VS Code to Cursor Migration: 12 Steps, 60 Min [2026]

Switching editors used to mean starting from zero: reinstalling forty extensions, rebuilding keybindings from memory, and squinting at a default theme for a week. Cursor, the AI-native fork of VS Code that now ships as Cursor 3 with its “unified workspace for building software with agents” framing, removes most of that friction with a one-click import tool built directly into account settings. That workspace stopped being VS Code-exclusive territory in May 2026, when Cursor shipped JetBrains IDE support, so the same import instincts covered here increasingly apply no matter which editor family you’re leaving. This tutorial walks through every step of moving a real VS Code setup into Cursor, keeping your extensions, keybindings, themes, and settings intact, then configuring the AI-specific pieces VS Code never had: model selection, Tab completions, and agent mode.

By the end, you will have a fully migrated Cursor install that behaves like your old VS Code setup plus AI tooling, verified against a real sample project with a working build task, a debugger, and a functioning terminal. This is written for developers who already have a VS Code workflow they like and don’t want to lose it, not for people starting from a blank editor.

Twelve steps cover the core migration, followed by pricing, a shortcuts reference, a team-rollout section for engineering leads, five pitfalls worth avoiding, advanced configuration tips, and eight troubleshooting fixes for the issues that come up most often. If you only need the fast path, Steps 1 through 5 alone get you a fully imported editor in under ten minutes – the rest is about making the AI-specific tooling actually earn its place in your workflow.

Note: some prerequisite version numbers and pricing figures below reflect the most recent publicly available data at the time of writing. Cursor and VS Code both ship frequent updates, so verify exact current figures on their respective sites before treating any specific number as fixed.

This context matters most if your team has service-level expectations around editor stability – a fast-moving release cadence is a feature for early adopters and a liability for teams that need predictable tooling during a sprint.

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Why developers are migrating from VS Code to Cursor in 2026

Cursor is built on the same open-source core as VS Code, so it renders extensions, keybindings, and settings files the same way. That shared foundation is exactly why the migration path is short: Cursor doesn’t need to reinvent an import format, it just reads the files VS Code already writes to disk. Microsoft’s own editor keeps shipping fast too. Visual Studio Code hit version 1.136 on September 9, 2026, with 1.137 already queued as the next release on the official update page, so this is not a comparison between an old tool and a new one. It’s a comparison between two actively maintained editors that happen to share a codebase.

What pulls people over is the AI layer sitting on top of that shared editor core. Cursor’s Tab completions predict multi-line edits instead of single tokens, Cmd+K rewrites selected code inline, and Composer/Agent mode – running on Composer 2.5, Cursor’s own first-party agentic coding model since its May 2026 launch – can plan and execute changes across multiple files in one pass. None of that exists in stock VS Code without installing and configuring a separate AI extension, and even then the integration isn’t as tight because Cursor controls the whole editor shell rather than working through an extension API. If you’ve been running GitHub Copilot inside VS Code and want to compare the agent experience directly, our VS Code vs Cursor vs Zed benchmark has cold-start and latency numbers worth reading before you commit.

It’s also worth being honest about what you’re not gaining. VS Code’s extension marketplace is larger and has had more time to mature, its Settings Sync feature is a first-party Microsoft product with no third-party dependency, and its release cadence (weekly insiders builds, monthly stable releases) is one of the most predictable in the industry. If your workflow doesn’t lean on AI-assisted coding at all, migrating for its own sake buys you very little. This tutorial assumes you’ve already decided the AI features are worth evaluating and just want the transition to be painless rather than a weekend project.

Prerequisites and versions you need before starting

Get these in place before you touch the import button. Skipping any of them is the single biggest reason migrations stall halfway through.

