Improve markdown preview mermaid rendering

Ideas Feedback
1

Markdown preview mermaid rendering falls a lot behind VSCode, and even codex.

Installed bierner.markdown-mermaid which got merged into VSCode, but not working in Cursor builtin preview.

Any plan on improving this?

5

Hey, thanks for the report. There are two different preview surfaces in Cursor, so it can look like the extension isn’t doing anything.

  • The Preview tab that opens for a .md file is Cursor’s own renderer. It draws Mermaid natively with zoom and pan, but right now it only supports flowchart, sequence, class, state, ER, and XY chart. Other types like pie, gantt, mindmap, gitGraph, timeline, C4, etc. show Mermaid Syntax Error there, and extensions can’t affect that tab.

  • The classic VS Code preview still exists in Cursor, and that’s what bierner.markdown-mermaid hooks into. To use it, open the .md file, switch to the Source tab, open Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P or Cmd+Shift+P, then run Markdown: Open Preview to the Side. Or press Ctrl+K then V, or Cmd+K then V. In that preview panel, diagrams render using the extension’s full Mermaid engine.

You’re right that VS Code 1.121 added built-in Mermaid in its preview, and Cursor hasn’t pulled that in yet. There’s already an open request for this: Feature Request: Enable Plan-style Mermaid rendering for regular .md files. I’ll merge your thread into that request so it counts toward it.

If a diagram still doesn’t render in the classic preview after these steps, send the first line of the mermaid block which is the diagram type, and your Cursor version from Cursor > About Cursor, and I’ll take a closer look.

6

Thank you, could work this way