Currently, as far as I know, rules in Cursor can only be defined at the project level. While this works well in most cases, there are situations where I’d like to use some personal, manual rules that I don’t want to commit to the main project repo.
Global user rules are always applied, which is great — but I’d love the ability to manually apply specific Cursor rules as needed.
Example use case:
I have a personal workflow for implementing Jira tickets. It includes steps for interacting with MCP servers, committing code, and so on. These rules are tailored to my preferences and don’t make sense for the whole team. Right now, I keep them in a text file and copy-paste them into Cursor when needed.
A way to save and manually apply personal rule sets (without committing them to the repo) would be super helpful.
If anyone knows of a more elegant workaround, I’d love to hear it!
Thanks for the reply @condor but User Rules are something else. User rules are always applied globally. As mentioned in the official documentation.
In simple terms what I am describing is having the ability to select a folder with additional rules which are not in the project directory (outside of the repository).
… or even just extend the current user rules functionality to be able to @ a specific rule in the chat and apply it manually instead of them being always applied.
Hey, you have the option to attach the necessary project rules to the conversation instead of relying on the agent. This will also work if you add a markdown file with your rules to the chat context.
I appreciate the reply but this is not what this post is about. I know how to add rules and @-ing Rules allows you to add only rules defined in the project directory which is the problem. On commercial codebases (or any shared codebases) one should not have to commit their own rules to use them.
Hello,
I’m writing to support Belmin’s request regarding rule management in Cursor.
While Cursor is a fantastic tool for accelerating development, the current approach to user rules being global across all projects is a significant limitation. I frequently switch between projects using different stacks — for example, Next.js and Expo — and having to maintain separate rule sets manually and copy-paste them every time is quite inconvenient and error-prone.
Given Cursor’s vision of context-aware development and AI-assisted productivity, I believe that supporting project-specific rules (or memory) should be a top priority for future updates. It would greatly enhance the usability and intelligence of the tool in real-world, multi-project workflows.
Thanks for the great work so far — looking forward to seeing this improvement in future releases!
