WSL Mirrored Networking breaks Cursor integration

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Just started using Cursor and I installed the Anysphere WSL extension. It works fine if you keep WSL Networking set to NAT but if you change it to Mirrored it breaks the integration. Is there a work around for this?

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Hey @Josh_Friberg, thanks for the report, and welcome!

This is a known interaction with WSL mirrored networking. Cursor starts a small server inside your WSL distro and then connects to it from Windows over localhost. In mirrored mode that localhost connection doesn’t always get through, which is why switching back to NAT makes it work.

There is a setting for exactly this case. You can keep mirrored networking on:

  1. In Cursor on Windows, press Ctrl+Shift+P and run “Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)”.
  2. Add this line inside the top-level braces (add a comma after the previous line if needed):
    "remote.WSL.serverListenAddress": "0.0.0.0"
  3. Save the file and fully quit Cursor (check Task Manager for no remaining Cursor processes).
  4. In PowerShell, run: wsl --shutdown
  5. Start Cursor again and connect to your WSL distro (Ctrl+Shift+P, “WSL: Connect to WSL” or open your project from a WSL terminal with cursor .).

That tells the server inside WSL to listen on all interfaces so Windows can reach it in mirrored mode. Connections are still protected by a per-session token.

Give this a try and let us know!