• VS Code installed and up to date (version 1.136 or later recommended, released September 9, 2026) with Settings Sync signed in if you use it across machines
• Cursor downloaded from cursor.com – the current release line is Cursor 3, described by the company as a unified workspace for building software with agents
• A Cursor account (free Hobby tier or a paid Pro/Pro+/Ultra/Teams/Enterprise plan) – sign-in is required before the VS Code import option appears
• At least 2 GB of free disk space for a clean extension reinstall, since Cursor pulls each extension fresh from the marketplace rather than copying binaries
• Administrator or write access to your user profile folder (Cursor reads from the same paths VS Code uses: ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\Code\User\ on Windows, ~/.config/Code/User/ on Linux)
• 15-45 minutes depending on how many extensions you have installed and how large your workspace settings file is
• A backup of your current VS Code settings.json and keybindings.json, just in case (Step 2 covers exactly how)

None of this requires uninstalling VS Code. Cursor and VS Code coexist fine on the same machine, which matters if you need to fall back mid-project or keep VS Code around for a client who mandates it.

Step 1: Back up your VS Code configuration first

Before importing anything, copy your current configuration files somewhere safe. The import process is non-destructive to VS Code itself, but you want a known-good snapshot in case a setting doesn’t translate the way you expect.

# macOS
cp -r "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Code/User" "$HOME/vscode-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)"

# Windows (PowerShell)
Copy-Item "$env:APPDATA\Code\User" -Destination "$env:USERPROFILE\vscode-backup-$(Get-Date -Format yyyyMMdd)" -Recurse

# Linux
cp -r "$HOME/.config/Code/User" "$HOME/vscode-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)"

This backup folder contains settings.json, keybindings.json, snippet files, and your workspace storage. If you use VS Code’s built-in Settings Sync, you already have a cloud copy tied to your Microsoft or GitHub account, but a local backup is faster to restore from and doesn’t depend on network access.

Step 2: Download and install Cursor

Go to cursor.com and download the installer for your OS. Cursor ships native builds for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux (deb, rpm, and AppImage). Installation is standard: run the installer, accept the license, and launch.

On first launch, Cursor asks you to sign in (email, Google, or GitHub) before showing the main editor window. Sign-in is mandatory, not optional, because your plan tier and AI model access are tied to your account. If you skip it, the VS Code import option in settings won’t appear until you complete this step.

Step 3: Run the one-click VS Code import

This is the step that does the actual work. Cursor detects an existing VS Code installation on first launch and offers to import it directly in the onboarding flow. If you dismissed that prompt or want to re-run it later, the same import lives permanently in settings.

1. Open Cursor Settings with Cmd+Shift+J (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+J (Windows/Linux)
2. Navigate to General > Account
3. Find the VS Code Import section
4. Click Import

According to Cursor’s own migration documentation, this single click transfers four things: extensions, themes, settings, and keybindings. Cursor reads your VS Code settings.json and keybindings.json directly, installs each detected extension fresh from the marketplace (rather than copying the binary), and reapplies your active theme and icon pack. You can re-run this import at any time from the same menu if you install new extensions in VS Code later and want to bring them across without repeating manual setup. Full details are in Cursor’s VS Code migration docs.

Step 4: Verify extensions installed correctly

Open the Extensions panel (Cmd+Shift+X or Ctrl+Shift+X) and compare the list against your VS Code install. Most extensions transfer cleanly because Cursor resolves them through an Open VSX-compatible marketplace rather than Microsoft’s proprietary one – the two catalogs overlap heavily but aren’t identical, which matters if you rely on a niche or recently published extension. A few categories are worth checking manually:

• Language servers (Python, Go, Rust extensions) – these usually reinstall fine but may need a reload window to activate
• Linters and formatters (ESLint, Prettier, Black) – check their settings still point to the right config files in your workspace
• Git tooling (GitLens, GitHub Pull Requests) – re-authenticate if prompted, since OAuth tokens don’t always carry over
• Other AI extensions (GitHub Copilot, Codeium, Tabnine) – these can technically run alongside Cursor’s native AI features but usually conflict on keybindings like Tab, so decide early whether you want them active

If an extension is missing, it’s usually because Cursor couldn’t resolve it on the marketplace (rare, but happens with privately published or deprecated extensions). Install it manually from the Extensions panel in that case.

