Reader Mode
Read an agent's conversation as a document instead of a terminal dump — with a live terminal docked beside it.
An AI agent's terminal is a stream of redrawn frames. It is fine to watch and awful to read: line breaks land mid-word, **markdown** shows up raw, and a long session is reduced to the few hundred words still on screen.
Reader Mode re-renders the conversation as a document.
Opening it
Reader Mode is on the terminal toolbar, and it works on Markdown files in the editor too. It coexists with Agent Input — you can keep reading and still send a prompt.
What it fixes
- The full transcript, not just what fits on screen
- Real paragraphs, headings, lists, and code blocks
- Terminal chrome (banners, status lines, box drawing) stripped out
- Cursor conversations render their real parsed transcript rather than a scrape of whatever happened to be on screen
Docking a terminal beside it
While reading a Markdown file in Reader Mode, you can dock any of the project's terminals to the side — a real, live terminal with full output, scrollback, and Agent Input, not a static copy.
Closing the dock hands your scrollback back cleanly so nothing is lost. You can also create a brand-new terminal from the dock and return to the document without leaving full-screen reading.
Prompting while you read
The composer is available inside Reader Mode, so noticing something halfway down a transcript and asking about it does not mean leaving the reading view.
Notes in Reader Mode
Sticky notes render alongside the document, so annotations you left on a file are visible while you read it. See Sticky Notes.
On your phone
Reader Mode is the best way to catch up on an agent from a phone, and it is available there too. The phone version styles user messages, agent results, code, and raw terminal output separately, with light, sepia, and dark reading surfaces and a default that follows your device theme.
It also re-renders the transcript at any width, which makes it the escape hatch when a desktop-width terminal is unreadable on a small screen.
Themes
Reader colours inherit the reading canvas rather than the app's terminal palette, so a dark app can still give you a light reading surface if that is what you prefer.