Claudius

Multiple Claude Desktop and Claude Code accounts, side by side on macOS.

Each profile keeps its own login, chats, settings, MCP connectors, plugins, and skills. Open multiple Claude windows at once, each on a different account. Share extensions, MCP servers, and skills across profiles selectively, through a live matrix UI.

Unofficial community tool. Uses public Electron flags (--user-data-dir) and an undocumented-but-stable Claude Code env var (CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR) to isolate profiles. Not endorsed by Anthropic.

Features

• Side-by-side profiles — fully isolated Desktop and Code accounts. Independent auth, chats, MCP, skills.
• Live status — sidebar polls every 10 s; the running profile gets a pulsing dot and a LIVE pill.
• One click, two apps — New Profile creates the Desktop launcher (Claude WORK.app) and the Code CLI alias (claude-work) in one step.
• Selective sharing — extensions and skills via live symlinks (edits propagate both ways); MCP servers and preferences via atomic copy-on-apply.
• Matrix UI — every profile × every content item in one grid. Five-state glyphs (■●◐○·) show share status at distance.
• Profile detail — today's tokens, rolling 5h / 7d session counts, pace vs your own baseline, account identities, storage breakdown, sharing graph.
• CLI included — the original interactive wizard is here too: add, list, status, repair, remove.

Install

App (recommended)

Grab the latest .dmg from Releases and drag Claudius.app to /Applications.

The build is unsigned, so first launch needs a right-click → Open, or:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Claudius.app"

CLI only

npm install -g github:democra-ai/claudius

Node 18+. The Code half works on Linux; the Desktop half is macOS-only because Claude Desktop is.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/democra-ai/claudius
cd claudius
npm install && npm run frontend:install
npm run tauri:dev      # GUI with hot reload
npm run tauri:build    # produces .app + .dmg

Requires Rust, Xcode CLT, Node 18+.

Quick start

1. Open Claudius.
2. Sidebar bottom → NEW PROFILE → name it work → check ☑ Desktop + ☑ Code → click +.
3. Claude WORK.app lands in ~/Applications/. Drag it to the Dock.
4. New terminal tab — the claude-work alias is live.
5. Quit any other Claude window with Cmd+Q before first-launching the new profile (the claude:// auth deep link routes to whichever Claude is already running).

CLI equivalent: claude-multiprofile add.

How it works

Claude Desktop is an Electron app and honors --user-data-dir, which relocates all app state (auth, chats, settings, MCP, projects) to a directory of your choosing. The launcher is a tiny AppleScript bundle: open -n -a Claude --args --user-data-dir=/path/to/profile. Different folder → different instance.

Claude Code honors the CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR env var. The OAuth token in macOS Keychain is keyed by a SHA-256 of that path, so swapping the env var swaps the auth entirely.

Sharing. Two models. Extensions and skills are symlinked — edits propagate live both ways. MCP servers and preferences are copy-on-apply — you can't symlink a JSON key, so the value is written atomically (temp + rename) at Apply time.

The matrix

Rows are content items, columns are the profiles you've checked. Each cell encodes share state as both a glyph and a color (legible at distance and for colorblind users):

Glyph	State	Meaning
■	Shared	Live symlink between ≥ 2 profiles — edits propagate
●	Copied	One-shot copy, currently aligned
◐	Diverged	Same item, different values across profiles
○	Independent	Present here, not aligned with any other profile
·	Absent	Not in this profile

CLI reference

claude-multiprofile add            # interactive wizard (Desktop, Code, or both)
claude-multiprofile list           # configured profiles + paths
claude-multiprofile status         # health-check directories, .apps, aliases
claude-multiprofile extensions <p> # multi-select copy Desktop extensions
claude-multiprofile repair <p>     # re-register macOS launcher (icon-cache fix)
claude-multiprofile remove <p>     # tear down a profile (data kept by default)
claude-multiprofile upgrade        # pull latest from GitHub

Pass --help to any command for flags.

Tech stack

Layer	Tool
Desktop runtime	Tauri 2 (Rust)
macOS chrome	tauri-plugin-decorum for single-row title bar + inset traffic lights
Frontend	React 18 + Vite + TypeScript
Styling	Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
CLI	Node 18+ + @inquirer/prompts

Comparison

Tool	Desktop	Code	GUI	macOS	Linux
Claudius	✓	✓	✓	✓	partial
aimux	—	✓	—	✓	✓
aisw	—	✓	—	✓	✓
Jean-Claude	—	✓	—	✓	✓

Security

Reads & writes only inside the per-profile data folders, the launcher .app bundles in ~/Applications/, the registry at ~/.config/claude-multiprofile/, and a delimited managed block in ~/.zshrc. Never touches your default Claude install, macOS Keychain, IndexedDB / cookies, or anything else on disk. CLI has one runtime dep (@inquirer/prompts); the Tauri app's release bundle vendors its own runtime.

Acknowledgments

• claude-multiprofile (upstream, by jmdarre-v) — the CLI wizard, registry, macOS launcher generation, and shell-alias handling are derived from this MIT-licensed project. Preserved here under the same terms.
• tauri-plugin-decorum (by clearlysid) — the NSWindow Objective-C bindings that give us a proper single-row title bar with inset traffic lights.
• Anthropic — for Claude Desktop and Claude Code. Native multi-account is in their open feature requests (Desktop, Code); this tool fills the gap until then.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Original copyright lines from the upstream fork are preserved.