Subfolders within Cursor commands folder supported in IDE but not CLI

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1

Describe the Bug

Subfolders in the commands folder such as this path
.cursor/commands/development/

work in the Cursor IDE but don’t appear as commands in the Cursor CLI

Steps to Reproduce

Add a subfolder to the commands folder and add a command file there. It will show up when you do ‘/’ in the Cursor agent chat, but not in the Cursor CLI

Expected Behavior

Popups up in the Cursor CLI chat as well

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

CLI:
CLI Version 2026.03.11-6dfa30c
Model GPT-5.4 High
OS darwin (arm64)
Terminal superset
Shell zsh

IDE:
Version: 2.6.19
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 224838f96445be37e3db643a163a817c15b36060
Date: 2026-03-12T04:07:27.435Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.4.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

7

Hi Tommy,

Thank you for the detailed report. This is a known behavior difference between the IDE and CLI — the IDE recursively scans subdirectories within .cursor/commands/, but the CLI currently only reads top-level .md files and skips subdirectories entirely.

In the meantime, the workaround is to flatten the structure — move commands from subfolders (e.g., .cursor/commands/development/my-command.md) to the top-level .cursor/commands/ folder, using descriptive filenames like development-my-command.md to preserve the organizational intent.

Best,
Mohit

8

This is a great workaround unless yout need the subdirectory in order to wire in a shared git submodule accoss multiple projects. When do you expect to have this implemented in the CLI as well?