Cursor is built on VS Code, so it can import settings, extensions, themes and keybindings. The capability is pleasant and for that very reason dangerous: along with what is useful it carries over incompatible extensions, deprecated setting keys, machine-specific paths and corporate restrictions you forgot about long ago. A one-click import turns a clean installation into a copy of state accumulated over years - with every compromise you once made for a specific reason and have not revisited since.
The naive move is to press import and be glad that everything is in place. That works right up to the first oddity: the editor stutters, a keybinding conflicts, an extension intercepts an action you expected from Cursor. Then comes the unpleasant part - you do not know what exactly came across, and you cannot separate a property of the new tool from the legacy of the old one. Diagnosis in such an environment costs more than a careful migration from the start: you have no state at all that you know for certain is clean.
The right form is to move in layers and check after each one. First the theme and keybindings: this is the visual environment and muscle memory, they carry almost no risk but immediately make the work feel familiar. This is also where conflicts are checked - Cursor's own shortcuts and the operating system's can intercept what you are used to. Then settings, but only the ones whose meaning you understand: editor, languages, formatting. Deprecated keys and absolute paths from another machine are left behind.
The next layer is extensions, and it is the most sensitive. What should move is a minimal working set, not the whole list: every extension has a publisher, permissions and access to data, and in the new environment it gets the same capabilities. An extension you installed once for a single task keeps working in the new editor, and now there is an agent alongside it. The list of extensions is part of the trust surface, not a detail of presentation.
It helps to see these layers as a table once: what to move first and what to check at each step. You come back to this map when moving to a new machine: it turns migration from one click into four clear steps, each of which can be rolled back without dismantling the rest.
| Layer | What to move first | What to check |
|---|
| Theme and keybindings | The visual environment and muscle memory | Conflicts with Cursor and operating-system shortcuts |
|---|---|---|
| Settings | Only editor and language settings you understand | Deprecated keys, machine-specific paths |
| Extensions | A minimal working set | Publisher, signature, network and data access |
| Workspace files | After opening a real project | Workspace Trust and the repository's own policy |
Deprecated keys and foreign paths deserve a more precise word, because they do harm silently. A key renamed or dropped in a newer version raises no error - it simply has no effect, and you go on believing the setting is on. An absolute path from the old machine points at a directory that does not exist here, and the feature bound to that path fails without a clear message. The sign that you dragged such debris along is recognizable: the setting looks set, and the behavior does not match it. That is why understood keys are moved one at a time, not the settings file as a whole.
Workspace files are the last layer, and they are moved only after the real project is open. The reason is that workspace configuration governs the environment's behavior inside a specific repository and falls under workspace trust and the repository's own rules. Until the project is open you are moving settings blind, unable to see what they combine with. An open project shows which of them are needed at all: some will turn out to be the legacy of a task closed long ago, and the right action for those is not to move them.
For JetBrains the path is different: Cursor publishes a separate migration guide, and the integration itself goes through the agent communication protocol: Cursor is added as an agent provider inside the stock JetBrains plugin, and has no plugin of its own. It matters not to treat that integration as a full copy of the desktop application - the documentation promises many of the same agent capabilities rather than all of them, and the set is checked on the integration page rather than inferred by analogy with the editor. Expecting feature parity between different clients is a common source of disappointment and lost time, and in team work also a source of mismatched expectations: half the team treats a capability as shared when only one client has it.
The engineering conclusion is simple: import a minimal reproducible environment, not everything as it was. Such an environment pays off twice. It is faster and more predictable, and the source of a problem is visible in it right away: if the oddity appeared after enabling the next group of extensions, you already know where to look. Restoring what is missing as the need arises costs less than cleaning the excess out of a working environment.
The typical migration failures are predictable. Moving everything at once and then guessing what exactly is in the way. Dragging over settings with absolute paths from another machine. Treating the JetBrains integration as a full equivalent of the desktop application. And leaving extensions on the list whose permissions and publisher you remember nothing about.