agent-signals

022. The terminals and the worker processes of the Cursor CLI on macOS

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Date
2026-10-30
Agents
Cursor CLI
Measured on
real machine

Measured

2026-10-30, Cursor CLI 2026.10.22-27dcf5f, Cursor editor (version not recorded), macOS 26.6 (arm64), with no tmux installed. Measured on: real machine. The probe probes/cursor/macos.sh read ps and one AppleScript call to Terminal.

What was measured

  1. An interactive Cursor CLI process runs as ~/.local/bin/agent --use-system-ca ~/.local/share/cursor-agent/versions/<version>/index.js. Its parent is the shell of the terminal (zsh). It has a tty, for example ttys023.
  2. The parent of that shell is the terminal program:
    • A JetBrains IDE (PyCharm) for nine processes: pycharm > /bin/zsh > agent.
    • Terminal.app for one process: Terminal > login > -zsh > agent.
  3. osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to get tty of every tab of every window' gives the tty of each Terminal tab, for example /dev/ttys001. The tty of the Terminal process in item 2 was in that list.
  4. The Cursor editor runs agent workers as ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/anysphere.cursor-agent-worker/agent-cli/.local/bin/cursor-agent. Their parent is process 1, and they have no tty. Each one has a working folder. Four ran at the same time.
  5. The editor runs an extension host with the title "Agents Window".

Mechanism

The tty of a process names its terminal tab. Terminal.app can find a tab by its tty, so a tool can bring that tab to the front. A JetBrains IDE has no known scripting access to its terminal tabs, so a tool can only bring the window of the IDE to the front.

The editor's agent workers are not CLI sessions: no person types in them. A reader of CLI sessions must not show them as sessions.

Incident

None.

Screens

None.

Not measured