cursor-chat-recovery 0.2.0

Inventory, view, reassign, and export Cursor chats

cursor-chat-recovery

Did your Cursor chats disappear after you moved, renamed, or re-opened a project? They're not gone. This is an interactive terminal UI to recover, browse, move, and export Cursor AI chat history — across all your projects.

Why chats "disappear"

Cursor identifies each workspace by a hash of its identifier URI. Reopening a project from a different path, or saving an Untitled multi-folder workspace as a .code-workspace file, mints a new workspace identity and detaches all prior chats from the sidebar. The conversations are still in globalStorage/state.vscdb keyed by composerId — they just need their workspaceIdentifier rewritten to point at the new workspace. That's what this tool does, with backups at every step.

It's also useful when nothing is broken: browse every chat you've ever had in any project, move chats between workspaces, and export conversations to Markdown.

Install

Requires Python 3.10+. With uv:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/kwiscion/cursor-chat-recovery

or with pipx:

pipx install git+https://github.com/kwiscion/cursor-chat-recovery

Both install the cursor-chat-recovery executable (and a short alias, ccr). After uv tool install, ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH (run uv tool update-shell once if needed).

To run from a clone without installing: uv run cursor-chat-recovery.

Use

cursor-chat-recovery                # interactive TUI  (or: ccr)
cursor-chat-recovery --readonly     # TUI with mutations disabled
cursor-chat-recovery --list         # workspaces table to stdout
cursor-chat-recovery --list --json
cursor-chat-recovery --export <COMPOSER_ID> --format markdown -o chat.md
cursor-chat-recovery --reassign <COMPOSER_IDS,COMMA,SEP> <TARGET_WS_ID> --yes
cursor-chat-recovery --merge <SRC_WS_ID> <TARGET_WS_ID> --yes

Close Cursor before any mutation. The tool refuses to write while Cursor is running.

Keys

Global

Key	Action
?	Open help screen
q	Quit
esc	Back / cancel (clears an active filter first)
ctrl-c	Force quit

Workspaces (project list)

Key	Action
up / down	Move selection
pgup / pgdn	Page up / down
home / end	Jump to first / last
enter	Open workspace's chats
s	Cycle sort order (last activity → chat count → name → health)
/	Filter by name or path (enter keeps filter, esc clears)

Chats (within a workspace)

Key	Action
up / down	Move selection
pgup / pgdn	Page up / down
enter	View messages
space	Select / deselect chat for bulk actions
a	Select all chats
A	Deselect all chats
m	Move selected (or highlighted) chats to another workspace (r is a legacy alias)
e	Export selected (or highlighted) chats to Markdown files

Messages (within a chat)

Key	Action
up / down, pgup / pgdn, home / end	Scroll
e	Export this chat

Moving chats

Press m on the chats screen to open the move-target picker. Workspaces are identified by name, path, chat count, and last activity so ambiguous short names are distinguishable. Type / to filter the list; the current workspace is marked and cannot be selected as a target. After you confirm, a timestamped backup is written to ~/.cursor-chat-recovery/backups/ before any data is touched. Cursor must be closed before the move is attempted; the tool refuses to write while Cursor is running.

Safety

• Per-session full DB backup written next to state.vscdb on first mutation.
• Per-op headers backup under ~/.cursor-chat-recovery/backups/.
• Read-only mode auto-engages on schema mismatch or detected Cursor-running.
• Reassign is reversible: the per-op backup restores the prior composer.composerHeaders.

Schema drift

When Cursor changes its schema, the tool detects the mismatch on startup and shows a copy-pastable prompt you can paste into a coding agent to adapt the tool. The agent prompt names the affected files and what to change.

Development

uv sync --dev
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check
uv run mypy src/

License

MIT