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.

Binary and structured files handled directly by the MCP. Excel, DOCX, and PDF are first-class — read and modified through format-specific mechanisms rather than text-only approximations: Excel via cell-range JSON, DOCX via raw-XML edits, PDF via page-level operations on a new output file. The result is the real file in its original format, not a regenerated approximation. Images and PDFs return as viewable content for the agent.

Search at scale. Streaming, ripgrep-backed search across whole projects or folder trees. The agent picks between filename search and in-file content search, pages through results progressively without flooding context, and runs multiple concurrent searches when the query is ambiguous.

Remote machines via SSH. A long-lived SSH session inside a persistent shell turns the agent into a real ops tool: connect once, then tail logs, run diagnostics, deploy, or debug across many turns without reconnecting each step.