How I Cracked the Code to Export AI Chats in Cursor IDE

As a developer, I lean on AI for coding help every day. But when I started using Cursor IDE, I hit a wall: there was no way to export my AI chats without copying and pasting everything by hand.

Sharing ideas with my team or saving chats for later turned into a real headache. I knew there had to be a better way.

After some digging and a bit of trial and error, I found a few tricks that totally changed how I work. And I’m excited to share them with you.

The Copy-Paste Nightmare

Manually copying each chat message? It’s not only slow, it ruins the formatting. Code blocks turn into a mess.

Screenshots weren’t any better. I needed text I could search and edit, not a static image.

Without a way to export chats, collaborating with my team and keeping track of what I’d learned became way harder than it should be.

Simple Solutions I Found

While we wait for Cursor to add an official export button, I’ve found a few practical ways to get the job done. They keep your formatting intact and make the whole process a breeze.

My Favorite: The JavaScript Clipboard Trick

This became my go-to method because it’s surprisingly simple. Here’s exactly what I did:

• Run your chat: Start by having your conversation with the AI in Cursor as you normally would.
• Create a mini tool: I built a tiny HTML page with a button that copies the entire chat. Save this code in a file called export.html:

<button onclick="copyToClipboard()">Copy Chat Content</button>
<script>
function copyToClipboard() {
  // Replace 'chatContent' with your actual chat text or use an element ID
  const content = "Your AI chat text here"; // Manually paste or automate
  navigator.clipboard.writeText(content);
  alert("Copied to clipboard!");
}
</script>

• Copy and paste: Open that HTML file in your browser, click the button, and then paste the chat anywhere you like—Obsidian, a Google Doc, wherever. It’s perfect for markdown, though you might need to adjust a few things if your chat is extra complex.

Other Options That Worked

Sometimes you need different tools for different situations. Here’s what else I tested:

• Third-party formatters: I tried tools like Convo Formatter which is built for formatting AI chats. I just pasted my Cursor chat into it and it worked like a charm.
• VS Code extensions: The VS Code Chat Builder extension has a nice export feature. I installed it and used the JSON export to grab entire conversations.
• Use Cursor’s copy feature: You can right-click any AI response in Cursor and choose ‘Copy’ to get it in markdown. For short chats, I just did this a few times and pasted everything together.

Why This Changed Everything

These tricks saved me hours of copying and pasting. Now I can share chats with my team for teaching or debugging, and store them in Obsidian without a fuss.

I’m really hoping Cursor adds an official export option soon. Until then, these workarounds keep me productive.

Try them out and see how much time you can save!