Claude Code on desktop

Claude Code on desktop

The fast loop. Files on your machine, a diff you watch as it happens, and a rendered PDF you can open the second it is written.

Verified against the official documentation on 10 September 2026: Overview, Desktop.

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Install once

The desktop app includes Claude Code, so there is no separate CLI install.

Platform	Download
macOS, Intel and Apple Silicon	Download the .dmg
Windows x64	Download the installer
Windows ARM64	Download the installer
Ubuntu or Debian	In beta, installed with apt. See the Linux instructions.

Launch Claude, sign in, and click the Code tab. A paid subscription is required.

If you prefer a terminal, install the CLI directly instead:

# macOS, Linux, WSL
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

# Windows PowerShell
irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

# Homebrew
brew install --cask claude-code

# WinGet
winget install Anthropic.ClaudeCode

Then cd into the repository and run claude.

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Set the repository up once

git clone https://github.com/fde-academy-lab/c2-content-factory.git
cd c2-content-factory
bash setup.sh

setup.sh installs WeasyPrint, mermaid-cli, python-pptx, openpyxl and Playwright. It tolerates failure and always exits zero, so read the [setup] lines rather than trusting the exit code.

If you would rather not install anything at all, the repository ships a devcontainer, so Open in GitHub Codespaces from the README gives you the same environment in a browser tab.

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The loop this lane is for

flowchart LR
    A["ask for one<br/>small change"] --> B["watch the diff<br/>land in seconds"]
    B --> C["open the built file<br/>and look at it"]
    C --> D{"right?"}
    D -->|no| A
    D -->|yes| E["run the gate,<br/>commit"]

Loading

The whole value is step C. A cheat sheet with a five-point label, a slide whose table has grown past the footer, a diagram whose arrows cross: none of those are visible in a diff and all of them are obvious in the PDF. This lane exists so you can look.

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What it is best at

Job	Why desktop wins
Anything visual	You open the .pdf or the .pptx immediately, in the same second it is written
A single failing check	The loop is short enough to try three fixes in the time one cloud round trip takes
Reviewing somebody else's branch	git checkout, run the gate, open the files, comment with your eyes
Trying a change to a builder script	You can run scripts/build_deck.py on one file and see the result
Working without network	The generated data and every script run locally

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Moving between surfaces

From	To	Command
Terminal	Desktop app	/desktop, which continues the current session where you can review diffs visually. Needs a claude.ai subscription. Available on macOS and x64 Windows.
Terminal	Web	claude --cloud "task". It clones the GitHub remote at your current branch, not your local checkout, so push first.
Web	Terminal	claude --teleport. See Claude Code on the web.
Anywhere	A running cloud session	claude -p "your message" --cloud <session-id> posts one message and exits

Session handoff from the CLI is one way: you can pull a cloud session down, and you cannot push a terminal session up. The desktop app has a Continue in menu that can send a local session to the web.

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Running several at once

Each --cloud command starts an independent session, so three artifact families can be built in parallel when they genuinely do not depend on each other:

claude --cloud "Rebuild the W04/D2 cheat sheet PDF and report every label under 5.2pt"
claude --cloud "Run distractor_audit across content/W02 and fix every failure"

/tasks lists them. This is a real accelerator and it is also the fastest way to create a merge conflict, so keep parallel sessions on genuinely separate folders.

Two warnings that apply to this repository specifically. Parallel sessions must not both build day packs, because that is the drift the one-session rule exists to prevent. And nothing here pushes to main, ever.

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What this lane is bad at

Weakness	What to do instead
A long autonomous build while you do something else	The web, which keeps running with the laptop shut
Working from a machine you do not control	The web, or Codespaces
Anything where you would forget to push	The web, where the branch is the only place the work exists