wtf is claude-desktop-profiles?

Claude Desktop Profiles is a small Electron app that lets you run several completely separate copies of Claude Desktop on the same computer, each with its own sessions, cookies, MCP server configurations, and preferences. Normally Claude Desktop keeps everything in one shared folder, meaning one account and one workspace for the whole app. This tool solves that by giving every profile its own home directory, then launching the real Claude Desktop app pointed at that directory, so a personal account and a work account, or separate setups for different projects, never mix. It works by starting the actual Claude Desktop program with the operating system's home folder variable overridden to a profile specific path, using HOME on macOS and Linux and USERPROFILE and APPDATA on Windows. Because Claude Desktop already reads and writes its data based on that variable, the isolation happens without the tool needing to modify Claude Desktop itself, and it keeps working after Claude Desktop updates. Beyond isolation, the app can sync Claude Code sessions from one profile to another: a user opens a sync dialog on a profile, browses its projects, picks specific sessions, chooses target profiles, and those sessions then show up in Claude Desktop's recent list on next launch. Other features include emoji icons and renaming for profiles, a live indicator of which profiles are currently running, system tray support, and keyboard shortcuts for creating a new profile or opening settings. The README calls out real limitations. On Windows, Claude's Cowork feature runs through a separate machine level service that shares its virtual machine bundles across every profile, so Cowork activity is not fully isolated. Also on Windows, signing in with the browser redirect option logs into the system wide Claude session instead of the isolated profile, so the README recommends signing in with email and a verification code instead. Because Windows installs Claude Desktop through a versioned path that changes on every update, profiles can stop launching after an update until the binary path is manually reselected in settings. Installers are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux from the releases page. On macOS the app is not code signed yet, so a manual command is needed to clear the quarantine flag before first launch. The project is released under the ISC license and can also be built from source with Node.js and pnpm.