# Release Notes — v0.2.44

• 🐢 Multi-minute tool-call hangs under parallel load — fixed — under heavy parallel file I/O, tool calls (even in-memory ones like list_processes) could stall ~4 minutes then recover. Stats persistence is now non-blocking, the libuv threadpool is raised to 16, and stalled reads are cancelled via a flat 3-minute abortable timeout that fails before the client's opaque cutoff. #535

• 🔌 Remote: device no longer wedges offline after sleep/wifi loss — a half-open socket could park the realtime channel in joining forever, leaving the device offline until restart. Time-in-joining is now bounded, forcing a channel recreate instead of wedging. #528

• 🛡️ write_file won't silently clobber a file on a missing mode — an omitted mode used to default to rewrite and replace the whole file, so a dropped param on an intended append could destroy content. Writes to existing non-empty files now require an explicit append/rewrite. Creating new or empty files keeps the zero-friction default. #546

• 🖼️ More reliable file previews — the preview widget now renders every file type from its own read_file pull, with structuredContent returned as metadata-only on UI reads (no content duplication for the model). An 8s RPC bound and 10s watchdog replace a preview that could spin forever. #536

Contributors: @wonderwhy-er, @edgarsskore

# Release Notes — v0.2.43

• ⚡ edit_block stays responsive on large files — fuzzy matching now runs in a worker thread, so fuzzy searches on big files no longer block the event loop. #500

• 🧯 Terminal output won't run away with memory — per-session output buffers are now capped, so a process that floods stdout no longer balloons DC's memory. #503

• 🗣️ Unsupported tool parameters get flagged, not silently dropped — when the model sends a parameter DC doesn't recognize, it now warns and lists the supported ones instead of quietly ignoring it. #519

• 🖼️ More reliable image reads — read_file carries image data once in structured content, so previews rehydrate correctly on clients that read it. #526

• 🔌 Remote: reconnect recovers half-open sockets — the device Realtime channel now recovers from a half-open socket on reconnect instead of getting stuck. #520

• 🧹 Packaging — added npm repository metadata. #499

Contributors: @edgarsskore, @wonderwhy-er, and first-time contributor @chenyuan35 🎉

Release Notes — v0.2.42

• 🖼️ Image reads fixed — on some clients the model wasn't actually seeing the image when reading an image file; it does now. #488

• 🪟 Windows: terminal command quoting fixed — some types of commands had their quotes mangled before running; fixed now. #495

• 🪟 Windows: PATH fixes — DC now correctly finds tools and apps that are installed and on your PATH. #484

• 📁 Cowork file listing fixed — directory listings now show up in Cowork (and other clients that read structured content), not just in chat. #496

• 🖨️ PDF generation: stale Chrome cleanup — write_pdf now prunes outdated Puppeteer Chrome builds it downloads. #485

  • ⚠️ This only cleans up going forward, inside DC's own cache. Chrome downloaded by older versions lives in the shared Puppeteer cache and isn't touched — if you don't need it, delete that folder yourself (it can be several GB):
    • macOS / Linux: ~/.cache/puppeteer
    • Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.cache\puppeteer

Contributors: @wonderwhy-er, @edgarsskore, and first-time contributor @katoken54321go 🎉

Release Notes — v0.2.41

🔒 Security: directory traversal via symlink bypass — fixed

A symlink inside an allowed directory pointing to a restricted location could bypass isPathAllowed() when the target file didn't yet exist — fs.realpath() failed with ENOENT and the allowlist check fell back to the unresolved path. validatePath() now resolves the deepest existing ancestor and reconstructs the real path before checking the allowlist, so a symlink at /projects/evil → /etc/ can no longer trick a write of /projects/evil/crontab into landing at /etc/crontab.

Reported and patched by @sorlen008 — thank you. Fixed in #398 — closes #219 (open ~7 months).

🛟 Excel: read_file now accepts SheetName!A1:B2 range syntax

edit_block accepted range: "Sheet1!E5" but read_file rejected it as Invalid cell range — and the post-success help line in every read_file output literally showed {range: "Sheet1!E5"} as the example. Agents copying that example hit unrecoverable retry loops. The two parsers are now unified; quoted Excel-native forms ('My Sheet'!A1:B2), full-column ranges (A:B), and combined Sheet!Cells all work for both tools.

