.cursorignore blocks explicit file sharing in chat — should be index-only

Ideas Feature Requests
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1

Feature request for product/service

Cursor IDE

Describe the request

Hi team,

I’d like to suggest a distinction between two behaviors that .cursorignore currently conflates:

Excluding files from codebase indexing (the intended use case)
Blocking files from being explicitly shared in chat (drag & drop, @ mention)
Currently, if a file is listed in .cursorignore, dragging it into the chat produces no output — the file is silently discarded even when the user is intentionally sharing it. This is unintuitive.

The analogy with .gitignore is useful here: .gitignore prevents files from being tracked automatically, but git add -f still lets you force-include them when you explicitly want to. There’s no equivalent override in Cursor.

Suggested improvement: .cursorignore should only affect automatic indexing and context retrieval. When a user explicitly drags a file into chat or references it with @, that explicit intent should override the ignore rule — or at minimum, Cursor should show a warning like “This file is in .cursorignore — include it anyway?” rather than silently doing nothing.

This would make .cursorignore useful for keeping the index clean without losing the ability to reference specific files on demand.

Thanks!

Operating System (if it applies)

Windows 10/11

4

Hey, thanks for the detailed FR.

It looks like the main use case a clean index without losing the ability to explicitly share a file is already covered by a separate file .cursorindexingignore. It only affects indexing, but it does not block reading via @ mention or drag and drop. So if you want an index-only ignore, you should use it instead of .cursorignore.

As for .cursorignore, the current behavior is intentional. It is a security boundary, files listed there should not reach the model through any path index, context, or attachment. So an override like include anyway is unlikely, because it breaks that guarantee.

But the idea of showing a warning instead of silently discarding is reasonable. Right now it is not obvious why drag and drop does nothing. I will keep the thread open and see what the community votes for.

Related: How to force Cursor to index files/folders in gitignore How to force Cursor to index files/folders in gitignore, it discusses the difference between .cursorignore and .cursorindexingignore.