How to Search Cursor Chat History Across Workspaces

Description and use

Users can quickly locate and export specific Cursor chat sessions across different workspaces using simple CLI commands without API keys.

Problem

Need to locate a specific conversation across multiple Cursor workspaces when the project name is forgotten.

Outcome

Users can efficiently locate and export specific Cursor chat sessions across multiple workspaces using simple CLI commands, without needing API keys or embeddings.

Workflow

• Install cursor-history globally via npm
• Run cursor-history list --all to discover workspaces
• Search with a remembered phrase: cursor-history search "connection pool"
• Adjust query to a distinctive substring if results are too many
• Use -n flag to change result limit
• Open a matching session with cursor-history show <index> or cursor-history export <sessionId>
• Export session to JSON with --format json --output ./conversation.json
• If workspace known, narrow search with --workspace /path/to/project
• If no matches, try shorter phrase, run cursor-history list --all --json, check file ownership, custom roots, WSL paths, and source status
• Set environment variables CURSOR_DATA_PATH and CURSOR_STORE_ROOT for explicit directories
• Use Cursor native session commands for continued Agent CLI conversations
• Consider MCP companion for assistant-driven search
• Keep cursor-history on GitHub for future use
• Refer to recovery guide for moved projects

Evidence

cursor-history searches conversation text in supported local Cursor stores across discovered workspaces.

Source

It can read history created before you installed it, without a capture hook, embeddings, or an API key.

Source

Search returns up to 10 matching sessions by default. -n 30 raises the limit; -n 0 returns all matching sessions.

Source