Release Notes - v0.2.14-v0.2.17 - Enhanced Context Management & Directory Navigation

✨ Major New Features

📜 Tool Call History System (get_recent_tool_calls)

A powerful new tool for maintaining context and recovering from lost conversations.

How it works:

• Automatically tracks all tool calls made during your session
• Stores the last 1000 tool calls in memory (resets on restart)
• Retrieve calls with optional filters by tool name and time range
• View complete details including arguments and outputs

Why this matters:

• Restore Lost Claude Chats: Sometimes Claude errors out and fails to save a conversation along with the tool calls. This tool lets you recover what was done.
• Pass Context Between Chats: Start a new chat and quickly review what was accomplished in previous sessions
• Best Practice Tip: Ask Claude to keep a log of work or a task list in markdown files. Combined with tool call history, you can almost completely restore lost context from failed sessions.

Example usage:

"Show me what commands were run in the last hour"
"Get my recent file operations"
"What did I do with GitHub tools today?"

📂 Recursive Directory Listing with Depth Control

The list_directory tool now supports a depth parameter for exploring directory hierarchies in a single call.

Depth Levels:

• depth=1: Only direct contents (files and folders in the specified directory)
• depth=2: Contents plus one level of subdirectories (default)
• depth=3+: Multiple levels deep for comprehensive exploration

Context Protection:
Large directories (like node_modules) can contain thousands of files. To prevent overwhelming your context window:

• Top-level directory: Shows ALL items (no limit)
• Nested directories (depth > 1): Limited to 100 items per folder
• When a folder exceeds 100 items, you'll see: [WARNING] node_modules: 500 items hidden (showing first 100 of 600 total)

Example output structure:

[DIR] src
[FILE] src/index.ts
[DIR] src/tools
[FILE] src/tools/filesystem.ts
[FILE] src/tools/terminal.ts
[DIR] src/utils
[FILE] src/utils/logger.ts

🚫 Disable Onboarding Option

You can now disable the automatic onboarding system using the --disable-onboarding command-line parameter.

Configuration example for Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "desktop-commander": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "@wonderwhy-er/desktop-commander@latest",
        "--disable-onboarding"
      ]
    }
  }
}

This is particularly useful for:

• Power users who don't need getting-started guidance
• Custom MCP client integrations
• Automated setups where onboarding prompts aren't needed

🏛️ Official Claude Desktop Extension Release

Desktop Commander is listed in Claude's official Desktop Extensions Directory!

Improvements made for that release:

• ✅ More human-readable tool call names for better Claude integration
• ✅ Updated to latest MCP SDK (v1.9.0)
• ✅ Protocol compliance improvements for cross-platform compatibility
• ✅ Enhanced tool annotations and metadata
• ✅ Proper manifest formatting for official registry

✨ New Features & Improvements

• Enhanced Search Performance: Fixed pattern matching in search queries and improved search reliability with better error handling
• MCP Registry Ready: Prepared Desktop Commander for official MCP registry publication with proper configuration
• VS Code Compatibility: Added compatibility handler for VS Code MCP integration contributed by andriyshevchenko
• Updated Dependencies: Upgraded to @modelcontextprotocol/sdk v1.9.0 for latest MCP features contributed by andriyshevchenko

✨ New Features & Improvements

• Intelligent Onboarding System:
  • Automated Guidance: Desktop Commander now includes intelligent onboarding for new users (fewer than 10 successful commands). AI Client will automatically offer helpful getting-started guidance and tutorials after successful tool use.
  • On-Demand Help: Users can now explicitly ask AI Client for onboarding assistance at any time with phrases like "Help me get started with Desktop Commander," "Show me Desktop Commander examples," or "What can I do with Desktop Commander?".
  • Curated Examples: AI Client will present beginner-friendly tutorials and examples, including:
    • Organizing your Downloads folder
    • Analyzing CSV/Excel files with Python
    • Setting up GitHub Actions CI/CD
    • Exploring and understanding codebases
    • Running interactive development environments
    • Building a shopping list app and deploying it online
    • Analyzing data files
    • Checking system health and resources
    • Finding patterns and errors in log files

In future we plan to add way more to prompt library, allow to save your own private prompts or publish and share with others.
This is just first step.

• get_prompts Tool:

  • A new tool get_prompts has been added to browse and retrieve curated Desktop Commander prompts.
  • Actions:
    • list_categories: List all available prompt categories.
    • list_prompts: List prompts, with optional filtering by category.
    • get_prompt: Retrieve and execute a specific prompt by ID.
  • This tool allows users to discover and leverage pre-built workflows and examples directly in AI Client like Claude/Claude Code/Cursor and others.

• Enhanced Client Compatibility & Type Safety:

  • set_config_value Fixes: Improved handling for allowedDirectories and blockedCommands when setting values via the set_config_value tool. It now robustly parses various string inputs (e.g., comma-separated, JSON array strings, single values) into arrays, ensuring compatibility with strict client environments like Gemini. This avoids previous issues where certain input formats would cause errors.
  • Stricter Type Definitions: The value parameter in SetConfigValueArgsSchema now uses z.union to explicitly define accepted types (string, number, boolean, array of strings, null). This provides clearer type hints for clients and prevents unexpected type-related errors, leading to more reliable tool usage across different LLM clients.