Step 5: Confirm keybindings and theme carried over

Open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P) and search “Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON).” This opens your imported keybindings.json directly, so you can diff it against your backup from Step 1 if something feels off. Custom shortcuts for things like “run tests,” “toggle terminal,” or multi-cursor selection should all be present exactly as they were.

Theme and icon pack import the same way. If your window still looks visually wrong after import (wrong font, wrong color scheme), open Command Palette and run “Preferences: Color Theme” to reselect it manually – this occasionally needs a nudge on the first launch after import.

It’s worth spot-checking the raw imported file too, especially if your VS Code setup had heavily customized font rendering or editor rulers. Open Command Palette and run “Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)” to see exactly what landed in Cursor.

// Example of settings that typically survive the import untouched
{
 "editor.fontFamily": "'JetBrains Mono', 'Fira Code', monospace",
 "editor.fontLigatures": true,
 "editor.rulers": [80, 120],
 "editor.tabSize": 2,
 "files.trimTrailingWhitespace": true,
 "workbench.colorTheme": "One Dark Pro",
 "terminal.integrated.fontSize": 13
}

General editor preferences like these map over cleanly because Cursor reads the identical settings.json schema VS Code uses. Settings tied to a specific extension’s internal ID occasionally break if that extension changed its configuration namespace between the version you had installed and the version Cursor pulls from the marketplace – rare, but worth a quick scan if a formatter or linter behaves differently than expected.

Step 6: Choose your AI model and set up Tab completions

This is where Cursor diverges from VS Code entirely, since none of this existed in your old setup. Open Cursor Settings and go to the Models section. Cursor’s current model lineup, per its own documentation, includes Claude Sonnet 5 with a context window of 1M tokens, alongside other frontier models depending on your plan tier – the roster grew again in September 2026 with Grok 4.7, pitched by Cursor for complex coding and interactive visual work, and Grok 4.6, which Cursor’s changelog highlights for long-running agent sessions and currently ships with 2x introductory usage. See our Codex vs Cursor vs Claude Code comparison for how these models perform head to head on coding benchmarks. Pick a default model for chat and a (usually faster, cheaper) model for autocomplete if the settings panel gives you that split.

Tab completions are on by default. Open any file and start typing – Cursor predicts multi-line edits, not just the next token, and you accept a suggestion with Tab the same way you would with a single-line autocomplete. If Tab conflicts with an existing extension’s keybinding (common with some snippet extensions), remap one of them in Keyboard Shortcuts.

Step 7: Index your codebase for context-aware chat

Open a real project folder (not a single file) and Cursor will prompt to index it. Indexing builds an embeddings-based map of your codebase so chat and agent features can reference functions, types, and files by name instead of only seeing what’s in the open tab. For a mid-sized repository (a few thousand files), indexing typically finishes in one to a few minutes depending on connection speed and repo size. You can check progress and exclude folders (like node_modules or build output) under Settings > Indexing.

# .cursorignore - place at project root to exclude paths from indexing
node_modules/
dist/
build/
*.log
.env
coverage/

A .cursorignore file works the same way .gitignore does – it keeps generated artifacts and secrets out of the index, which both speeds up indexing and prevents sensitive files from being pulled into a model context window.

Step 8: Set up a project-level rules file

VS Code doesn’t have an equivalent of this, so it’s easy to skip, but it’s one of the highest-leverage steps in the whole migration. A rules file tells Cursor’s AI features how your team writes code: naming conventions, preferred libraries, test patterns, things to avoid. Create a .cursor/rules directory at your project root.

# .cursor/rules/project.mdc
---
description: Core conventions for this repository
globs: ["**/*.ts", "**/*.tsx"]
alwaysApply: true
---

- Use TypeScript strict mode; never disable type checks with @ts-ignore
- Prefer named exports over default exports
- Write tests with Vitest, not Jest
- API calls go through the client in src/lib/api.ts - never fetch() directly in components
- Follow existing error handling pattern: throw typed errors, catch at route boundary

Once this file exists, every chat response, inline edit, and agent action in that project respects these constraints automatically. Skipping this step is one of the most common reasons teams feel Cursor’s suggestions “don’t match how we code” in the first week – the model has no way of knowing your conventions until you write them down.

