As far as I understand, Cursor has no button to check for updates.
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It’s auto update, you don’t need to do that
You can always do Command / Ctrl + Shift + P, then “Cursor: Attempt Update.”
Though always looking to improve. Curious if you’d want more here?
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Thanks for the quick responses, everyone! I appreciate the insights on how Cursor handles updates. I did try the Command / Ctrl + Shift + P and then “Cursor: Attempt Update,” but it didn’t seem to do the trick for me.
The reason I brought this up is that I saw some cool new features listed on the Cursor changelog page, and I was eager to try them out. However, my current version wasn’t catching up as quickly as my enthusiasm! 
I think having a “Check for Update” button, similar to what we have in VSCode, would be a fantastic addition. It would give users like me the ability to pull the latest updates manually, ensuring we’re always on the cutting edge of what Cursor has to offer. 
Looking forward to seeing how Cursor evolves! Keep up the great work! 
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Second vote for a “Check for Update” button. I agree this would be a nice addition.
I’m still on version 10.4 and trying “Cursor: Attempt update” didn’t seem to force the latest update.
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We now have incremental rollouts built-in so that we can slowly release the update. this allows to us to iterate fast and catch BAD bugs before they reach too many people haha.
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A “check for update” button might be nice, but, at a minimum using Command / Ctrl + Shift + P and “Cursor: Attempt Update” should be fixed, as currently, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
We do need a reliable way to force client updates. I’m also still stuck on 0.10.4 and nothing I’ve tried so far has triggered an update, which is odd to say the least.
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Believe this is because we do incremental rollouts. We’ve noticed some issues with the recent update (e.g. Python problems), so we halted the rollout. Would be nice for us to show this in the UI though to reduce confusion when you try to update.
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Attempt Update should also not try to close all open windows before exiting the editor - this forces any unsaved or untitled buffers to prompt for save or cancel.
Instead it should quit the editor the same way that the standard file > close/exit option does, which correctly preserves opened windows and cached buffers upon relaunch
my current process is literally to make sure I have at least one unsaved file buffer in every open window before I trigger Attempt Update, choose cancel on each separate window’s unsaved changes prompt, and then manually exit the editor from the file menu - it will still attempt to update once the editor exits and still relaunch the editor once the updater is done, but now it restores opened windows and file buffers just like if I’d relaunched the editor for any other reason.
@truell20 Incremental updates make sense for automatic updates. But it’s a bit frustrating as a user to manually attempt an update and be unable to, when Cursor has announced support for a new model.
My usual experience (like today) when Cursor announces a new model: I try restarting 5x and clicking “Cursor: attempt update” 5x times too, with no update. So I end up needing to wait for the rollout at an unknown day and ultimately forget about it for a few weeks…and miss the fun trying out the new thing with others.
(But aside from that, I do enjoy using Cursor!)
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My cursor at home (win 11) shows a little popup at the bottom left corner asking me if I want to update when there is an update available.
At work (win 10) after a week off with several updates at home, the popup never shows up so I googled how to check for updates and that brought me here.
After “attempt update” it updated.
Just curious why it never asked me if I want to update like the one at home does.
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I click the pop-up that says “Update Cursor?” and then the app quits and nothing happens. I would like to update to the latest version but I’m not entirely sure how. The recommendation to try Command / Ctrl + Shift + P, then “Cursor: Attempt Update.” does not work for me.
I’m on an M1 Mac running the Sonoma 14.5 operating system.
You can download the latest version from the homepage of our website.
I have tried “Attempy Update” and it did not work for me (macOS Sequoia 15.0).
I think adding a Check for Updates option would be good!
Same here, running on top of linux mint 21. Regardless if clicking on the little “update cursor” box, or using P, attempt update, cursor instantly closes. Also lot faster than regularly closing, so I assume this is an unhandled exception. Do we have an application log for cursor somewhere?
I know we are in 0.â– â– versions, but if someone wants me to keep paying (pro account), the cursor team should really fix things like this. Not the only problem. Many, many UI design desasters, far and beyond annoying.
If you don’t have one, get a good UI (NOT !!! UX) designer.
Disenchanted.
Hey, yes, we have a changelog page, and you can also download the latest version there. As for the UI, it’s based on the UI of the VSCode editor itself. Could you share the problematic areas of the design? We’ll look into it.
I am aware of the changelog. However, I have found no instructions as to update the software, w/o possibly destroying settings, old projects, etc. Which is something I would expect to see when doing a new install (that being the only hints I could find on the net, be it this forum, reddit, or wherever.) And those questions run OLD. Plus, even if there was a proper update/upgrade functionality, where is the possibility to roll back to a previous version, if the update turns out to be problematic? As can be expected in a basically beta version of the software?
Well, VScode. I know your software is partly a branch of that, which is why I decided to give cursor a try. VSCode is not bad, but I have been in the IT business for more than three decades, and got burnt repeatedly by relying on products by Microsoft. I try to avoid them as much as possible.
