We do not index files that are gitignored or cursorignored. This is respected on the next re-index (which happens about every 10 minutes or upon restarting the editor)
Cursor Tab is separate from indexing and will run on any open file unless you have cpp disabled on the file’s language.
cursorignore was primarily build for the indexing feature for codebase-chat. I don’t want to index lots of large/unneeded files (like my node modules or generated protobuf files) in a large codebase. But, I’d still like autocomplete to be able to read from/write to many of them. Cursor Tab does not persist code or code-derived information, which is why we worry less about the storage overhead/privacy when reading these files vs indexing.
But, I still think it is important to be able to specify files that Cursor Tab should never see, so we will work on a solution for this.