Step 9: Test inline editing, chat, and agent mode

Run through all three AI interaction modes on a real file so you know how each one behaves before relying on it under deadline pressure.

1. Inline edit (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K): select a function, press the shortcut, type an instruction like “add input validation,” and review the diff before accepting
2. Chat (Cmd+L / Ctrl+L): ask a question about the open file or reference another file with @filename; responses stream in a side panel and can insert code directly into the editor
3. Composer / Agent mode: describe a multi-file change (“add a rate limiter middleware and wire it into the existing Express app”) and let the agent plan, edit multiple files, and optionally run terminal commands, with each change shown as a reviewable diff before it’s applied

Agent mode is the feature with no VS Code equivalent at all (short of chaining separate extensions together), so budget extra time here. Since Cursor shipped Background Agents in May 2026, you can also hand a task off to a remote agent and keep coding locally while it works, rather than staring at a diff-in-progress. Start with a small, low-risk task – a new utility function, a test file – before trusting it with anything touching production code paths.

Step 10: Build and verify a complete working project

Migration isn’t done until you’ve proven the whole toolchain works end to end inside Cursor, not just that the editor opens. Clone a real project (or use one you already have) and confirm every piece of your dev loop functions.

git clone https://github.com/your-org/sample-project.git
cd sample-project
npm install
npm run build
npm test

Open the integrated terminal (Ctrl+`) and run your usual build and test commands. Then confirm the debugger attaches correctly – open .vscode/launch.json (Cursor reads the same debug configuration format VS Code does), set a breakpoint, and press F5. If your launch configuration references a specific runtime path, double-check it resolves correctly on the new install, since Cursor’s bundled Node/Python detection can differ slightly from a machine where VS Code has been configured for years.

Finally, run a build task through the Command Palette (“Tasks: Run Build Task”) to confirm your tasks.json imported and executes without errors. If all three – terminal commands, debugger, and tasks – work, your migration is functionally complete.

Step 11: Decide what to do with GitHub Copilot

If you were running GitHub Copilot inside VS Code, it imports as an extension along with everything else, and it can run inside Cursor. But Copilot and Cursor’s native Tab completions both want to control the same inline suggestion UI, so running both active at once usually means one silently loses. Most migrating developers pick one:

• Disable Copilot’s inline suggestions (keep chat if you want a second opinion) and use Cursor Tab as your primary completion engine
• Disable Cursor Tab and keep Copilot if your org has a Copilot Business/Enterprise license tied to code-review policies you don’t want to break
• Run both, but with Copilot’s “Editor: Inline Suggest” toggle off by default and only turned on manually for comparison testing

For a side-by-side look at how the underlying models and pricing compare, see our Cursor vs GitHub Copilot vs Augment Code breakdown. If you’re setting Copilot up fresh rather than migrating away from it, our GitHub Copilot setup guide covers that process step by step.

Step 12: Clean up and set your default editor

Once you’ve confirmed everything works, point your OS file associations and terminal shortcuts at Cursor instead of VS Code. On macOS and Linux, install the cursor CLI shim (offered during first launch or from the Command Palette via “Shell Command: Install ‘cursor’ command”) so cursor . opens the current directory the way code . used to.

# Verify the CLI shim installed correctly
which cursor
cursor --version

# Open the current directory in Cursor
cursor .

Leave VS Code installed rather than uninstalling it immediately. Keep it around for at least a full sprint or project cycle as a fallback, then remove it once you’re confident nothing in your workflow depends on it.

Cursor pricing tiers after migration

Your VS Code setup was free. Cursor’s Hobby tier is also free, but it comes with real limits worth understanding before you build a workflow around a paid feature you might lose access to mid-month. As of September 2026, the individual Pro plan runs $20/month and now includes unlimited Tab completions plus a bundled allowance of agent usage, while team pricing has split into a $40/month Teams Standard seat and a $120/month Teams Premium seat that gets you 5x the Standard usage pool – both introduced in June 2026.

