I cannot close the window, i cannot interact with anything. It just stuck and i cant do anything, i cant interact with the terminal, on the editor mode on explorer when i click on any folder it does not show me the content of it, sometimes i see this warning pop up: “Unable to watch for file changes. Please follow the instructions link to resolve this issue.”
it started to be this way just recently so i guess it has to do with the latest changes.
Steps to Reproduce
Open a project in WSL environment on windows, it might work for you for a brief moment but it after some time it becomes unstable to use
Expected Behavior
The window is stuck and the only way to work with it is to kill it using the task manager, i would expect it will work smoothly
The “Unable to watch for file changes” warning and the freezing you’re seeing point to a known Linux/WSL limitation: the system has a maximum number of file watchers it can track simultaneously, and large projects can exhaust that limit. When it’s reached, Cursor’s file system monitoring fails, which causes the cascading freeze you described.
To fix this, increase the inotify watcher limit inside your WSL instance:
Open a WSL terminal
Run:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p
Restart Cursor completely (not just reload window)
This increases the limit from the default (typically 8,192) to 524,288, which should handle even very large projects.
If the issue persists after increasing the limit, a couple of additional things to try:
Switch to the Stable release track (Cursor Settings > Application > Release Track) instead of Nightly, to rule out any recent nightly-specific regressions
Check if the project has an unusually large node_modules or generated directory — adding those to your .gitignore and Cursor’s file watcher excludes can help reduce watcher pressure
I downgraded to cursor version 3.3 and the problem solved, although i still see the warning, the window is not freezes as in cursor version 3.5.8.
So it seems like this warning is not the cause of the problem. I also see this warning in Anti gravity IDE
That’s really helpful info, thanks for testing that. If the warning shows up on 3.3 (and other editors) without any freeze, then the inotify limit isn’t the culprit here — something changed between 3.3 and 3.5.8 that’s causing the freeze specifically on WSL.
Since you’re on the Nightly release track, which gets more frequent and less-tested builds, could you try switching to the Stable track? Cursor Settings > Application > Release Track > Stable, then restart. If the freeze doesn’t happen on the latest Stable build, that would confirm this is a nightly-specific regression. If it does, reply here with the Stable version number and we can narrow it down further.