In my work repository, we use development as the “main” branch. When using the @ menu to select the “Branch (Diff with Main)” option, it’s not clear to me which branch is actually being used as the base for comparison. How do I ensure that Cursor is choosing the correct base branch for this context…

It seems vscode has an existing concept of this in the setting git.defaultBranchName. Maybe Cursor could use this if it’s set to customize the diffing behavior?

Hey @quantizor For your awareness, this is how Cursor is determining what the main branch is for Branch (Diff with Main) git symbolic-ref --short refs/remotes/origin/HEAD. This is the primary method. It reads what branch the remote’s origin/HEAD points to. If the above fails, it checks for ma…

Thanks Colin, that was super helpful! If I could suggest moving 4 up above 2 I think that would be the most obvious experience. Basically just makes it so intentional user config always wins.

I disagree with moving 4 to 2 as that is effective the default setting value. Values that are contextually relevant should be utilized first. There are many examples of scope priority like in pydantic_settings field-value-priority or how Google Cloud has a search order to determine Application Def…

No plans to change defaults at the moment, but we’ll keep an ear out for more feedback!

I don’t need the default changed, but I would love for this to be configurable. My team uses main for the deployed branch and test for development, so for this feature to be useful to me I need to be able to set it to compare against the test branch.

How to change the default branch for Cursor

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quantizor December 16, 2025, 4:56pm 2

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How to change the default branch for Cursor

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