Cursor session format

Stores and files

Cursor IDE stores chats in state.vscdb under globalStorage/ and workspaceStorage/*/. The user root is ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User on macOS and ~/.config/Cursor/User on other systems; an existing $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Cursor/User is used when available. DEJA_CURSOR_ROOT overrides IDE discovery.

Cursor CLI writes projects/<encoded-path>/agent-transcripts/**/*.jsonl below ${CURSOR_CONFIG_DIR:-~/.cursor}. DEJA_CURSOR_CLI_ROOT overrides transcript reads. Subagent transcripts are excluded unless DEJA_INCLUDE_SUBAGENTS=1 — for index

size, not because the parent already holds that work. Unlike Claude's sidechain

files, Cursor's have not been read here: what the parent keeps and what only the

child has is unverified for this harness, so deja indexes them as it finds them

rather than deriving an edge it has not seen.

IDE SQLite records

The cursorDiskKV(key, value) table has session values at composerData:<id> and message values at bubbleId:<composer-id>:<bubble-id>.

{"composerId":"composer-7","name":"Fix cache invalidation","createdAt":1784278800000,"lastUpdatedAt":1784278802000}
{"type":1,"text":"Why is this stale?","timestamp":1784278801000,"workspaceProjectDir":"/work/api"}

Bubble type: 1 maps to user; other numeric types map to assistant. Text uses text, falling back to rawText. Timestamps are Unix milliseconds. The first bubble with workspaceProjectDir supplies the project. Reading SQLite requires the sqlite3 CLI.

CLI JSONL records

{"role":"assistant","message":{"content":[{"type":"text","text":"The cache key omitted the locale."}]}}

Only user and assistant roles are retained. Content follows the Anthropic string-or-parts shape. Control records such as turn_ended are ignored. The transcript has no message timestamps, so deja uses file modification time.

Resume

CLI chats only. A transcript is named after the chat id cursor-agent --resume

takes, and the command runs in the project directory because Cursor lists chats

per workspace — deja prints cd <project> && cursor-agent --resume <id>, the

directory recovered from the encoded path (Cursor writes it without the leading

separator, Users-x-app). Live-verified: the resumed chat answered from its own

history. IDE chats carry a composer id from state.vscdb that the CLI does not

take, so those still reopen only in the editor.

Known quirks and drift

  • Cursor moved modern IDE chats toward global storage while older versions used workspace databases; both are scanned.
  • SQLite values are JSON inside a key-value table and malformed or null entries occur.
  • CLI project path encoding has the same separator-versus-hyphen ambiguity as Claude Code.
  • SQLite text is capped at 64 KiB. CLI subagent duplication is opt-in.

Last verified: 2026-07-17

deja reads this format and nineteen others, and turns what it finds into memory your agents can search. See the harness matrix for what is wired where, or install it and search your own history.