Russian characters are displayed incorrectly in the console

[al1 (al)]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When a console utility outputs something in Russian, the characters are unreadable.

Steps to Reproduce

Ask to run a console command.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.41 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 2ca326e0d1ce10956aea33d54c0e2d8c13c58a30
Date: 2026-01-16T19:14:00.150Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26200

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue with non-ASCII characters in the terminal on Windows.

Similar issue: Cursor AI Korean Encoding Bug (Korean characters)

A few options to fix it:

1. Restart the terminal:

• Ctrl+Shift+P → “Terminal: Kill All Terminals”
• Fully close Cursor and reopen it
• Check: echo Cyrillic test

2. Cursor Rules (auto chcp):
   Add this to .cursor/rules:

When running commands in cmd.exe, always prefix the command with: chcp 65001 >nul &&

Example: instead of "dir", run "chcp 65001 >nul && dir"

3. settings.json (auto-start UTF-8):

"terminal.integrated.profiles.windows": {
  "Command Prompt": {
    "path": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe",
    "args": ["/K", "chcp 65001"]
  }
}

4. Switch terminals:
   In Cursor Settings → Terminal → Default Profile, try PowerShell instead of cmd.exe. It sometimes handles UTF-8 better, but not always.

5. System UTF-8 (most reliable, but more drastic):
   Windows Settings → Time & Language → Language → Administrative language settings → Change system locale → enable “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” → reboot.