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Cade's Dotfiles

Cursor skills remain a directory instead of the shared symlink

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Source: Troubleshooting reference

Symptom: readlink ~/.cursor/skills prints nothing, Cursor has a separate skill tree, or chezmoi apply cannot replace ~/.cursor/skills with its managed link.

Root cause: an older Cursor installation created ~/.cursor/skills as a real directory before this repository made it a symlink to ~/.claude/skills. The pre-chezmoi ownership migration preserves that directory as an adjacent backup, copies only top-level entries that do not already exist in the shared tree, and does not overwrite a shared collision.

Confirm the current shape without changing it:

Terminal window
test -d ~/.cursor/skills && ! test -L ~/.cursor/skills && echo 'real directory'
readlink ~/.cursor/skills

Fix: run the migration, then rerun bootstrap so it records its chezmoi source and creates the managed link:

Terminal window
bash ~/dotfiles/install/skills-sync.sh adopt
~/dotfiles/bootstrap.sh update
readlink ~/.cursor/skills

The last command should print ../.claude/skills. The original complete tree remains at ~/.cursor/skills.pre-chezmoi-*; inspect it before deleting anything. For a name collision, the shared ~/.claude/skills/<name> stays authoritative and the Cursor version remains only in that backup.