Plan files automatically insert blank lines between markdown table rows, breaking table rendering

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When creating or editing .plan.md files in ~/.cursor/plans/, Cursor automatically inserts blank lines between consecutive lines in markdown tables. This breaks standard markdown table syntax and prevents tables from rendering correctly.
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Steps to Reproduce

Open Cursor in any workspace
Use the CreatePlan tool (or have the AI create a plan) that includes a markdown table
Observe the plan file created in ~/.cursor/plans/
The markdown table will have blank lines inserted between every row

Expected Behavior

Markdown tables should remain intact with consecutive rows (no blank lines between them):
| Column A | Column B ||----------|----------|| Value 1 | Value 2 || Value 3 | Value 4 |
This renders as a proper table in markdown viewers.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.26
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: bdbdd3f2cf698f583c5cdd2a6dc0f5aec4ed5f90
Date: 2026-01-07T07:11:15.842Z

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Opus 4.5

Additional Information

Actual Behavior
Cursor automatically reformats the table to insert blank lines between every row:
| Column A | Column B ||----------|----------|| Value 1 | Value 2 || Value 3 | Value 4 |
This breaks markdown table rendering entirely - the table displays as plain text with pipe characters instead of a formatted table.

Additional Observations
Persistent reformatting: Even when writing the file directly via shell commands (bypassing Cursor’s tools), the file is subsequently reformatted with blank lines inserted. This suggests a file watcher or auto-save mechanism is applying this formatting.
Affects all table-like structures: The issue appears to affect any consecutive lines that could be part of a table structure.
HTML tables also affected: Attempting to use HTML

tags as a workaround also results in blank lines being inserted between elements, and the HTML is displayed as raw text rather than rendered.
Specific to ~/.cursor/plans/ directory: Files with the same content stored elsewhere (e.g., in workspace directories) are NOT affected by this auto-formatting.
Cannot be prevented: Closing the file, writing via terminal, or any other method we tried - the reformatting is reapplied when Cursor processes the file.
Workaround
Store plan documentation as regular .md files in the workspace directory (e.g., .cursor/plans/ within the project) instead of using the built-in CreatePlan tool which saves to ~/.cursor/plans/. Files in workspace directories are not affected by this auto-formatting.
Impact
Severity: Medium-High
Usability impact: Markdown tables are a fundamental documentation feature. Plans often need to present tabular data (comparison tables, mapping tables, status tables, etc.) and this bug makes that impossible in plan files.
User experience: Significant friction when trying to create well-formatted plan documentation.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

Hey, thanks for the report.

That’s interesting. The team recently worked on adding support for Markdown tables in Plan mode, but it looks like there might be a regression or a new issue with auto-formatting.

Your workaround using .cursor/plans/ inside the workspace is correct. To be sure, could you check if the issue still happens on the latest version? (Cursor > Check for Updates)

I’ll pass this to the engineers to investigate. We’re especially interested in the part where the file watcher reformats even files created via the shell.