Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor IDE
Describe the Bug
Terminal and agent interface not working for workspace until related Cursor workspace storage is manually deleted
I ran into an issue where a workspace would open but the integrated terminal panel never loaded and the agent terminal didn’t work either.
The editor itself was fine — files, sidebar, everything else worked — but no terminal, no agent, no search.
This persisted across Reload Window and full Cursor restarts, and happened even when the workspace was opened by itself.
I used my working Cursor instance with Opus4.6 to debug the bad instance, this is it’s findings:
Digging through the logs, the failure chain was:
- The extension isolation service restarts extension hosts on window open
- During that restart, anysphere.cursor-socket fails to activate
- Without cursor-socket, the Connect transport provider never registers
- This cascades: no search provider, git context times out, pty host never starts, terminal never loads
- The broken state gets saved to the workspace’s state.vscdb, so every restart replays the same failure
The renderer.log for the affected window showed:
“No search provider registered for scheme: file, waiting”
“[WorktreeManager] Timed out waiting for git context provider”
“No Connect transport provider registered”
The exthost.log showed:
“Extension activation failure: anysphere.cursor-socket”
“Extension host terminating: renderer closed the MessagePort”
The ptyhost.log was completely empty (pty host never started).
The fix was to close Cursor and delete the workspace storage for the affected project:
rm -rf ~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/workspace-id
rm -rf ~/.cursor/projects/home-user-project-name
Then reopen with: cursor /path/to/project
After that, everything worked immediately. The workspace initialized cleanly with terminal, agent, and search all functioning.
It seems like once the workspace state gets corrupted, there’s no built-in recovery — Reload Window and restarts just restore into the same broken state.
Ideally Cursor would detect this and reinitialize, or at least not persist a failed extension activation state.
Steps to Reproduce
Open the project in Cursor
Expected Behavior
Terminal and agents functional
Operating System
Linux
Version Information
Cursor 3.1.15
Does this stop you from using Cursor
Yes - Cursor is unusable