The Outline view is empty; how can I display the symbols from the source code currently in the editor?

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The Outline view is empty; how can I display the symbols from the source code currently in the editor?

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Hey, thanks for the screenshot. I can see a C file is open album.c, and Outline says “The active editor cannot provide outline information”.

This is expected, not a bug. Outline is filled by a language extension document symbol provider, and Cursor doesn’t include one for C/C++ by default.

One important note. Microsoft’s official C/C++ extension ms-vscode.cpptools doesn’t work in Cursor because Microsoft blocked it on VS Code forks. The working option is clangd llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd.

What to do:

  1. Open Extensions Cmd+Shift+X or Ctrl+Shift+X, search for clangd, and install it.
  2. Make sure the language mode in the bottom right is set to C, not Plain Text.
  3. clangd needs clang installed on your system and a compile_commands.json or compile_flags.txt in the project root. Without that, it can’t parse the code correctly, so symbols won’t show up.
  4. After you open the project, give the server some time to index it.

Let me know if symbols still don’t appear after installing clangd.