ClaudeForge is a cross-platform desktop editor designed to simplify the management of Claude Code and Claude Desktop configuration files. It provides a user-friendly interface for editing JSON-based settings, with features that enhance productivity and clarity.
Key Features:
Typed Editor: A structured environment for managing Claude configurations, showing scope badges (e.g., Managed, Local, Project, User) to identify the source of each setting.
Compound Editors: Specialized forms for complex settings like Permissions, Hooks, MCP Servers, and Marketplaces, reducing the need for manual JSON editing.
Backup/Restore: Create timestamped backups of configurations, with an option to sanitize sensitive data before saving.
Profiles Management: Switch between named profiles for Claude Code and Claude Desktop, supporting seamless configuration export and import.
Auto-reload: Instantly reflects changes made by external tools or editors in real time.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers, researchers, and users of Claude Code or Claude Desktop who need to manage complex configurations. ClaudeForge streamlines the process of tuning settings across multiple scopes, simplifies profile switching, and enhances privacy by allowing users to sanitize configuration backups before sharing them. It is particularly beneficial for those maintaining multiple projects or requiring precise control over Claude's behavior.
ClaudeForge can be installed via winget on Windows, with pre-built binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms.
If you use Claude Code or Claude Desktop, you have JSON configuration files in ~/.claude/ (and per-project .claude/). Editing them by hand is fine for small tweaks, but tedious when you're:
Tuning a fresh install — token budgets, sandbox, MCP server trust, model selection are scattered across multiple files and undocumented env vars.
Maintaining multiple projects — User vs Project vs Local scopes overlap; figuring out which file actually wins for a given setting takes attention you'd rather spend elsewhere.
Sharing your machine, recording a demo, or shipping a screenshot — you'd like to know (and erase) what Claude has captured about you across sessions.
Using profiles — you want to switch between "personal" and "work" Claude Code setups without copy-pasting JSON files around.
ClaudeForge is a typed editor for all of that. Every setting shows which scope provides its current value, where it's coming from, what it does, and what changing it will do. Compound editors (Permissions, Hooks, MCP servers, Marketplaces) replace error-prone freehand JSON with structured forms. The Backup / Restore page captures your entire ~/.claude/ (excluding cache + credentials by default) into a timestamped .zip you can roll back to.
Top-of-tree page that pins the highest-impact settings — token budgets, sandbox, MCP trust, model, effort level, fast mode, auto-update channel, auto-memory, and the disable-bypass-permissions safety knob. Includes a search-deep-link to take you straight to any of them.
🧠 Memory page
Surfaces what Claude has captured about you across sessions (transcripts, prompt history, todos, cost tracker, file-edit logs) and what files Claude reads on every session. Per-category delete for privacy hygiene before sharing your machine, recording a demo, or taking screenshots.
Layered settings editor
Browse and edit all Claude Code settings across Managed → Local → Project → User scopes. Every setting shows colour-coded scope badges with explanatory tooltips.
Effective settings view
See the fully-merged winning value for every setting at a glance, with the source scope marked.
model, effortLevel, and permissions.defaultMode are driven by a bundled model catalog that knows their relationships: the effort dropdown only offers levels the selected model supports (auto-coercing an invalidated value to the nearest one), auto mode is gated to capable models at User scope, and the model field is free-form with suggestions.
Profiles + claudectx interop
Manage named profiles for both Claude Code and Claude Desktop. Per-profile JSON export / import that round-trips with claudectx. See docs/CLAUDECTX-COMPATIBILITY.md.
Auto-reload
When another tool (e.g. claudectx) or your text editor changes a config file on disk, ClaudeForge picks it up automatically.
Backup / Restore
Timestamped .zip archives of all config (and optionally projects + credentials). Restore any previous backup with a preview. Sanitized mode scrubs secret-bearing values (env, MCP headers, credentials, *token, *secret, *password, *apikey, bearer) with "[redacted]" so the archive is safe to share with support / community / bug reports. Sanitized backups are non-restorable by design.
Add to PATH
One-click Add-to-PATH button on the Version Information page. Windows: writes HKCU\Environment\Path. macOS / Linux (new in v1): appends to the user's shell rc file (~/.bashrc / ~/.zshrc / ~/.config/fish/config.fish, auto-detected from $SHELL).
