Cursor in WSL2 on Windows is a pain: neither the latest version of Cursor nor the latest version of WSL extension will actually work. As such I cannot recommend this because it is so fiddly. With that disclaimer; this is how I got it working:

Using

• Windows 11 and WSL2¹
• Cursor Setup 0.45.8 - Build 250201b44xw1x2k-x64.exe
  • Note as of 11 March 2025 the latest version of Cursor seems to try to download a version of WSL that doesn’t seem to exist—404 error when running ../bin/cursor within WSL—which is why we use a different version
• WSL extension version 0.88.3, which can be downloaded from here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/ms-vscode-remote/vsextensions/remote-wsl/0.88.3/vspackage and which will download as ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.88.3.vsix

Steps

1. Install Cursor
2. Run Cursor from within Windows, select Extensions, and drag and drop in ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.88.3.vsix, which will install the extension
3. Close Cursor in Windows
4. Within WSL, run /mnt/c/Users/$WIN_USERNAME/AppData/Local/Programs/cursor/resources/app/bin/cursor to launch Cursor, where $WIN_USERNAME is your username in Windows

Cursor should then open in Windows and connect to the WSL environment

Further

The Cursor Extensions tab doesn’t seem to work in WSL so any extensions need to be downloaded manually and dropped in e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/vscodevim/vsextensions/vim/1.29.0/vspackage for Vim keybindings