Cursor 3 shortcuts and settings cheatsheet

Cursor 3 shipped in February-April 2026 with a redesigned Agents Window, parallel agent sessions, /best-of-n, and three keybinding moves that will waste 20 minutes of any 2.x user’s first session. The 18 shortcuts below are the daily working set; the 6 settings are the ones worth changing on every machine; the 3 moved bindings are the ones the recurring r/cursor “What changed in 3.0” threads keep flagging.

The 18 shortcuts that matter daily

The 3 bindings they moved

• “Jump to next diagnostic” was Cmd + Shift + M in 2.x. In Cursor 3 it is F8, matching VS Code. Remap if you want the old binding.
• “New agent session” is a new command. It did not exist in 2.x because parallel agents did not. Cmd + Shift + N queues a parallel Composer run.
• “Open AI chat” used to be Cmd + L; in Cursor 3, Cmd + L is Composer in a new chat, and the old “just chat” view is in the sidebar (View > Cursor Chat). Old muscle memory will land you in Composer.

The 6 settings worth changing on every machine

// .cursor/settings.json
{
  "composer.agent.model": "auto",
  "composer.agent.parallelism": 2,
  "rag.chunker.size": 768,
  "rag.chunker.overlap": 128,
  "autocomplete.maxContextFiles": 12,
  "indexer.includeNodeModules": false
}

The indexer setting matters for any Node or pnpm user. Cursor 3’s indexer walks node_modules by default, which extends cold-start time noticeably on monorepos. Set it to false unless you are specifically indexing a library you author. The recurring r/cursor “Cursor 3 cold start is slow” thread converges on this fix in dozens of replies.

.cursorignore and .cursor/rules migration

Two one-time gotchas when you upgrade:

• If your 2.x .cursorignore has any line starting with /, strip the leading slash. In Cursor 3 the matcher is gitignore-compatible, and a leading slash pins the pattern to the repo root. A top-level /src pattern will now match only the root-level src/ directory, not nested ones.
• The legacy .cursorrules file is still read in Cursor 3 but does not inherit the precedence of the new .cursor/rules/*.mdc files. Move your rules to the new location; the official Cursor docs cover the format.

Plan and pricing reminder

Related

For the full review of Cursor 3 + Composer 2 with the 14-task scores, see the Cursor 3 review. For the chunker math behind the 768 / 128 settings above, see the RAG defaults cheatsheet.

One-line takeaway

Remap the diagnostic binding if you liked the old one, set the indexer to skip node_modules, bump the RAG chunker to 768 with 128 overlap, move your rules to .cursor/rules/, and Cursor 3 will stop surprising you in the first hour.