Cursor Freezes When Opening One Specific Project – Tried All Support Steps

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

Hi everyone,

I’m running into a persistent freezing issue in the Cursor.ai desktop app on macOS, and I’m hoping someone in the community might have insight beyond what support has suggested.

:white_check_mark: The Problem
• Cursor works perfectly fine with most of my projects.
• But when I open one specific project, the app starts loading—especially the AI chat sidebar on the right (“Loading Chat…”)—and then completely locks up.
• After ~10 seconds, I get the macOS “The window is not responding” dialog with options to Reopen, Close, or Keep Waiting.

This happens 100% of the time, only with this one project. All others work normally.

⸻

:test_tube: What I’ve Already Tried (Per Official Support)
• Relaunched and force-quit Cursor multiple times.
• Launched with cursor --disable-extensions.
• Backed up and deleted:
• ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor
• ~/.cursor.json
• Uninstalled Cursor, re-downloaded the latest version, reinstalled.
• Deleted or renamed the .cursor folder inside the project directory.

None of this resolved the issue.

⸻

:light_bulb: My Theory

It looks like the freeze happens when Cursor is trying to load the AI chat history from this project. That particular project has a lot of back-and-forth with the AI assistant, so it might be:
• Too large/corrupted,
• Hitting a memory/rendering issue,
• Or failing to gracefully degrade when history is heavy.

⸻

:folded_hands: What I Need

I’m okay with losing the AI chat history for this project—I just want Cursor to stop freezing so I can keep working.

Does anyone know:
1. Is there a deeper chat/session cache I can clear?
2. Can I disable the AI sidebar or chat memory just for this project?
3. Has anyone dealt with a similar issue—and if so, how did you fix it?

⸻

Thanks so much for any ideas. I really love working in Cursor and just want to get back to building!

— Charles

Steps to Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce
1. Launch Cursor.ai desktop app (latest version as of June 2025).
2. Open a specific large project folder (contains .cursor/rules, lots of chats with the AI, etc.).
3. App attempts to load the project; right-hand sidebar (chat) begins “Loading Chat”.
4. Shortly after, I receive a macOS system dialog: “The window is not responding.”
5. Options shown are Reopen, Close, Keep Waiting.

Expected Behavior

It should load the project so that I can start work again.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Screenshot 2025-06-14 at 6.20.40 PM.png
Screenshot 2025-06-14 at 6.20.40 PM.png2050×1526 157 KB

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.3
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 979ba33804ac150108481c14e0b5cb970bda3260
Date: 2025-06-15T06:35:49.230Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

1 Like
2

Hey, this issue is usually related to a large chat history in your project. To solve the problem, try manually deleting most of the history, possibly the oldest chats. You can also try renaming or moving the project. This will help you quickly clear the history.

Additionally, you can delete the history by navigating to this path and sorting the folders by modification date. Choose the one that was used recently, you can delete it or save a backup just in case:

Windows: %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage
Linux: ~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage

If your history is important to you, you can try exporting it using this extension:

3

So I went to ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/. I see workspaceStorage but there is also a History folder. What is the difference between these two folders? There seems to be a lot of information in both folders? None of these will destroy my cursor rules right? Would it just be a good idea to clear the history folder too? I can just start new conversations with the AI chat to keep working.

4

I just renamed the project and it fixed the issue. I did try deleting some of both of the History and workspaceStorage files thinking it was a issue with this but it still was having the issue so I just decided to change the name of the work folder to create a fresh history. I am very curious what caused the issue in the first place? It must have been a corrupted workspaceStorage or History file. It is too bad I dont have the history info though but I can deal with this and keep working.

2 Likes
5

I had the same issue. I tried deleting several folders mentioned in this thread and the entire “User” folder, but it didn’t resolve the issue. So I wiped all of ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/ and then had to set up Cursor again. Now it works—annoying bug. There was a significant amount of chat history in that one project, which probably contributed to the issue.

1 Like
6

Yeah, I think that is exactly what happened to me too. I had a lot of conversations in several chats. I had a few very tough bugs that took a lot of conversations to work out so they got quite large. Well at least now I know how to fix it.

7

Same problem, freezing at what seems to be loading of chat history.
Cursing a plenty

1 Like
8

Ty for the tip, worked wonders!
Shame about the lost chats, but at least it works now. Thnkaful!

9

Same here — really annoying, and it happened on a project I just started today.

10

It seems like there might be a fundamental flaw in how the chats are being stored. If it’s a file size issue, but it seems like it’s having a problem with even small files so maybe there’s a bug somewhere in the cursor application.

11

Jason, there’s even a quicker way all you have to do is just rename the root project folder and it fixes the problem. That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s much easier than reinstalling everything. I have been making a copy then renaming though so maybe in the future I could figure out where the problem is.

1 Like
12

None of that worked, I had to nuke the entire ~/.cursor folder. That’s happened 3 times in the past month; is there no way to prevent the chat history from growing beyond a certain size? Even a warning in the UI would be good enough IMHO.

13

Chiming in to say that I experienced this as well. The only thing I had tried was renaming the project directory, which fixed it for me. I can also say that my chat history was extremely short, as I had only just started working on the project in Cursor minutes prior to the initial hang up. It started freezing on that project after I had to bail Claude Code out of a failed rebase running in the Cursor terminal, which could or could not be entirely unrelated to the nature of the underlying problem.