Desktop Commander gives Claude Code access to a local MCP server for terminal sessions, filesystem work, structured documents, search, process management, and SSH workflows. What it enables: - Persistent shell sessions: keep working directory, environment variables, virtualenvs, and running processes alive across tool calls. - Long-running processes: start a dev server, watcher, or build in the background and continue working while checking logs or interacting with the process later. - Precise file edits: make targeted edits to existing files with exact-match safety checks instead of rewriting whole files. - Structured file support: work directly with `.xlsx`, `.docx`, PDFs, images, and large local data files such as CSVs. - Search and diagnostics at scale: use ripgrep-backed search, inspect running processes, and manage local workflows from the same session. - SSH workflows: connect to remote machines, run diagnostics, tail logs, and continue working in the same session across multiple steps.