Reader Mode
Read an agent's conversation as a document instead of a terminal dump — with a live terminal in a resizable split 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
A terminal beside it, in a real split
While reading a Markdown file in Reader Mode, you can put any of the project's terminals in a pane beside the document — a real, live terminal with full output, scrollback, and Agent Input, not a static copy.
Since v1.70.0 this is a genuine split rather than a dock floating over the page, so the terminal never covers the paragraph you are reading. Pick a layout from the reader toolbar:
| Preset | Layout |
|---|---|
| 5 : 5 | Markdown 50% · terminal 50%, side by side |
| 3 : 7 | Markdown 30% · terminal 70% |
| 7 : 3 | Markdown 70% · terminal 30% |
| MD / Term | Markdown above the terminal |
| Term / MD | Terminal above the markdown |
Drag the sash between the panes to fine-tune the ratio — the layout you settle on is remembered for next time. Stack the panes instead when the document has long lines and you would rather give it the full width.
You can also create a brand-new terminal from the reader, and closing the pane hands your scrollback back cleanly so nothing is lost.
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.