Drag & Drop files to editor pane freezes UI / lags behind

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Hello,
if I drag & drop a file from the sidepanel into the editor pane it is very slow/laggy. Mouse cursor moves normal but the UI hinting where the file will be opened lags pretty hard. It seems like the whole UI is freezing. It sometimes takes up to 5-8 seonds until it is responsive again. This does not appear when I use code. I also tried to disable all extensions as well. Noting helped. Debugged already with AI and no solution seems to help.

I am on Arch with Hyprland & Wayland using Nvidia. Maybe you know about that problem?

Steps to Reproduce

Drag a file from the sidepanel into the editor view, while multiple tabs are open.

Expected Behavior

No lag to be seen and the UI does not freeze.

Operating System

Linux

Version Information

Version: 2.4.37
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 7b9c34466f5c119e93c3e654bb80fe9306b6cc70
Date: 2026-02-12T23:15:35.107Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.5.2
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Linux x64 6.18.9-arch1-2

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

recording

Hey, thanks for the report.

It looks like this might be an interaction issue between the Wayland compositor and Nvidia. A few things to try:

  1. Run Cursor with XWayland instead of native Wayland:

    cursor --ozone-platform=x11
    

    This forces X11 rendering, which often fixes drag and drop issues on Wayland compositors.

  2. If that doesn’t help, try disabling hardware acceleration:

    cursor --disable-gpu
    
  3. Also worth checking, are you using the proprietary Nvidia drivers or nouveau?

If --ozone-platform=x11 helps, you can make it permanent by adding it to ~/.config/cursor-flags.conf.

Let me know what helped (or didn’t) and that should narrow down what’s causing it.

I tried both your options already and neither work sadly. That’s why I thought I should open an bug report.
I use the proprietary driver for nvidia.

1 Like

Will there be any news about this or info I get? Or am I just left with the problem and I need to live with it?

Hey, sorry for the silence, we haven’t forgotten about you.

First, you’re on 2.4.37 from February 12. Since then, we’ve shipped a few updates, and they may include fixes for Electron or Chromium rendering. Please update to the latest version (Help > Check for Updates) and see if the issue goes away.

If it still lags after updating, try a couple more things:

  1. Launch with these flags:

    cursor --disable-gpu-compositing --disable-software-rasterizer
    
  2. Or try all three at once:

    cursor --disable-gpu --disable-gpu-compositing --ozone-platform=x11
    
  3. While drag and drop is lagging, open Help > Open Process Explorer and check which process is spiking CPU. That’ll help narrow down where the bottleneck is.

A couple questions:

  • What Nvidia driver version are you on? (nvidia-smi will show it)
  • What GPU model do you have?

I’ve already passed this info to the team. Let me know how it goes.