desktop-commander-overview

• SKILL.mdcore · 12,282 bytes

# Desktop Commander MCP

Desktop Commander gives the agent reach across the user's actual computer — files, folders, terminals, processes, structured documents, and remote machines reachable over SSH. The tools' detailed schemas (parameters, return shapes, format-specific behavior) live in the MCP itself; this skill explains what they enable and how they compose into common workflows.

## What this MCP gives the agent

**Persistent shell sessions.** Desktop Commander keeps a started process or session alive across tool calls. Inside a single long-lived shell, REPL, or SSH session, state carries forward — environment variables, working directory, activated virtualenvs, open connections, REPL variables — so the agent can `cd`, activate a venv, then send commands or code into that same session many turns later without re-setup. (Note: separate `start_process` calls open separate sessions and do **not** share shell state with each other; persistence is inside one session, not across them.)

**Long-running processes.** Start a dev server, watcher, build, training run, or test suite in the background and keep working. The MCP returns a process handle the agent can tail, interact with, or terminate across many turns. Long-running commands don't need to block the workflow waiting for a foreground command to exit.

**Filesystem reach beyond the IDE workspace.** Read, write, move, list, and inspect files anywhere the user has granted scope — Downloads, Documents, project folders outside the IDE, or any other granted folders. Useful for organize-and-clean tasks, batch document work, and any "look at the file my coworker just sent me" request that doesn't fit inside the IDE sandbox.

**Surgical edits to existing files.** The `edit_block` tool does exact-string find-and-replace with built-in safety: ambiguous matches fail loudly instead of silently overwriting the wrong thing, and an `expected_replacements` count prevents partial-match disasters. Lower data-loss risk than rewriting whole files based on the slice you happened to read — though a wrong `old_string` or wrong `expected_replacements` can still corrupt content, so review the changed content before considering the edit done.