Command reference Β· Cursor CLI
/show-thinking
Toggles display of the model's thinking blocks.
/show-thinking is a simple toggle: the command shows or hides the model's internal thinking blocks in the running CLI session. According to the official reference table, the short description is simply "Toggle thinking block display" β the command takes no further arguments.
Thinking blocks show the internal intermediate-step text that some models generate before the actual answer. It's not documented whether the display starts on or off by default; the command merely toggles between the two states, based on the session's current state.
/show-thinking joins /vim, /line-numbers, and /status-indicators in the group of pure display toggles of the CLI β they only change the presentation in the terminal, not the model's behavior itself.
π THE SAME TASK (βTOGGLE EXTENDED THINKINGβ) ON OTHER PLATFORMS
- Aider: /think-tokens
β WHEN TO USE IT?
Understand why the agent makes a certain decision
/show-thinking on, before a complex architecture decision is coming up
Read along the intermediate-step text when debugging unexpected agent behavior
Turn on /show-thinking when a response seems hard to follow, and turn it off again afterward
β WHEN NOT TO?
Only the final result matters, not the reasoning path
Thinking blocks unnecessarily lengthen the visible output in the terminal when only the result counts.
Better: Leave /show-thinking off for a more compact session
SOURCES
- Cursor Docs β Slash Commands β cursor.com