Git.autorefresh is not working in WSL

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I have to manually press Git Refresh button, git.autorefresh is not working.

Steps to Reproduce

I am using WSL, maybe it could be related. I don’t know. On my previous setup, everything worked fine.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.7.28 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: adb0f9e3e4f184bba7f3fa6dbfd72ad0ebb8cfd0
Date: 2025-10-01T02:45:21.769Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

2

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue with WSL setups - the file system watching can be a bit finicky between Windows and the Linux subsystem

Try these fixes in order:

  1. Check your git.autorefresh setting is enabled in Cursor settings (should be true by default)

  2. If you’re working in a WSL directory, make sure you’re opening Cursor from within WSL itself rather than from Windows. Run cursor . from your WSL terminal in your project directory

  3. WSL2 file watching can be improved by adding this to your WSL config. Create/edit /etc/wsl.conf and add:

[automount]
options = "metadata,umask=22,fmask=11"
  1. You might also need to increase the inotify limits in WSL. Run:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p

The WSL file system bridge can sometimes miss file change events, which is probably why your git auto-refresh isn’t picking up changes. Opening Cursor directly from WSL usually fixes this

Let me know if any of these help!