Cursor is not loading chats and screen might as well be pure black: Reprise

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I cannot seem to get back to my work (~/,config/Cursor) and to make it worse, I can barely see the screen as the GUI mode seems to be ‘black cat on a black blanket on a moonless night’.

I am updating via debian dselect / apt-get. One day I had a working system… I did an update and it showed my former chat as an agent and gave me a wait cursor that ran for many hours before I killed it. This situation persisted until yesterday’s update when everything failed.

I do not know if it has trashed months of work or not.

Steps to Reproduce

Start up Cursor.
It gives a nearly pure black screen with invisible darkgrey print.
It does not use my previous ~/.config/Cursor state and chat

Expected Behavior

It should start up into my previous chat (or agent under new structure) without going into a wait forever loop.

Operating System

Linux

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.29
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 4ca9b38c6c97d4243bf0c61e51426667cb964bd0
Date: 2026-01-08T00:34:49.798Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Linux x64 6.8.0-88-lowlatency

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Claude

Additional Information

2nd try. I typed this all in, the frontend declared the topic name used, and it blew away everything I had entered here… not nice.

I was in the midst of critical development when an update wrecked my working environment. I am unable to get at the 6 months of chats in which I trained Claude on my very large code base, format and build styles. I had to abandon use of Cursor because I had a fixed deadline.

I had email exchanges with Reis, but your system decided while I was away on test and then on Christmas break that my request was to be closed. I suggest you tie that older request to this one as we had made zero progress on the issues.

This is the second time I’ve had Cursor AI give problems with data base access after an update. On the previous occassion I managed to dig into the data base manually and recover. So far I have been unable to do so on this issue.

I do have backups from before the update which apparently trashed my .config/cursor files, but I think some understanding of what went wrong is important.

I have a bit of time clear without any hard deadlines, so if Reis could re-engage, that would be appreciated.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

3

20260109-CursorAI-BlackScreen_113257-crop
20260109-CursorAI-BlackScreen_113257-crop1920×944 196 KB

Just as a refresher, this is what my screen looks like. Although this problem is secondary to recovering my chat database, it would be worth showing around. How can anyone believe this is a usable interface???

4

Hey, thanks for the report.

To recover your chat history, check a different location:

ls -la ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage/

Look for files with .corrupted. in the name. They contain your backup data. If you find any:

  • Fully close Cursor
  • In ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage/:
    • Move state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup to a backup folder
    • Rename the .corrupted.* file to state.vscdb
  • Restart Cursor

Reference: Tutorial: how to fix “Loading Chat” and recover history (Cursor v2.3.x)

About the black screen, let’s get the correct info about your GPU:

lspci | grep -i vga
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"

Also try launching with:

ELECTRON_DISABLE_GPU=1 cursor

Please share the command outputs and the contents of the globalStorage/ directory.

5

ls -la ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage/

total 536
drwxrwxr-x 2 amon amon 4096 Jan 9 14:43 .
drwxrwxr-x 6 amon amon 4096 Dec 3 15:23 ..
-rw-r–r-- 1 amon amon 528384 Jan 9 14:43 state.vscdb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 amon amon 20 Jan 9 10:47 state.vscdb.options.json
-rw-rw-r-- 1 amon amon 2395 Jan 9 11:35 storage.json

Look for files with .corrupted. in the name. They contain your backup data. If you find any:

  • Fully close Cursor
  • In ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage/:
    * Move state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup to a backup folder
    * Rename the .corrupted.* file to state.vscdb
  • Restart Cursor

So, it is not showing outwardly as corrupted. Perhaps it is there but I cannot see the menu entries to get to it? The top bar has changed while I was off doing interesting things, and I am not at all sure where things are.

Reference: Tutorial: how to fix “Loading Chat” and recover history (Cursor v2.3.x)https://forum.cursor.com/t/tutorial-how-to-fix-loading-chat-and-recover-history-cursor-v2-3-x/148023

About the black screen, let’s get the correct info about your GPU:

amon@otv3:~$ lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108GLM [Quadro 1000M] (rev a1)

glxinfo | grep “OpenGL renderer”
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2)

Also try launching with:
ELECTRON_DISABLE_GPU=1 cursor

Shown in image.

Please share the command outputs and the contents of the globalStorage/ directory.

Shown earlier.

(attachments)

20260109_145207.jpg
20260109_145207.jpg2992×2992 311 KB

6

To be honest, I’m not sure I understand what exactly your problem is, but you may try Doctor in Cursor Mover: Copy the workspace without losing the chats

7

Thanks for the detailed info.

Black screen issue:

Based on the command output, Cursor is using the old Intel HD Graphics 3000 with Mesa drivers. The newer Electron version (37.7.0) might have compatibility issues with this older GPU.

Can you confirm, when you ran ELECTRON_DISABLE_GPU=1 cursor, did the UI become readable? It’s hard to tell from the photo in Post #5.

Also try:

cursor --disable-gpu
cursor --disable-gpu-sandbox
cursor --disable-software-rasterizer

Chat history issue:

Since there are no .corrupted.* files, try checking your backups. You mentioned you have backups from before the problematic update. You can try:

  1. Fully close Cursor
  2. Copy ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb from the backup
  3. Restart Cursor

If that doesn’t help, you can try the tool from this topic to work with the database.

8

I will send a photo later, but interesting results. I pulled backups of the entire ,config/Cursor directory that were likely only a day or two before the cursor update when things went bad.

Cursor loads with the backup. It has my old readable setup which has a white background and dark text. It shows the old chats in the left sidebar. It is apparently trying to load the old chat, which is quite large, but has been on a wait cursor for 12 hours.

This may be what happened at the end of November. I updated to the debian packaged version instead of the manual installs I had been doing. I am guessing that at some point I killed it to see if there were problems and tried an even newer debian update, and the process caused a reset of some sort that gave me the black background and lost access to the old database.

So the issue may come down to why does cursor have issues with a circa 20251116-25 database that had previously been slow, but worked?

9

Good, progress - the backup helped restore the normal UI and chats are visible now. So the black screen was due to corrupted settings, not the GPU.

Now about the hang when loading the chat for 12+ hours - that’s a known issue with very large histories. A few options:

  1. Try opening another chat
    Click on any other chat in the sidebar (not the big one that’s trying to load). If it opens - it’s definitely the size of that specific conversation.

  2. If you need data from the old chat
    Use Cursor Mover with the Doctor function - it can export chats from the database into a readable format.

  3. For stable work going forward
    After exporting important data - you can delete the problematic chat or start with a clean state.vscdb. Sadly, a 6-month history with a huge number of messages can cause performance issues.

A couple clarifications:

  • What’s the approximate size of state.vscdb from the backup?
  • Do other chats in the sidebar open normally or does everything hang?