Desktop Commander MCP

Desktop Commander MCP is a Model Context Protocol server that gives AI assistants full control over your local machine — terminal commands, file system operations, process management, and in-memory code execution. Built on top of MCP Filesystem Server, it extends basic file access with long-running command execution, interactive process sessions, diff-based file editing, and native support for Excel, PDF, and DOCX files. The server provides tools across four categories. Terminal tools let you execute commands with configurable timeouts, read output from long-running processes, force-terminate sessions, and list active command sessions. Process management tools list system processes and kill them by PID. File system tools handle reading, writing, creating directories, moving files, searching by pattern, and retrieving metadata. The edit_block tool enables surgical text replacements in code files without rewriting entire contents. Desktop Commander also includes in-memory code execution for Python, Node.js, and R — you can run scripts without saving files to disk, which is ideal for quick data analysis on CSV, JSON, or Excel datasets. A file preview UI provides visual previews in Claude Desktop with rendered markdown, inline images, and expandable content. The server has 5,300 plus GitHub stars, uses an MIT license, and installs via npm or Smithery CLI with automatic updates on restart. A command blacklist feature lets you block specific operations for safety.