What happened to “cursor.diffs.useCharacterLevelDiffs”? It’s marked as as an unknown configuration setting since Version: 2.0.60. Changes aren’t highlighted anymore on character level as a consequence.
Has this been moved somewhere else?
Steps to Reproduce
Update to Version: 2.0.60 (Universal).
Expected Behavior
Character level highlighting of diffs in the inline suggestions.
Operating System
MacOS
Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)
Thanks for reporting this! I heard back from the team about the cursor.diffs.useCharacterLevelDiffs setting.
Unfortunately, the character-level diff feature was removed because it was generating inaccurate diffs too frequently, which was causing confusion for users. The team made the decision to remove it rather than keep a broken experience.
The good news is that the team is actively focused on improving the agent review flow overall. While there aren’t immediate plans to add character-level diffs back, they’re working on making the review experience smoother and more reliable.
We’d love your feedback: What specific aspects of reviewing agent changes are most important to your workflow? Your input on what would make the review process better would be really valuable to the team as they work on improvements.
Character level diffs were really useful for me fwiw! It’s now hard to know the agent has changed and I have been using the working tree diff view to see what changed, but this is much worse than how it was before.
I can see how this character level diff isn’t that important for really large changes, but when I’m asking Cursor to, for example, change the padding on something, it’s so much easier when I can instantly see the couple numbers that it changed.
Lmk if you want more details on how I find it useful. I suspect this won’t happen, but if possible to bring the setting back, I would really appreciate it.
Just wanted to add that this feature was very critical for my user experience. I often used cursor for text editing and it’s now very difficult to see any changes that were made in a text paragraph in latex – for example – because the paragraph is on a single line (and I wouldn’t want to switch to having to write each sentence on a new line).
That was the most useful feature for AI agents. It takes 3-4 times more to check what an agent changed without the character level diffs. Especially if there are only few characters changed in json file.
Thank you! Please bring it back, it was making it much easier to see what had been edited.
In the Editor I never had an issue with it showing the wrong result, I am assuming it is an issue with the Agent. If there’s a way to bring it back in Editor mode it would be amazing!
This is a core feature I can’t live without. Please bring it back. Even though it was buggy at times (maybe <1% from my experience), the time savings were enormous. I feel like my hands are tied now, and I have to read so much text to compare every character, which is very exhausting. I know people who pay for Cursor solely for this feature, because they say it gives them much better control of the code compared to Cloud Code and other tools, which they say are overall much better. I’m downgrading Cursor and hope you will fix it in the meantime, or I’ll have to figure out something else.
P.S. @sanjeed5 , as far as I remember, this feature was never enabled by default, so the people in this thread who say Cursor is useless without it all enabled it manually, spending time going through all the Cursor options and toggling them on and off. Now see how strongly we are defending it, and some even say Cursor is useless without it. The point is that if you fix the feature and enable it for everyone, it could be a game changer for the average Cursor user who did not even know it existed.