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Prompt Your Editor Config

The settings UI is a search box over a few thousand toggles, and it only finds what you can already name. You know what you want — zoom with the mouse wheel — but you don't know the editor calls it editor.mouseWheelZoom, so you scroll. There's a faster path: open the JSON file the UI is writing to, trigger the inline AI edit, and say what you want in plain English.

The move

1. Open the settings file directly — the Command Palette entry for Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON) gets you to settings.json.
2. Put the cursor inside the JSON object and trigger the inline AI edit (Ctrl-K / Cmd-K in Cursor).
3. Describe the change the way you'd describe it to a colleague: “add the setting where I can zoom using the mouse wheel.”
4. Accept the suggestion.
5. Save the file.

The prompt can be sloppy. A very rough, one-line description is enough — you're not writing the config, you're naming the outcome and letting the model translate it into the key the editor actually reads. That example produces:

"editor.mouseWheelZoom": true

Which does exactly what it sounds like: holding Ctrl (or Cmd) and scrolling the mouse wheel changes the editor's font size. It's a real VS Code setting, and it's the kind of thing that is trivial to describe and annoying to find.

Why this beats the settings UI

The settings UI is organized around names. You search “zoom” and get a list of every setting with “zoom” in its label, across editor, terminal, window, and workbench — and you still have to read them to figure out which one matches your intent. The AI edit is organized around intent. You describe the behavior and it picks the key.

It also gets you a second thing for free: the JSON file is the shareable artifact. Once your preferences live in settings.json, you can diff them, commit them to a dotfiles repo, and move them between machines. The UI hides that file; going straight to it makes your config portable by default.

The same trick works for keybindings

Keyboard shortcuts have their own file. Get to it via Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → configure keyboard shortcuts, then open the JSON editor for it — that's keybindings.json. Trigger the same inline AI edit and describe the binding you want: “when I press Ctrl+A, make it behave like the right arrow key.” Accept, save, and Ctrl+A starts moving the cursor right.

That is a deliberately silly example, but the pattern is the useful part. Remapping a chord you keep reaching for — a key nearer the home row standing in for an arrow key, a shortcut you brought over from a different editor — is exactly the sort of thing where you know the behavior and have no idea what the command ID is called. Let the model look it up.

Two practical notes: pick a chord that isn't already load-bearing, and if the binding doesn't fire, check the editor's Keyboard Shortcuts view for a conflict before assuming the AI got the command wrong.

Where it falls down

This is genuinely useful and genuinely imperfect. Two failure modes come up immediately, and both look like “the AI got it wrong” when it didn't:

• It skips the trailing comma. The inline edit will happily insert a new key without adding the comma that separates it from the previous entry. That's not cosmetic — it's invalid JSON, so the whole file fails to parse and none of your settings apply. Watch for the squiggle, add the comma, move on.
• Nothing takes effect until you save. With auto-save off, you'll accept a perfect edit, go test it, and find the old behavior still in place — then debug a setting that was never loaded. Ctrl-S first, then judge the result.

Read the diff before you accept it, the same way you would with any AI edit. It's a config file, so the blast radius is small — but a mistyped key is silently ignored rather than flagged, and a broken comma takes everything down with it.

This isn't a Cursor-only trick

settings.json and keybindings.json are VS Code files. Any VS Code-family editor with an inline AI edit command can do this — the file paths, the key names, and the caveats are identical; only the keystroke that opens the inline edit changes. If your editor can edit a file with a natural-language instruction, it can edit its own config.

Related: bring your VS Code setup with you

If you're moving to Cursor from VS Code, you don't have to rebuild any of this by hand. In Cursor's settings there's a one-click Import that pulls your existing VS Code settings across as they are. Import first, then use the prompt trick for the settings you never got around to configuring in the first place.