Plan	Monthly price	Best for	Key limits
Hobby	Free	Trying Cursor, light personal use	Limited premium requests and Tab completions per month
Pro	Paid, billed monthly or annually	Individual developers using AI daily	Higher premium request allowance, priority access during high demand
Pro+	Paid, above Pro	Heavy daily agent/Composer use	Expanded usage pool over Pro
Ultra	Paid, highest individual tier	Power users running long agent sessions	Largest individual usage pool
Teams	Paid, per-seat	Small to mid-size engineering teams	Centralized billing, admin controls
Enterprise	Custom	Large organizations	SSO, audit logs, custom data retention policies

Check current numbers on Cursor’s pricing page before committing, since usage allowances and pricing are the parts of any AI tool most likely to shift between when this is published and when you read it – as of June 2026, for instance, Teams Standard seats also draw from separate usage pools for first-party and third-party models, and paying annually knocks that seat price down to $32/seat/month instead of the $40 monthly rate. If cost is a blocker, the Hobby tier is enough to complete every step in this tutorial and get a feel for whether Cursor’s AI features are worth paying for.

VS Code vs Cursor: what stays the same, what changes

The point of this migration is that most of your editor experience shouldn’t change at all. Here’s a direct breakdown of what carries over automatically versus what you have to configure fresh.

Feature	Carries over automatically	Needs manual setup
Extensions	Yes, reinstalled from marketplace on import	Re-authenticate OAuth-based extensions (GitLens, GitHub PRs)
Keybindings	Yes, full keybindings.json import	Resolve Tab-key conflicts with AI completions
Themes and icon packs	Yes	Reselect manually if it doesn’t apply on first load
User settings.json	Yes	Review workspace-specific overrides per project
Debug configurations (launch.json)	Yes, same JSON format	Verify runtime paths resolve on the new install
Tasks (tasks.json)	Yes, same JSON format	None typically required
AI model selection	No – new to Cursor	Choose default chat and completion models
Codebase indexing	No – new to Cursor	Run initial index, configure .cursorignore
Project rules (.cursor/rules)	No – new to Cursor	Write from scratch per project

Keyboard shortcuts: what’s identical and what’s new

Because your imported keybindings.json carries over verbatim, every custom shortcut you built in VS Code behaves the same way in Cursor. What’s new is a small set of AI-specific shortcuts layered on top, none of which existed in your old muscle memory. Learning these five is worth doing deliberately rather than discovering them by accident mid-task.

Action	Mac	Windows/Linux	Existed in VS Code?
Open Cursor Settings	Cmd+Shift+J	Ctrl+Shift+J	No – new binding
Inline AI edit (Cmd+K)	Cmd+K	Ctrl+K	No – repurposes a VS Code chord prefix
Open AI chat panel	Cmd+L	Ctrl+L	No – new binding
Accept Tab completion	Tab	Tab	Yes, same key as standard autocomplete
Command Palette	Cmd+Shift+P	Ctrl+Shift+P	Yes, unchanged from VS Code
Toggle integrated terminal	Ctrl+`	Ctrl+`	Yes, unchanged from VS Code
Open Composer/Agent mode	Cmd+I	Ctrl+I	No – new binding

The one collision worth watching for: if you had a custom keybinding on Cmd+K or Cmd+I in VS Code (some Git extensions and multi-cursor tools use these as chord prefixes), Cursor’s import preserves your original binding, which means it can quietly shadow the AI shortcut. Check Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) and search for “cursorai” or “composer” to confirm the AI commands aren’t shadowed by something you defined years ago and forgot about.

Rolling the migration out across a team

Migrating your own machine is a 15-45 minute task. Migrating a team is a different problem, because you’re not just moving settings, you’re trying to get everyone to the same starting point without a week of Slack threads about why one person’s linter behaves differently from everyone else’s.