Search bar
Find any setting by name, JSON path, or keyword. Synthetic hits for common gotchas like --dangerouslySkipPermissions and bypassPermissions.
Save preview
Confirm-before-save dialog lists each file the change will be written to, plus a one-line "Saving N change(s) across M file(s)" summary.
Dark / light theme
Follows the system preference; toggle manually from the toolbar.
Install
winget (Windows COMING SOON)
Pre-built binaries
Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page:
Platform
File
Windows (x64)
ClaudeForge--win-x64.zip
Windows (ARM64)
ClaudeForge--win-arm64.zip
macOS (Apple Silicon)
ClaudeForge--osx-arm64.tar.gz
macOS (Intel)
ClaudeForge--osx-x64.tar.gz
Linux (x64)
ClaudeForge--linux-x64.tar.gz
Linux (ARM64)
ClaudeForge--linux-arm64.tar.gz
Binaries are self-contained — no .NET runtime installation required. The Linux
and macOS tarballs include the platform-helper scripts described below
(linux-setup.sh / allow-app-to-run.sh).
Linux: dock / titlebar icon setup
The published binary works out of the box on X11 (Window.Icon writes the standard _NET_WM_ICON property). On Wayland (CachyOS / COSMIC, GNOME 40+, KDE 6, Sway), the protocol does not expose a per-window-icon API — compositors look up icons via a .desktop file matching the app's app_id. The release .tar.gz ships with linux-setup.sh, which installs a per-user .desktop entry pointing at the extracted binary plus the SVG icon into the hicolor icon theme:
tar -xzf ClaudeForge-linux-x64.tar.gz -C ~/ClaudeForge
cd ~/ClaudeForge
./linux-setup.sh
./ClaudeForge
The script writes only to per-user XDG paths (~/.local/share/applications/claudeforge.desktop and ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/claudeforge.svg), no sudo required. Run ./linux-setup.sh --uninstall to remove. See the script's header comments for the WHY / WHAT IT WRITES / UNINSTALL rationale.
System-wide install for distro packagers, full diagnostic commands (xprop WM_CLASS, swaymsg get_tree), and pre-rendered hicolor PNG generation for older GTK environments live in docs/LINUX-DESKTOP-INTEGRATION.md.
Windows: SmartScreen warning
ClaudeForge v1 is unsigned. Windows SmartScreen will warn the first time you run an unsigned binary downloaded from the internet — click More info → Run anyway. We're considering code-signing for a future release; meanwhile, if your security policy disallows running unsigned binaries you'll need to build from source.
macOS: Gatekeeper
ClaudeForge is not yet notarized. macOS Gatekeeper will refuse to launch the unsigned binary by default. The release .tar.gz ships with allow-app-to-run.sh, which recursively strips the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute from every file in the extracted directory:
tar -xzf ClaudeForge-osx-arm64.tar.gz -C ~/ClaudeForge
cd ~/ClaudeForge
./allow-app-to-run.sh # add `sudo` if you extracted into a system location
./ClaudeForge
The right-click → Open → Open dialog only clears the xattr from the binary you click; the dozens of .dylib files a self-contained .NET publish ships carry their own quarantine xattr and will trip "Library not loaded: ... operation not permitted" at runtime. The bundled script clears them all in one shot. See the script's header comments for the full WHY / SECURITY rationale. As with Windows, notarization is on the post-v1 list.
Click 📂 Open Project to select a project folder. This loads the project-level and local-level settings files in addition to the user-level ones, and unlocks editing at those scopes.
Changing the editing scope
Each settings page has an Editing scope selector. Changes are written to the selected scope. Use this to set a value at the Project scope so it's shared with the team while leaving the User-level value untouched.
Profiles
The toolbar profile selector shows a unified dropdown covering both Claude Code and Claude Desktop profiles. Profiles that exist in both systems are merged into a single entry; CLI-only entries show a green CC chiclet; Desktop-only entries show a blue D chiclet; shared entries show both.
Selecting (global) loads the live configuration for both products. Selecting a named profile loads the matching profile data for whichever products have a profile with that name.
Click Manage… next to the profile selector to navigate to the Profiles page where you can create, apply, sync (CLI ↔ Desktop), delete, export, and import profiles. Per-profile JSON export uses claudectx's exact schema so artefacts round-trip between the two tools.
Saving
Press Ctrl+S or click 💾 Save to write all pending changes to disk. The save button is enabled only when there are unsaved changes. A preview dialog lists exactly what will change and which file each edit will be written to before any disk write.
