How to clear the Cursor cache on a Mac, safely

By EgeTech LTD · October 6, 2026 · 2 min read

Cursor is built on the same foundation as VS Code, and like any app of that kind it keeps a pile of caches on disk: web resources, compiled code, downloaded extensions and updater files. Over months they can reach gigabytes. Here is how to clear them without touching anything you care about.

This guide is about the cache on your disk. If you came for “cache read tokens”, that is a billing term for prompt caching in the AI model, and it has no folder to delete.

Where Cursor keeps its data

On a Mac, Cursor’s data folder is:

~/Library/Application Support/Cursor

Look at what takes the space:

du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/* | sort -rh | head

You will see a mix of folders. Some are caches, some are your data.

Cache folders you can delete

These names are inherited from VS Code, and they hold regenerable data:

There are two more places with leftovers:

~/Library/Caches/com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92
~/Library/Caches/cursor-compile-cache

The first is a cache folder created for the app, and the second is a compile cache. A folder with a .ShipIt ending next to them holds downloaded updates, and is also safe to remove.

Folders to leave alone

• User inside the Cursor folder: your settings, keybindings, snippets and the state of your workspaces.
• ~/.cursor: extensions and configuration such as MCP settings.

Do not delete the whole Cursor folder. You would lose settings and may be signed out.

How to clear the cache

1. Quit Cursor (Cursor → Quit, or ⌘Q). Deleting caches under a running editor can confuse it.
2. Run:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor
rm -rf Cache CachedData CachedExtensionVSIXs "Code Cache" GPUCache

3. Start Cursor again. The first launch is a little slower while it rebuilds what it needs.

Some of those folders may not exist on your version. rm -rf ignores that.

What it costs

Nothing you wrote. The editor rebuilds its caches as you work, and it may re-download an extension package when it needs one. Your projects and Git history are not involved.

On Windows and Linux

The layout follows VS Code, so the data folder is %APPDATA%\Cursor on Windows and ~/.config/Cursor on Linux, with the same cache folder names inside. Check the folder sizes before you delete.

The same idea works for the other editors

VS Code keeps the same cache folders in ~/Library/Application Support/Code. Other apps built on Electron do too. For the full list of what is safe on a developer Mac, see how to free up disk space as a developer and why System Data gets so big.