I have battled with cursor for many months to manage to have open into IDE mode, every now and then you keep pushing updates that keeps on reverting the behaviour to open the agent view!
AGAIN, CAN YOU STOP MESSING WITH THIS AND LEAVE THE USER TO OPEN IN IDE MODE
Hey, I get why this is annoying. Let’s fix it so Cursor opens the classic IDE, and make it stick.
This happens because cursor <folder> opens the folder in the Agents Window if that was the last active window. There isn’t a setting to disable this behavior for the CLI yet, but here’s how to break the loop:
Cursor Settings > General > Startup > Window Restoration (used to be called Open Agents Window on Startup) → pick Last Used Windows.
Break the loop once:
Open an Editor Window via File > New Editor Window, or Cmd+Shift+N
Open your folder in that Editor Window
Close the Agents Window
Quit Cursor from the editor window
After that, the next launches should restore the editor.
For the CLI, use cursor -n /path/to/repo or the --classic flag. This always forces the classic IDE window, even if the Agents Window was last active. Plain cursor <folder> only opens classic if the last active window was an editor.
Also, the part where a restored Agents Window sometimes ignores the startup setting is a bug on our side. It’s tracked, but I can’t share an ETA yet. The steps above should keep you stable in IDE mode. Let me know if any of it doesn’t work.