Fixed in #469. Thanks @dasein108.

🩹 File preview survives page refresh

The "Preview unavailable after page refresh" placeholder is gone for cases where preview content was actually available — read_file now embeds returned content in structuredContent so the widget can rehydrate, and unsupported file types fall back to raw escaped content instead of an error card. #472

⏱️ Startup hang on Windows / high-latency networks — fixed

On Windows + Node 24 / undici 7.x, AbortController.abort() doesn't always interrupt an in-progress TCP connect, so the feature flags fetch could hang for ~30s on every cold start (OS-level TCP timeout). Wrapped the fetch in Promise.race with a hard 3s timeout, added a 5s safety bound to waitForFreshFlags(), and added 6 regression tests including a broken-AbortController simulation.

Fixed in #467 — closes #465.

📁 list_directory: [NOT_FOUND] vs [DENIED]

Listing a nonexistent path used to report [DENIED], implying a permission problem. ENOENT now produces [NOT_FOUND] with a clear message and a ❓ icon in the directory preview UI. EPERM/EACCES/ETIMEDOUT still surface as [DENIED]. #468

✨ Gemini CLI extension skills

Extends the Gemini CLI extension support shipped in v0.2.40 with a proper skill page — guidance for agents on when to reach for Desktop Commander (persistent shells, long-running jobs, large local files, structured documents, SSH sessions, process management) with worked example workflows. #466

🧩 Claude Code plugin

Desktop Commander is now submittable as a Claude Code plugin — plugin metadata, README, and a skill guide so Claude knows when to use it for terminal work, file access, document handling, process management, and SSH. #457

🖱️ Cursor plugin metadata + one-click install

Cursor marketplace metadata, a branded install button, and a deeplink that opens Cursor with the MCP server config prefilled. #456, #462, #464

Contributors

@sorlen008, @dasein108, @edgarsskore, @wonderwhy-er — and thanks to the user in Australia who filed #465 with detailed logs that made the Windows timeout fix straightforward.

Release Notes - v0.2.40

🛟 Hotfix: Markdown auto-save no longer corrupts your files

If you've been on v0.2.39, please upgrade. The markdown preview pane was silently rewriting .md files on disk through a Tiptap round-trip — collapsing GFM tables, rewriting Obsidian wikilinks ([[Note]] → [Note](http://Note)), corrupting YAML frontmatter, and adding spurious \[, \], \~, \_ escapes. Fixed in #445 — closes #437 and #440.

✨ Gemini CLI extension support

Desktop Commander can now be installed as a Gemini CLI extension.

🧹 Tool history log: better truncation (#441)

The tool history file could grow unbounded and occasionally crash the server. Now hard-capped at 5 MiB with a rolling trim down to 4 MiB keeping the most recent entries.

Contributors

@serg33v, @edgarsskore, @wonderwhy-er — and thanks to @dvdakile and @55nchz for the detailed reproductions on #437 / #440.

Release Notes - v0.2.39

📝 Markdown Editor (New!)

WYSIWYG markdown editing right in the preview pane — what you see is what you get. Edit your .md files, then copy-paste the formatted output straight into Slack, Medium, Notion, email, or anywhere else that accepts rich text. No more "does this work here or do I need to retype it as bold?"

• Live edit/preview with raw and rendered views, plus fullscreen mode
• Table of contents navigation, link search/insert, autosave, undo/revert
• Conflict handling — when a file changes on disk (e.g. another agent edits it mid-session), get a clear choice between the disk version and your edits, or a partial-success merge when only some of your edits collide
• Copy paste styled results to other rich text editors, Slack, Medium, Notion

📂 Directory Browser (New!) (#392)

read_file on a directory path now opens a browsable tree view in the preview pane instead of throwing EISDIR:

• Expand/collapse folders, drill into subdirectories, go back up to parent
• Open files directly from the tree, or open the whole folder in your system file browser
• Agents also get an immediate directory listing + hint to use list_directory next time, so no wasted round-trip

⚙️ Configuration Improvements

• Boolean config values accept string inputs ("true"/"false") and are normalized correctly — telemetry opt-out works reliably even when stored as a string
• Sanitized error messages (#367)