• Commit shared rules before you ask anyone to switch. A .cursor/rules directory checked into the repo means every teammate who runs the import gets identical AI behavior on day one, instead of five people writing five slightly different versions of the same conventions.
• Standardize the plan tier before rollout, not after. Mixing Hobby-tier and Pro-tier developers on the same team creates confusing bug reports, because the person on the free tier will hit request limits and describe it as “Cursor being slow” when it’s actually a quota wall. Decide centrally whether the team pays for Teams or Enterprise before the first migration happens.
• Pilot with two or three developers first. Have them run through all twelve steps in this tutorial on a real project and report back on anything specific to your stack – a monorepo with unusual folder conventions, a legacy extension with no Open VSX listing, a custom debug adapter – before rolling it out to the full team.
• Keep a rollback plan documented, not just possible. Since VS Code stays installed and untouched throughout, rolling back is trivial technically, but write down the one-line instruction (“reopen VS Code, nothing was changed”) so nobody wastes an afternoon worrying about data loss that was never a risk.
• Decide on the Copilot question at the org level. If your company has an existing GitHub Copilot Business license, decide centrally whether Cursor replaces it, supplements it, or coexists with it disabled by default – this is a licensing and cost decision, not something each developer should be improvising individually.

Teams that skip the pilot step and migrate everyone simultaneously tend to generate the most support tickets in the first 48 hours, almost all of them traceable to the same handful of issues covered in the troubleshooting section below.

5 common pitfalls when migrating from VS Code to Cursor

1. Running Copilot and Cursor Tab at the same time without picking one. Both extensions try to claim the Tab key and the inline ghost-text UI. The result is inconsistent suggestions that seem to randomly come from one tool or the other. Pick a primary completion engine in Step 11 before you start relying on autocomplete for real work.

2. Skipping the .cursorignore file on large repositories. Without it, Cursor tries to index node_modules, build output, and log files alongside your source code. This slows indexing dramatically and pollutes chat context with irrelevant dependency code, making answers less accurate, not more.

3. Assuming workspace-specific settings.json files migrated too. The VS Code import brings over your global user settings, not per-project .vscode/settings.json files that live inside individual repositories – those travel with the repo itself via git, not through Cursor’s account-level import. If a project-specific setting seems missing, check whether it was ever in your global settings to begin with.

4. Not setting up project rules and blaming the AI for bad suggestions. Generic chat and agent responses that ignore your codebase’s conventions are almost always a missing .cursor/rules file, not a model quality problem. This is the single most common complaint from developers in their first week that a five-minute rules file fixes.

5. Uninstalling VS Code immediately after migration. Give it at least one full project cycle. Some teams have CI pipelines, client requirements, or extensions with no Open VSX equivalent that only surface as a problem once you hit that specific workflow – which might not happen in week one.

Advanced tips for power users

Once the basic migration is stable, a few configuration moves get more out of Cursor than the default setup provides.

• Split your models by task. Use a smaller, faster model for Tab completions and reserve your highest-context model (like Claude Sonnet 5 at its 1M token ceiling) for chat sessions and agent mode where you need it to reason across many files at once.
• Write multiple scoped rules files instead of one giant one. A .cursor/rules directory supports multiple .mdc files with different globs patterns, so your backend conventions and frontend conventions can live separately and only apply to the files they’re relevant to.
• Use @-mentions in chat deliberately. Reference specific files, folders, or even documentation URLs with @ inside chat to narrow context instead of relying purely on the indexed codebase – this produces noticeably more accurate answers on large monorepos.
• Review every agent-mode diff before accepting. Multi-file agent changes are powerful but not infallible. Treat each one like a pull request from a fast, occasionally overconfident junior engineer – verify, don’t rubber-stamp.
• Keep your rules file in version control. Commit .cursor/rules to the repo so every teammate who migrates gets the same AI behavior automatically, rather than everyone writing their own inconsistent version.

Troubleshooting: 8 common migration issues and fixes

1. The VS Code Import option doesn’t appear in settings. You’re likely not signed in. Cursor requires an active account before showing the import flow – check General > Account and sign in first.

