Intermediate11 min
The Desktop App — Features Most Engineers Miss
The Desktop app was completely rebuilt on April 14, 2026 — not as a visual wrapper around the CLI, but as a multi-session management and cloud task coordination platform. This article covers every feature, including the ones most engineers never discover.
Quick Reference
- →Redesigned April 14, 2026 — multi-session sidebar, drag-and-drop panes, streaming rendering
- →Side chat (Cmd+;): branch a question without feeding it into the main session's context
- →Connectors: GitHub, Slack, Linear, Notion, Google Workspace in one click
- →Dispatch: receive tasks from Claude mobile app, executed on your desktop
- →Computer Use (Pro+, March 2026): Claude controls the browser or desktop UI
- →Routine management: create, monitor, and debug Routines from the Desktop UI
- →Visual diff viewer: scrollable, collapsible, side-by-side — rebuilt for large changesets
The April 14, 2026 Redesign
The April 14, 2026 Desktop app redesign is not an incremental update. The entire UI was rebuilt around three needs: managing multiple parallel sessions, reviewing large agent outputs visually, and coordinating cloud tasks.
- ▸Multi-session sidebar: all active and recent sessions in one view with filter and group
- ▸Rebuilt rendering layer: responses stream as Claude generates them — fast and responsive
- ▸Full CLI plugin parity: org-managed and local plugins work identically in the Desktop app
- ▸SSH support extended to Mac — connect to remote machines from the Desktop UI
- ▸Drag-and-drop pane layout: rearrange chat, diff, preview, terminal, file, plan, tasks