Cursor fails to find Jupyter kernels in a conda environment

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

The Cursor IDE is unable to find and connect to Jupyter kernels in a conda environment. The same project and environment work correctly in VSCode.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

Confirmed that the jupyter package is installed and working correctly in the scanpy conda environment.
The command /path/to/user/home/miniconda3/envs/scanpy/bin/python -m jupyter kernelspec list successfully lists the available kernels.
The user has selected the interpreter at /path/to/user/home/miniconda3/envs/scanpy/bin/python in Cursor, but the issue persists.
The same setup and project work as expected in VSCode.
Conclusion:

This appears to be an issue specific to the Cursor IDE, where it is not correctly using the selected Python interpreter to discover and launch the Jupyter kernel from a non-base conda environment.

System Information:

Operating System: macOS
Python Distribution: miniconda3
Path to working Python interpreter: /path/to/user/home/miniconda3/envs/scanpy/bin/python

Steps to Reproduce

Open a project with Jupyter notebooks that depends on a specific conda environment.
Use the “Python: Select Interpreter” command to select the Python interpreter from the conda environment.
Attempt to run a cell in a Jupyter notebook.

Expected Behavior

The notebook should connect to the Jupyter kernel in the selected conda environment and execute the cell.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Operating System: macOS
Python Distribution: miniconda3
Path to working Python interpreter: /path/to/user/home/miniconda3/envs/scanpy/bin/python

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

4

Hey, this is a known pattern. We’ve seen the same thing with conda environments not being discovered by Cursor, even though VSCode handles them fine. It’s usually the ms-python.vscode-python-envs extension failing to resolve conda paths.

Here’s what has worked for other users:

  1. Reinstall the Jupyter and Python extensions
  • Uninstall the “Jupyter”, “Python”, and “Python Environment Manager” extensions
  • Quit Cursor completely (Cmd+Q)
  • Reopen Cursor and reinstall the extensions
  • Restart Cursor again
  1. If that doesn’t help, add this to your settings.json (Cmd+, > Open Settings JSON):
{
    "python.condaPath": "/path/to/your/miniconda3/condabin/conda",
    "python.venvPath": "/path/to/your/miniconda3/envs"
}

Replace with your actual miniconda3 paths. Then restart Cursor completely.

  1. Also try disabling Python extension experiments:
{
    "python.experiments.enabled": false
}

If none of this works, could you check Output > Python (Cmd+Shift+U) and share any errors you see there? Also your Cursor version (Help > About Cursor > Copy) would help narrow things down.

Similar resolved thread for reference: Cursor can’t detect conda env - Miniforge

Let me know how it goes.