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Tab completion is the single feature most developers come to Cursor for. When it stops working, the whole reason you switched editors vanishes.
I've seen this break in a few specific ways. The ghost text just doesn't appear. Tab does nothing when a suggestion is showing. Completions appear once and then stop. Each one has a different cause. Here are the seven I'd check, in the order I'd check them.
Quick Answer
The three most common causes of Cursor tab completion failures:
- Cursor Tab is disabled in Settings > Features > Cursor Tab
- Tab key is remapped by another extension or a keybinding conflict
- GitHub Copilot (or Tabnine) is installed and fighting Cursor for the same key
Fix one of those three and you're probably done. If not, keep reading.
Fix 1: Check That Cursor Tab Is Actually Enabled
Obvious, but start here. It's off by default on new installs in some configurations, and it gets toggled off accidentally more often than you'd think.
Open Cursor Settings with Ctrl+Shift+J (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+J (Mac). Navigate to Features > Cursor Tab. You should see a toggle for Enable Cursor Tab — make sure it's on.
There's a second place to check: the status bar at the bottom right of the editor window. Look for the Cursor Tab indicator. If it's gray instead of the normal color, click it. A small dropdown appears. If "Disable Globally" is checked, uncheck it. Done.
You can also toggle it from the command palette. Hit Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P), type "enable cursor tab," and select the command. If the command says "disable cursor tab" instead, that means it's currently on — which means you need to look elsewhere.
Restart Cursor after any settings change. Seriously. A lot of toggles don't take effect until you do.
Fix 2: Check for Tab Key Remapping (Keybinding Conflicts)
This one gets people constantly, especially if they migrated a VS Code config to Cursor or have a heavily customized setup.
Open Keyboard Shortcuts: Ctrl+Shift+K on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+K on Mac. Search for "tab." Look for any custom bindings that target editor.action.inlineSuggest.commit or Accept Cursor Tab Suggestion. If something else has claimed the Tab key in the editor context, Cursor's completion handler never fires.
Also check your keybindings.json directly. Hit Ctrl+Shift+P and type "Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)." Look for any entry with "key": "tab" that isn't the default Cursor behavior. Delete or disable the conflicting binding.
One specific thing to watch for if you're on Windows and use a CJK input method: IME software (Sogou, Baidu Pinyin, QQ Pinyin) often intercepts the Tab key for its own functions, and its priority is higher than the editor's. The Tab press never reaches Cursor. Temporarily disable your IME and test whether completions work. If they do, you need to configure the IME to release the Tab key when you're in the editor.
Fix 3: Check Which AI Model Is Selected
Not all Cursor models generate tab completions at the same speed or quality. The Cursor Tab feature runs on Cursor's own purpose-built completion model — it's not the same model you use for Chat.
Go to Settings > Models and check your configuration. If you've manually overridden the completion model to something that's not optimized for low-latency inline suggestions, you'll get slow, delayed, or absent completions.
The more common version of this problem: you're on the free plan and you've exhausted your monthly completions. Cursor's free tier gives you 2,000 completions per month. Once they're gone, tab completion goes silent — no error, no warning, just nothing. Check your usage in the Cursor dashboard at cursor.com. If you're near or over the limit, that's your answer.
If you're on Cursor Pro and completions are slow: make sure you haven't accidentally set a heavier model in the wrong place. The Cursor Tab completion model is separate from the chat model. It's supposed to be fast. If it's not, toggle the feature off and on (Fix 4 below) before assuming a model configuration issue.
Fix 4: Toggle Cursor Tab Off and Back On
This sounds dumb. It works more than it should.
There's a known pattern where Cursor Tab gets into a broken state — completions stop appearing but the toggle shows it as enabled. The fix is to disable it, restart Cursor, re-enable it, restart again. Takes 60 seconds and resolves a surprising number of "nothing I do works" situations.
In Settings > Features > Cursor Tab, toggle Enable Cursor Tab off. Quit Cursor completely (don't just close the window — actually quit the process). Reopen. Toggle it back on. Restart again.
You can also try this via the command palette: disable, quit, reopen, enable. Same result.