2. Extensions show as installed but don’t activate. Reload the window with Command Palette > “Developer: Reload Window.” Some extensions need a full reload after a fresh install to register their activation events.

3. Keybindings imported but one specific shortcut doesn’t work. Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) and search for the command ID – a newer extension version may have changed its default keybinding, creating a silent conflict with your imported one.

4. Indexing gets stuck or never completes on a large repo. Add a .cursorignore file excluding build artifacts, dependency folders, and generated code, then restart indexing from Settings > Indexing.

5. Debugger won’t attach after migration. Check that launch.json points to a runtime path that actually exists on this install – Cursor’s bundled Node or Python detection can resolve to a different path than your old VS Code environment variables did.

6. Tab completions feel slower or lower quality than expected. Check which model is assigned to Tab completions in Settings > Models. A high-context reasoning model assigned to a task meant for fast, lightweight suggestions will feel sluggish by comparison.

7. Git integration shows the wrong author or loses credentials. Re-authenticate Git in Cursor’s Source Control panel – OAuth tokens tied to VS Code’s credential manager don’t always transfer, particularly on Windows where Credential Manager entries are sometimes scoped per-application.

8. Chat responses ignore obvious codebase context. Confirm indexing actually finished (Settings > Indexing shows a completion status) and that the file in question isn’t excluded by .cursorignore. An incomplete index is the most common cause of chat feeling “blind” to your code.

Rolling back to VS Code if Cursor isn’t a fit

Since the migration doesn’t touch your original VS Code installation, reverting is simple: reopen VS Code and everything is exactly as you left it, including the backup you made in Step 1 if you want to double-check nothing drifted. If you’d synced settings through VS Code’s built-in Settings Sync before migrating, that sync relationship is untouched too. There’s no cleanup required on the VS Code side – the import in Step 3 only reads from VS Code, it never writes back to it.

If the AI features weren’t the deciding factor and you mainly wanted a faster editor, it’s worth checking how Cursor stacks up against lighter alternatives before fully committing either direction – our Cursor vs Windsurf vs Zed comparison covers raw editor speed separately from AI feature depth.

Frequently asked questions

Does migrating to Cursor delete or modify my VS Code installation?
No. The import is read-only from VS Code’s perspective – it reads your settings, keybindings, and extension list, then applies them inside Cursor. VS Code itself is untouched and remains fully functional.

Can I run VS Code and Cursor on the same machine at the same time?
Yes. They install as separate applications with separate profile folders and don’t conflict with each other, so you can keep both installed indefinitely.

Will all of my VS Code extensions work in Cursor?
Most will, since Cursor uses the same extension architecture and a marketplace compatible with the vast majority of published extensions. A small number of privately distributed or deprecated extensions may not resolve automatically and need manual installation.

Is Cursor free to use after migrating from VS Code?
The Hobby tier is free and includes a limited allotment of premium AI requests and Tab completions per month. Paid tiers (Pro, Pro+, Ultra, Teams, Enterprise) remove or raise those limits – check Cursor’s current pricing for exact allowances.

Can I re-run the VS Code import later if I install new extensions?
Yes. The import option in General > Account isn’t a one-time action – you can trigger it again anytime to pick up changes made in VS Code since your last import.

Should I disable GitHub Copilot after migrating?
Not necessarily, but you should decide whether Copilot or Cursor’s native Tab completions handles inline suggestions, since both compete for the same keybinding and UI. Running both active without deciding leads to inconsistent completions.

Does Cursor support the same debug configurations as VS Code?
Yes. Cursor reads the same launch.json and tasks.json format VS Code uses, so existing debug and build configurations work without modification, provided the underlying runtime paths resolve correctly on the new install.

What happens to my project if I decide to switch back to VS Code later?
Nothing changes in your project itself. Settings, extensions, and AI-specific files like .cursor/rules live either in your Cursor account or inside the project folder – switching back to VS Code simply means those Cursor-specific files go unused, not that your code or configuration is at risk.

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