Wonderwhy-er/DesktopCommanderMCP is an MCP server that lets AI clients search and edit files, run terminal commands, and manage computer processes. It is used to give coding agents practical control over a local development environment through chat. The catalogue add-ons extend or configure this server and its agent workflows.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add wonderwhy-er/DesktopCommanderMCP --skill desktop-commander-overviewgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wonderwhy-er/DesktopCommanderMCPWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wonderwhy-er/desktopcommandermcp/desktop-commander-overview)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wonderwhy-er/desktopcommandermcp/desktop-commander-overview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wonderwhy-er/desktopcommandermcp/desktop-commander-overview/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wonderwhy-er/desktopcommandermcp/desktop-commander-overview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wonderwhy-er/desktopcommandermcp/desktop-commander-overview.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 84 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00067 | $0.02704 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00034 | $0.01352 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00013 | $0.00541 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00270 |
Grade A, and why
desktop-commander-overview scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
`start_process("npm run dev", timeout_ms=...)` keeps the server up. The agent then loops: `edit_block` on the route file, `read_process_output(pid, offset=-30)` to see the server's reload, `start_process("curl -s http:// Copies of this mod
3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- desktop-commander-overview — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- desktop-commander-overview — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- desktop-commander-overview — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 109 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
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.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 10d ago First seen · 109 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 7a0e77cae3d4
desktop-commander-overview is a skill published in the GitHub repository wonderwhy-er/DesktopCommanderMCP (9,513 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,704 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
co-mail-and-drive
Read and send mail from the user's own Gmail or Outlook account, safely stage Gmail draft attachments, send from the agent's own address, manage Outlook contacts and the Outlook calendar, and work with Google Drive files — with co gmail, co outlook, co email, and co gdrive. Use when the user asks about their inbox, an…
youdaonote
A command-line skill for managing Youdao Cloud Notes, a Chinese note-taking service. It supports notes, to-do items, saved web pages, searches, and folders.
markdown-documents
Write or edit Markdown notes, reports and plain text; default for non-Office writing.
obsidian
Read, search, create, or edit notes in an authorized Obsidian vault while preserving frontmatter, wikilinks, and unrelated notes.
notion-knowledge-capture
Convert conversations and notes into structured, linkable Notion pages for easy reuse.
google-workspace
Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Sheets, and Docs integration via gws CLI (googleworkspace/cli). Uses OAuth2 with automatic token refresh via bridge script. Requires gws binary.