If completions come back, great. If they stop again after a few minutes, you probably have an extension conflict causing them to get disabled in the background — which leads to Fix 5.
Fix 5: Disable Conflicting Extensions
If you came to Cursor from VS Code and imported your extensions, you may have brought some trouble with you.
The biggest offender: GitHub Copilot. If Copilot is installed and enabled in Cursor, it competes directly with Cursor Tab for the same keystrokes and completion hooks. The result is unpredictable — sometimes both fire and you get double suggestions, sometimes neither fires. Disable Copilot in Cursor. Not just turn off its suggestions. Actually disable the extension. You don't need it — Cursor Tab does everything Copilot does, and the point of Cursor is to use its own AI layer.
Other extensions worth checking:
- Tabnine — another AI completion tool, same conflict
- Vim/Neovim emulation plugins — these intercept keystrokes at a low level and can swallow the Tab key before Cursor's suggestion handler sees it
- Aggressive auto-format extensions (Prettier, ESLint with format-on-save) — can interrupt suggestion acceptance timing
The debugging method: disable every non-essential extension. Test tab completion. If it works, re-enable extensions one at a time until the problem returns. That's your culprit.
Fix 6: Check Network and Firewall
Cursor Tab completions are AI-generated — they require a live connection to Cursor's inference servers. If something's blocking that connection, completions fail silently.
Check your VPN first. Some VPN configurations route all traffic through exit nodes in regions with API restrictions. Others have aggressive outbound filtering. Disable your VPN temporarily and test. If completions work without the VPN, you've found the issue — the long-term fix is configuring split tunneling to exclude Cursor's endpoints.
Corporate firewalls are the other common culprit. If you're on a managed network, your IT firewall may be blocking outbound connections to Cursor's AI inference endpoints. Check with your network team about allowlisting requests to api2.cursor.sh and related domains.
You can also check whether Cursor is connecting at all: open Developer Tools from inside Cursor (Help > Toggle Developer Tools), go to the Network tab, and look for failed requests when you're trying to trigger a completion. A 403, 429, or connection refused error tells you exactly where the block is.
Check status.cursor.com while you're at it. Cursor has had occasional backend incidents — if there's an active incident on the inference layer, no amount of local debugging will fix it. You're just waiting.
Fix 7: Reinstall Cursor (Nuclear Option)
You've tried everything above. Tab completion still doesn't work. At this point, something in Cursor's local state is corrupted and the fastest fix is a clean reinstall.
Before you do anything: export your settings. Hit Ctrl+Shift+P and run "Export Settings." This saves your keybindings, preferences, and extension list.
Then:
- Uninstall Cursor completely
- On Mac, delete
~/Library/Application Support/Cursorafter uninstalling - On Windows, delete
%APPDATA%\Cursorand%LOCALAPPDATA%\Cursor - On Linux, delete
~/.config/Cursor - Download a fresh installer from cursor.com
- Install, sign in, and test tab completion before importing your settings
That last step is deliberate. If tab completion works on a clean install before you import anything, something in your settings or extensions was causing the problem. Import settings carefully and test after each batch to identify what broke it.
If tab completion still doesn't work on a completely clean install — sign out, sign back in, and contact Cursor support at cursor.com/contact. At that point, it's an account or backend issue that only they can fix.
When to Contact Support
Most tab completion problems resolve within the first three fixes. But a few scenarios genuinely need Cursor's team:
- Completions stopped working after a billing event (plan change, renewal failure)
- You're on a paid plan but seeing free-tier behavior
- Clean reinstall with no extensions and completions still don't work
- Completions work on one machine but not another with the same account
Cursor support is at cursor.com/contact. Pro users typically get a response within a business day. Include your Cursor version (Help > About), your OS, and whether the issue is account-wide or machine-specific — it speeds up the diagnosis considerably.
If you want more context on what Cursor's tab completion can actually do when it's working, the Cursor AI review goes into the full feature breakdown, including how the current Tab model compares to what Copilot and other tools do. And if tab completion being broken is making you reconsider the tool entirely, the Cursor AI: 10 Fixes When It's Not Working article covers the broader failure modes beyond just completions.
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