farique/cursor-chat-explorer

cursor-chat-explorer is a small terminal application that reads the local databases of the Cursor code editor and lets you browse and export the AI chat history saved inside them. Cursor stores every chat conversation a user has with its built-in AI in SQLite files on disk, and sometimes when reopening a project the chats appear to be missing. This tool finds them anyway, by joining the per-workspace database with the global database that holds the actual messages. The README warns that the tool currently supports only macOS paths and was vibecoded, meaning it was put together quickly with AI assistance. The README documents where the data lives. On macOS, Cursor keeps a per-workspace state.vscdb file holding chat IDs and the project folder path, and a global state.vscdb file holding the message contents under keys like composerData and bubbleId. The tool only opens these files with a read-only handle, so it is safe to run while Cursor itself is open. The user interface is a TUI (a terminal user interface, drawn with text characters) built with Ink, which is a library for making React-style terminal apps. There are three screens: a list of workspaces sorted by most recent activity, a list of chats in the selected workspace, and a chat detail view showing user messages, assistant text, reasoning blocks, and tool calls with their arguments and results. Keyboard shortcuts cover navigation, opening, filtering the current list with /, exporting one chat with e, exporting all chats in the current list with E, and jumping to the top or bottom of a long chat. There is also a headless mode for use in scripts. --list prints everything to standard output, which is handy for piping into grep, and --export-all writes every chat to a folder of Markdown files named by date, chat name, and composer ID. The output can be scoped to a single project with --workspace and the destination folder set with --out. Tool calls in the exported Markdown are rendered with the tool name, the arguments, and the result inline. The README notes that Cursor sometimes stores the same project under several workspace hashes, that very new or untitled chats appear as (unnamed), and that exported Markdown should be treated as sensitive because it can contain prompts, assistant responses, reasoning, tool inputs and outputs, and local file paths. Planned work includes Windows and Linux support.