expected Behavior

Rules in the normal .cursor/rules directory trees that are listed in .git/info/exclude but not in .gitignore, are made available to the agents per normal, on all platforms.

Reasoning:

• Ignore files | Cursor Docs mentions .gitignore but not .git/info/exclude
• prior behavior up to this point was to make such rules available

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

From the provided minimal repro repo, this tree structure, lists .cursor/rules/local in .git/info/exclude:

Operating System

Windows 10/11
MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.50 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 56f0a83df8e9eb48585fcc4858a9440db4cc7770
Date: 2025-12-06T23:39:52.834Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22621

Version: 2.1.50 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 56f0a83df8e9eb48585fcc4858a9440db4cc7770
Date: 2025-12-06T23:39:52.834Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Additional Information

I had been using this capability across multiple tools for managing rules, to add user-local, repo-specific Agent customizations into repositories where it was either impossible or inappropriate to force those preferences back up into source control and onto all other developers.

Without this, I’m very dead in the water WRT Agent quality on Mac - most of my tuning & memory & learnings are now ignored.

• .cursorignore is not a workaround
  If I add !.cursor/rules/local to a .cursorignore, then they are indexed - so the agents can be semi-aware of their contents, however:
  • that file now needs to be in source control, whereas before it did not! So I do not have a workaround for protecting source control from my customizations
  • The rules are still unable to be @Mention’d (this breaks user-requested rules)
  • The rules are not provided to the Agent in prompts (this breaks agent-requested, always-on, and glob’d rules)
• “User Rules” are not a workaround
  They don’t have the activation criteria that *.mdc rules have.
• Committing the rules is not a workaround
  As mentioned above, my agent preferences may not be appropriate for all developers. Rules that are appropriate, are already committed; this bug blocks personalization.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report

I see the issue: .git/info/exclude on Mac stopped working for rules in .cursor/rules/local, though WSL is fine. Looks like regression in 2.1.50.

Per docs (Ignore files | Cursor Docs) Cursor only respects .gitignore, while .git/info/exclude is git-specific for personal excludes. Rules from exclude not being ignored before was likely undocumented behavior.

Workaround with !.cursor/rules/local in .cursorignore won’t work for your personal settings outside source control.

I’ll pass this to the team as feature request: support .git/info/exclude for git consistency and personal rules without committing.

[Texarkanine]

I have just discovered that the .cursorignore semi-workaround I thought worked, didn’t really: Adding the .git/info/exclude’d rules to .cursorignore as excludes, e.g.

.cursorignore

!.cursor/rules/local

Does put them back in Cursor’s index - so some Agents can be semi-aware of their contents and appear to follow them, but the rules are still unable to be @Mention’d and they are still not provided to the Agents.

The only way to use a rule that’s in .git/info/exclude on Mac is to manually drag-and-drop it from the file explorer into a context pill (and this of course defeats the purpose of agent-requested and glob’d prompts).

I have updated the bug report.