🔒 Security Improvements

• ReDoS protection for Excel and DOCX search — searchExcelFiles and searchDocxFiles now detect catastrophic-backtracking regexes (e.g. (a+)+$) and fall back to literal string matching instead of hanging the event loop (#400)

🔧 Other Changes

• Better error messages for cloud storage permission failures (EPERM / EACCES / ETIMEDOUT) (#408)
• Added windowsHide to prevent console window flashing on Windows (#401)
• Improved test coverage for conditional-tools, including stale client name fix (#434)

Contributors
@edgarsskore, @wonderwhy-er, @phuryn, @sorlen008

Release Notes - v0.2.38

🖥️ Settings Panel (New!)
A visual config editor right inside Claude Desktop — no more editing JSON files or remembering tool call syntax.

View and edit all Desktop Commander settings through a clean UI
Toggle telemetry, adjust file limits, manage blocked commands and allowed directories
Dark mode support with host-agnostic theming
Works across different MCP hosts

🔒 Security Improvements

Config key allowlist — set_config_value now only accepts known configuration keys, preventing prompt injection from tampering with internal state like clientId or A/B test flags (#353)
Fail-closed command validation — if blocklist validation errors (corrupt config, read failure), commands are now denied instead of silently allowed (#352)
Sandbox hardening — removed allow-same-origin from preview iframe sandbox to prevent embedded content from escaping (#355)

🔧 Other Changes

Added token counter script for measuring tool definition token usage — 41 tools, 13,735 tokens, 6.9% of 200K context (#358)
Fixed "Inialization" typo in remote-channel.ts (#351)

Contributors
@edgarsskore, @pmcdade

v0.2.37

📄 DOCX Support (New!)

Full Microsoft Word document support through the existing read_file, write_file, edit_block, and start_search tools — no new tools needed.

• Read DOCX — default mode shows a text-bearing outline (paragraphs, tables, images, headers/footers) with body indices for navigation. Set offset=1 to get raw pretty-printed XML for precise editing.
• Edit DOCX — surgical find/replace on the underlying XML via edit_block, with automatic header/footer search fallback. For bulk operations (e.g. translation), use Python with the zipfile module.
• Create DOCX — write_file with a .docx extension converts markdown headings to proper Word heading styles with Calibri defaults and standard page margins.
• Search DOCX — content search extracts text from document.xml, headers, and footers, running in parallel alongside ripgrep.

🔧 Fixes & Improvements

• Onboarding config override — local onboarding_injection config setting is now respected, so users can disable it with set_config_value (#348, fixes #303)
• Remote error handling — enhanced error handling and logging across remote channel operations; removed unused subscribe method (#332)
• Options parsing fix — resolved false positive in options parsing (#345, fixes #343)
• Agent discovery — added plugin.yaml for agent registry and plugin discovery (#346)
• AgentAudit badge — added verified badge to docs (#340)

Contributors

@edgarsskore, @lucamorettibuilds, @mattalxndr, @dasein108, @chorghemaruti64-creator, @ecap0-ai

v0.2.36

🖼️ File Preview UI (New!)

When Claude reads a file, you now get a visual preview widget right in Claude Desktop — no more staring at raw text dumps in the chat.

• Rendered markdown with clean, Medium-inspired typography
• Image preview — PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP files render inline
• "Load more lines" — expand before/after to see more of the file without re-reading
• Breadcrumb path with an "Open in folder" button to jump straight to the file in Finder/Explorer
• Works on macOS and Windows (hardened Windows path handling to prevent injection)

🔧 Fixes & Improvements

• Build fix: blocking-offline-update.js now correctly copied to dist during build (#329)
• Tilde expansion: Restricted ~ expansion to current user only for security

Contributors

@edgarsskore

Screenshots

# Release Notes - v0.2.33

Security

• Fix command blocklist bypass via absolute paths and command substitution — thanks @dcpagotto
• validatePath now blocks symlink traversal to prevent arbitrary read/write — thanks @zjyhhhher
• Added symlink security tests for validatePath

Protocol

• Use SDK protocol version negotiation instead of a hardcoded version (found and suggested by @abcnow)

Features

• Add v2 feature flags with weighted A/B test variants
• Fix welcome page A/B test to include local-agent-mode clients

Release Tooling

• Release script now handles existing tags gracefully