Granular approval options for terminal commands and MCP tool calls

Ideas Feature Requests
, ,
5

Hey, thanks for the detailed feature request. Some of what you’re describing already exists today, so you might be able to use it right now:

  • Terminal commands: there’s an Auto-Run command allowlist in Cursor Settings, where you can add commands globally.
  • MCP tool calls: the allowlist supports granular scopes, per-tool and per-server server:*.
  • Workspace config in Git: for CLI permissions you can use the project-level .cursor/cli.json or the global ~/.cursor/cli-config.json. Rules go in the permissions object using allow and deny arrays with syntax like Shell(cmd), Read(path), Write(path), Mcp(server:*). You can commit this file and share it with your team. See docs Permissions | Cursor Docs

What’s not available yet, and what you’re asking for:

  • Choosing the scope directly in the approval prompt for shell and MCP, this workspace, globally, or this session. Right now in the IDE you only get Run-once, Allowlist global, or Skip.
  • Having the IDE pick up a per-project allowlist from .cursor/, not only in the CLI.

Both are on our radar, but I can’t share an ETA. Similar requests are being discussed in threads 96309 Separate "Auto-run MCP" Option from "Enable auto-run mode" and 127741 Ability to override settings via cursor/ files (eg allowlist), feel free to add your use cases there.

The stretch idea about agent-aware matching of an already approved command variant, like using tail -n 20 instead of tail -n 25, is separate and interesting. I logged it separately.