Environment variables
The Environment section merges all layers — Process, Claude-env, OS User, OS Machine — into a single table. Select a variable to view per-scope values and edit at your chosen scope. Known Claude-related variables show a description beneath the name; high-impact env vars (MAX_THINKING_TOKENS, CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS, etc.) appear as suggested keys even when unset.
Scope priority (highest first): Managed → Local → Project → User. Higher-priority scopes override lower-priority ones at the same key.
Privacy
ClaudeForge runs entirely on your machine. Specifically:
No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting. The app does not phone home.
No automatic updates. New versions ship via Releases; you choose when to upgrade.
Local rolling logs only. A diagnostic log is written to /logs/app-{date}-{hour}.txt (8-hour rolling buckets, 3-day retention) for your own troubleshooting. Never uploaded anywhere. The log path is printed to stderr at startup so you can find it.
Secret-bearing values are auto-redacted in logs. Any change to a key under env, headers, credentials, or auth (or whose name contains token / secret / password / apikey / api-key / bearer) has its value replaced with [redacted] before logging. Path-segment-aware so MCP HTTP headers are protected even when nested deep. Tested in SensitiveKeysTests.
Backups exclude credentials by default. Toggle separately if you want them included.
Sanitized backup mode is the recommended way to share your config for support / community / bug reports. Same scope as a normal Settings-only backup, but every *.json value whose key matches the secret-classifier (above) is rewritten to "[redacted]" before being added to the .zip. The .credentials.json file is dropped entirely regardless of the toggle. The resulting archive is non-restorable by design — a "Restore" attempt on a sanitized backup is refused with a clear message. The Restore list shows a yellow "Sanitized (for sharing)" chip on these archives. Regular SettingsOnly and Full backups store secrets in plaintext (since they have to be restorable); the Backup page surfaces a one-line advisory reminding you of that and pointing at Sanitized mode if you intend to share.
If you find a privacy issue, please open an issue marked security rather than emailing publicly.
Debug flags
ClaudeForge accepts a small set of command-line flags useful for testing UI states. All flags are case-insensitive; unknown args pass through to Avalonia untouched.
Flag
Effect
--showInstallBanner
Force the install-guidance banner on top of MainWindow even when Claude is detected.
--windows / --macos / --linux
Emulate the requested platform for UI-display purposes. The Desktop config path, install-banner shell command, backup-manifest platform tag, and About page render as if the host OS were the requested platform. Real platform-intrinsic APIs keep using the real host OS.
--showAllNew
Force every property in every editor to render with the "✨ NEW" badge. Useful for QA / screenshots / verifying badge styling without mutating the schema or snapshot cache.
--culture
Override CurrentUICulture with the named specific culture (e.g. en-US, zh-CN, fr-FR). Validated against the .NET predefined-culture list — unrecognised codes are rejected with a Serilog warning and the OS default is used. Useful for verifying the resx fallback path on cultures with no satellite.
--debug-help
Log the available flags.
Passing any flag emits a startup log line so log captures always say which flags shaped the session:
Conceptually distinct from debug flags: command-line arguments that run a task and exit without ever opening the GUI window. Useful for periodic disk-hygiene that's safe but tedious to do by hand.
Flag
Effect
--cleanup-restore-sidecars
Walk ~/.claude/ recursively and delete every *.bak file left behind by previous restores. Each Restore operation copies any overwritten file aside as .pre-restore-{stamp}.bak; these sidecars accumulate proportionally to restores × files-restored and can occupy several gigabytes after a few weeks of heavy use. The tool prints a heartbeat every 1,000 deletions plus a final summary Scanned N file(s); deleted M (X.X MB reclaimed); P failure(s). Read-only Git pack-object sidecars are handled with a retry-after-clearing-readonly fallback. Real-world impact: a profile with 99,307 accumulated sidecars reclaimed 3.3 GB on one run. Safe to invoke at any time — the only files touched are *.bak and no GUI state is changed.
# Windows
.\ClaudeForge --cleanup-restore-sidecars
# macOS / Linux
./ClaudeForge --cleanup-restore-sidecars
(Heads-up Windows users: the binary is WinExe-subsystem so it normally detaches from the console at launch. The cleanup tool attaches to the parent terminal so output is visible — no need to redirect stderr.)
