Desktop Commander

Desktop Commander is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other MCP-compatible AI clients direct control over a local terminal and filesystem. It is built on top of the MCP Filesystem Server and adds search-and-replace file editing, process management, and support for common office file formats. AI coding assistants that only see chunked file excerpts, or that cannot run long-lived shell commands, struggle with real development work; Desktop Commander gives the model full files, a real terminal, and control over running processes on the host OS.

Key features

• Terminal control: execute long-running terminal commands with output streaming, configurable timeouts, and background execution, plus process listing and kill support.
• Surgical file editing: make targeted search-and-replace text changes or full file rewrites across multiple files, backed by a vscode-ripgrep based recursive code and text search.
• Office file support: read, write, edit, and search Excel (.xlsx, .xls, .xlsm), PDF, and DOCX files without external tools, including markdown-to-DOCX conversion.
• In-memory code execution: run Python, Node.js, or R code directly without saving temporary files, useful for quick analysis of CSV, JSON, or Excel input.
• Process interaction: attach to running processes such as SSH sessions, databases, or development servers, with session management for long-running commands.
• Remote MCP access: connect from ChatGPT, Claude web, and other AI services through a hosted Remote MCP endpoint instead of a local install.
• Security hardening: symlink traversal prevention, a command blocklist with bypass protection, and an optional Docker sandbox isolate the server from the rest of the filesystem.

Installation

Desktop Commander installs through npx @wonderwhy-er/desktop-commander@latest setup, which configures Claude Desktop and auto-updates on every restart. A bash installer (install.sh) handles Node.js setup on macOS, and a Docker image (mcp/desktop-commander) runs the server sandboxed with persistent volumes for tools, configs, and package caches. The same JSON server definition also works with Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code / GitHub Copilot, Cline, Roo Code, Claude Code, Trae, and Kiro; Claude Code specifically can add it with claude mcp add --scope user desktop-commander -- npx -y @wonderwhy-er/desktop-commander@latest.

Ideal use cases

• Exploring and understanding an unfamiliar codebase without manual file chunking.
• Automating multi-step tasks across the operating system rather than inside a single editor.
• Working across multiple projects in the same conversation.
• Editing or generating Excel, PDF, and Word documents from natural language instructions.
• Interacting with long-running processes like local dev servers or database sessions.

Desktop Commander works with Claude Desktop's standard Pro subscription rather than metered API calls, so usage does not add per-token costs on top of the subscription fee. The server logs all tool calls for audit purposes, with 10MB log rotation and detailed timestamps.