How to exclude Cursor rules in subdirectories?

How To
1

Hi everyone :waving_hand:

Is it possible to selectively apply Cursor rules to some directories and exclude them from nested subdirectories?

Okay so here’s my directory setup, slimmed down for example purposes:

packages
  client
    components
      button.vue
    assets
      main.css
    special
      a-file.ts

I created two Cursor rules, with .mdc extensions in .cursor/rules/*. Here they are:

rule-1.mdc

---
description: 
globs: packages/client/**/*,!packages/client/special/**/*
alwaysApply: false
---

Apply rule to client dir but not to special dir

rule-2.mdc

---
description: 
globs: packages/special/**/*
alwaysApply: false
---

Only apply rule to special dir

–

Expected behaviour

  • Opening any file in the client dir and all of its subdirs/files (excluding special) would only attach rule-1.mdc
  • Opening any file in special dir and all of its subdirs/files would only attach rule-2.mdc

What actually happens

  • rule-2.mdc for the special dir and files is attached as expected
  • rule-1.mdc is never attached anywhere

–

I also tried the following syntax and it didn’t work:

rule-1.mdc

---
description: 
globs:
  - packages/client/**/*
  - !packages/client/special/**/*
alwaysApply: false
---

Always do this and that

Thanks in advance for the help :slight_smile: