Cursor freezes and eats up disk space

Support Bug Reports
, , ,
4

Hey, this is a known issue with the cursor-bin package from AUR, not a Cursor bug. The symptoms match 1:1: it freezes on Help → About, and it freezes on modals like Prettier on save notifications and dialogs, and the image preview overlay too. Over the last week, this is already the third or fourth report.

What’s happening: cursor-bin is a community maintained package. Its PKGBUILD depends on generic electron, but Cursor 3.4.20 is built for Electron 39. When your system pulls in Electron 42, the renderer crashes on any modal or overlay window, and crashpad writes dumps that can fill up your disk.

Three ways to fix it:

  • Install electron39 and repoint the wrapper:
    sudo pacman -S electron39
sudo sed -i 's/name=electron$/name=electron39/' /usr/bin/cursor /usr/share/cursor/cursor
    To prevent a system update from reverting the fix, add this to /etc/pacman.conf under [options]:
    IgnorePkg = electron
  • Install the official tarball or AppImage from Cursor · Download. Electron is bundled inside, so a mismatch can’t happen.
  • Message the cursor-bin maintainer on AUR and ask them to add electron39 to depends. This would fix it for all Arch and CachyOS users.

Before applying the fix, it’s worth cleaning up the crashpad dumps that filled your disk:
rm -rf ~/.config/Cursor/Crashpad ~/.config/Cursor/logs

Details and confirmation from other users: Cursor crashes when attempting to create/delete/edit files and folders

Let me know how it goes.