That fixes few bugs:
#235
#209

Release Notes - v0.2.11

🔍 Unified Search System - Major Change

Search Tools Rewrite

• Breaking Change: Replaced search_files and search_code with unified search system
• Both file name and content searches now use ripgrep backend (previously only content search used ripgrep)
• Simplified codebase by unifying two separate implementations into one consistent system

New Streaming Search Workflow

• Parallel Searches: Start multiple searches simultaneously like processes
• Progressive Results: start_search runs in background, get immediate first results
• Session Management: get_more_search_results for pagination, list_searches to track active searches, stop_search to cancel
• Non-blocking: Read first results without waiting for full completion

Enhanced Search Features

• Multi-Extension Support: Search across multiple file types with *.ts|*.js|*.py|*.java|*.go patterns
  Thanks to @genkernel for the contribution!
• Better Ripgrep Integration: Optimized command construction and flag usage
• Early Termination: Option to stop searches after first match found
• Case Sensitivity Control: New ignoreCase parameter for precise control
• Improved Accuracy: Fixed result counting to separate matches from context lines

New Tools:

• start_search → get_more_search_results → stop_search → list_searches

🛠️ Other Improvements

• MCP Catalog Badge: Added official MCP Catalog integration badge
• Security Documentation: Added SECURITY.md with transparent security approach
• Website Fixes: Updated navigation, installation links, and mobile responsiveness
• Code Quality: Various cleanups, better error handling, enhanced type safety
• Bug Fixes: Server initialization issues, NPX uninstall command, search timeouts

Upgrade: NPX users get automatic updates, manual installations should update to @latest

🚀 Major Features

🐳 Secure Docker Support with Persistence

We know people install us from Docker Hub Docker Hub
But way it works there is suboptimal. Does not support mounting host system folders and looses changes on container restarts.

In this release we added custom installation scripts that solve the key limitations: file persistence and folder mounting.

Installation instructions: Docker Setup Guide

Why it matters: Secure, isolated environment for AI work with persistence and access to selected folders with files

🛠️ Additional Enhantments

• Process Output Fix: Resolved critical bug where completed process outputs couldn't be read by AI
• Uninstall Script: Clean removal with npx @wonderwhy-er/desktop-commander remove

Release Notes - v0.2.7

Overview

This release includes important bug fixes, improvements to binary file handling, and new features to enhance the user experience.

Changes

✨ Enhancements

• Improve binary file handling (#187)
  • Not dumping binary files into context anymore
  • Enhanced binary file detection and processing capabilities
  • Added comprehensive test suite for binary file detection
  • Updated filesystem tools to better handle binary content

Released on: July 23, 2025

Bug was reported that when opting out and turning off feedback requests they still show up.
Should not be the case. Disabling the functionality here quickly.

Cursor fix

Fixes #177
Works in cursor now:

Few other changes, fix client detection, add MSeeP badge, update faq/readme with new tools, docker, privacy information

🚀 New Features

Cross-OS Interactive Terminal Support(SSH, REPL, etc)

• New: REPL and interactive terminal functionality for things like SSH, Python and Node REPL and almost anything else
• New: Now DC can start, read and interact with processes
• New: Now instead of running new terminal with each command it can reuse single terminal session for many things
• New: It also allows it to run code in memory to do things like parsing and working with Excel or PDF files among many other things
• Improved: OS-specific prompt adjustments for better user experience

Usage Analytics & Feedback System

• New: get_usage_stats tool for sharing your usage statistics, these are not sent anywhere, its for you
• New: give_feedback_to_desktop_commander tool for streamlined user feedback collection, give us feedback
• New: User will be prompted once to share feedback after moderate amount of usage

Docker Environment Compatibility

• New: We can be installed from https://hub.docker.com/r/mcp/desktop-commander
• Fixed: Bug fix with shell commands fixed so it fully works now
• TODO: - add installation instructions with mounted folders + improve Windows compatibility

⚡ Improvements

Advanced File Operations

• New: Support for negative file reads (tail-like behavior)
• New: Enhanced file reading with offset/length parameters for large files
• New: Improved file operation responses with better formatting

Search & Performance Optimizations

• New: Smart truncation for large search results
• New: Better handling of oversized responses to prevent timeouts
• New: Optimized search performance across different file types

Cross-Platform Stability

• Fixed: Enhanced Windows compatibility issues
• Fixed: Improved shell execution across different operating systems
• Fixed: Better handling of environment-specific commands and paths

🚀 New Features & Enhancements

File Read Improvements

• Negative Offset Support: Added support for reading files from the end using negative offsets (tail-like behavior)
  • Use offset: -20 to read the last 20 lines of a file
  • Optimized for large files with efficient reverse reading
• Enhanced File Reading Performance: Improved handling of large files with better byte estimation for deep positive offsets

Tool Enhancements

• Analytics Update: Minor tool calling analytics improvements
• Improved Chunked Writing: Better prompts and guidance for writing large files in chunks
• Enhanced Edit Block: Improved surgical text replacement functionality