Install Cursor AI code editor on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

setup_cursor_ubuntu.md

Install Cursor AI editor on Ubuntu 24.04

1. Use the Download button on www.cursor.com web site. It will download the NAME.AppImage file.

2. Copy the .AppImage file to your Applications directory

cd ~/Downloads
mkdir -p ~/Applications
mv NAME.AppImage ~/Applications/cursor.AppImage

3. Install libfuse2

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libfuse2

4. Make it an executable

chmod +x ~/Applications/cursor.AppImage

5. Run

~/Applications/cursor.AppImage --no-sandbox

6. Add cursor shortcut

Add to .bashrc or .zshrc

alias cursor='~/Applications/your-app.AppImage --no-sandbox'

Just saying.. In my case --appimage-extract doesn't accept the parameter for a directory (cursor in this case). Without cursor extracting works as expected into squashfs-root dir. Thanks!

Improved script from above snippet (for Linux): https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/621

That being said, it's still NOT ideal.. since normally the executable (eg. vscode or windsurf) goes to background when executing it. My code snippet fixing this again, by using a custom launcher script just like vscode. Basically doing:

ELECTRON="/usr/local/share/cursor/cursor"
CLI="/usr/local/share/cursor/resources/app/out/cli.js"
ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1 "$ELECTRON" "$CLI" "$@"

Cursor fix your deb files!

So now the only down-side is that an icon is missing Cursor fixed that issue apparently.