Cursor regularly loses Documents access on Mac

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Cursor will lose access to ~/Documents on Mac within the Terminal.
It’s not clear when it will happen, but seems to eventually happen every time and then my only recourse is to restart Cursor (restarting just the Terminal within Cursor is not sufficient).

I always notice it first when I can’t run flutter or dart which I happen to have installed in my ~/Documents/GitHub folder. But it affects ~/Documents more generally. Sometimes Cursor prompts for access to ~/Documents, but it doesn’t seem to realize it needs to for the Terminal, so instead those access requests are just denied at the system level.

The failure mode:

➜  demos dart          
bash: /Users/eseidel/Documents/GitHub/upstream_flutter/bin/dart: Operation not permitted
➜  demos ls ~/Documents 
ls: /Users/eseidel/Documents: Operation not permitted

Steps to Reproduce

Use cursor for a while. Have a command on your path that’s in your ~/Documents folder. This commonly happens when you’re developing command line tools (like I do) and also have them on your path.

Expected Behavior

Cursor should either prompt for Documents access, or not lose it in the first place.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.34 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 609c37304ae83141fd217c4ae638bf5321856500
Date: 2025-11-25T16:35:52.391Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Additional Information

I’ve not had this problem from within VSC. So my guess is that this is something related to Cursor’s fork.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

2

Hey, thanks for the report. This is an unusual macOS permission issue. To help investigate, could you please provide:

  1. Current permissions: Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Files and Folders - screenshot showing Cursor’s permissions.
  2. Full Disk Access status: Check System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access - is Cursor listed and enabled?
  3. System logs: When the issue occurs next, open Console.app, filter for “Cursor”, and share any permission-related errors.
  4. Pattern details: Roughly how long after opening Cursor does this occur? Any specific actions that seem to trigger it?

This appears to be a macOS sandbox issue specific to Cursor’s fork. Once we have this info, I’ll pass it to the team for investigation.

As a temporary workaround, have you tried granting Cursor Full Disk Access in System Settings? That might prevent the permission loss.

3

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  1. Looks like no applications have full disk access (not by a concious choice).

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image1410×650 89 KB

4

I’ll update 3 next time it occurs.

4. Probably every few days.

5

Thanks for the screenshots! I see that Cursor is listed under Full Disk Access, but the toggle is OFF (disabled).

Try enabling it:

  • Click the toggle next to “Cursor” to turn it ON
  • You may need to restart Cursor after enabling it
  • Check if the ~/Documents access issue still occurs

This should prevent the permission loss issue. Let me know if the problem persists after enabling Full Disk Access!