Saw the interview on Lex’s youtube channel. Brilliant guys, but, so it appears to me now, maybe only brilliant on the deep technological level.
You might have noticed I made a strong distinction between UI and UX. For good reason. UX is a cancer in today’s software. All about design, being pleasant to the eye. UI is about FUNCTIONALITY. And that is going down the drain just about everywhere, even with software from HUGE companies.
You want UI advice? I could do that, but sorry, that is not for free. You could try to implement really simple things, things that should be not even be worth mentioning: Text search trough the entire code base, to just name a simple thing.
Enough ranting, and I apologize. But I had a really bad day, largely b/c of cursor. Did not mention that before, but w/o any update, w/o any directory structure change, this morning, my whole ai chat histories in cursor are GONE. And searching for the problem, I can see that such things have been happening since 2 years. Really?
Best regards,
George
PS: Where is a proper documentation? Not talking about API, just a user’s manual. You might think that is superfluous (and it MIGHT be, with a truly intuition-based UI), but, by and large, I’d say good manuals are always a “must”. Think of stupid users, like myself.
Hey,
Cursor has an updating mechanism built in so that, when there is an update, you a prompted as such, and it will install when you next close the application. There should never be any loss of settings or project history when updating through this method.
Currently, there is no way to roll back your version officially. You can find and download olds builds, but there is a high risk of data loss if you do this, as there is no procedure for data migration when downgrading versions.
We have a release plan that aims to iron out any teething issues with new releases before they are released to everyone, including a beta testing program and a distributed rollout schedule. Therefore, by the time you get an update, there should (in an ideal world) be no bugs or issues added by accident.
We do offer new features to our users early in development, so they can try them and give us feedback, so it may be that the newest features still require some maturing before they could be considered “enterprise-ready”, but this is really a decision per user, hence we leave the option to you.
The reason for VSCode as a base is that we don’t want to build an editor. VSCode is the primary editor for engineers worldwide, regardless of the language, framework, or technology people hope to build with it. As such, it was the obvious choice as a base for an editor. We believe we can have much more impact on software development focusing on the new AI features than trying to improve upon the strong foundation VSCode already provides.
Text search through the entire codebase is already available and is brought over from VSCode. More info on that can be found here: Basic editing in Visual Studio Code
I apologize you are having a bad day with Cursor, the best advise I can give is two-fold:
- Routinely restart your Composer sessions, as long sessions can cause the AI to be confused, and forget your old context and messages - even its own changes if they were long enough ago!
- Write documentation for the AI, even short and sweet, can help when starting a new composer, or changing the area of your codebase you are working on. A short
.mdfile explaining the structure of your codebase can really help an AI understanding things better than just writing a prompt for it can. You can write a few of these, and @ them whenever needed, to help the AI stay back on track.
Regarding documentation, you can find it at docs.cursor.com, although we are in the process of reviewing and updating them to be more aligned with the current state of the editor today.
Dan,
first of all I want to apologize. I was really in a bad mood. And many thanks for your answer, which was very helpful. If I may, I’ll follow up on that.
- Updates.
As I said, the built-in update functionality (Regardless if clicking on the little “update cursor” box, or using P, attempt update), cursor instantly closes. A restart does not trigger an update; I am stuck at 0.41.3. The way cursor closes (in a millisecond) suggests to me it actually crashes. This why I asked if there is any sort of application log.
- Find function.
Oh my. I didn’t look closely enough, my fault. I was not aware that you really seem to keep the editor 100% VSCode. Not that I am very familiar with VSCode, but at least Microsoft has good documentation. Sorry again. A suggestion: In the Edit menu, I would rename the corresponding entry to “Find across (all) files”
- Loss of chats history
This has happened w/o any connection to the update issue. It just happened. I fired up cursor in the morning, it dutifully loaded the previous projects, with all the old file tabs open, but the chat history was (and remains) gone.
Can you point me to a place where the chat history is stored? I have no problem, as a workaround, to make backups of such files automatically.
Further (this is more a feature request), it would be very useful if there was an easy way to copy certain parts of the ai chat to a designated file, to keep a timestamped, possibly auto-commented protocol of important/interesting things. I know I can do it manually, but it is quite cumbersome.
" 1. Routinely restart your Composer sessions, as long sessions can cause the AI to be confused, and forget your old context and messages - even its own changes if they were long enough ago!"
Indeed, and that was part of my frustration. Cursor seemed to get more and more stupid, forgetting things it did itself 2 pages before. I resorted to make any request @codebase. Yuck.
Any suggestion to how long one should chats allow to become? And is that only determined by the current chat, or possibly by the total of all chats within a project? And could cursor not detect it’s chat base is becoming too large? Is that a question of exceeding the token window?
Thank you very much.
George
Do you ha a sample for such a file? Does it need to have any specific structure, or is it like a prompt?
How does that differ from .cursorrules, and also the settings “Rules for AI”?
Thanks again, George