Elyra Desktop

Elyra Desktop is the Elyra coding agent in a window: the same agent loop, tools, providers, sessions and extensions as the terminal edition, built with Rust (Tauri 2) and Svelte 5. It reads and writes the same ~/.elyra/agent/ directory — settings, credentials, sessions, skills, prompt templates, themes, memory and decision logs — so you can run both against the same projects and switch between them mid-session.

It is free to use, like the terminal edition. Downloads and updates come from elyracode.com/elyra; the source is not published.

Which edition?

	Terminal (`elyra`)	Desktop
Install	`npm i -g @elyracode/coding-agent`	A disk image or AppImage/deb from the download section
Runs on	macOS, Linux, Windows, anywhere Node 20+ runs	macOS on Apple silicon; Linux on x86_64 and ARM64
Sessions, settings, skills	`~/.elyra/agent/`	The same directory, unchanged
Extensions	Node on `PATH`	A bundled extension host; extensions themselves still need Node 20+ on `PATH` (or `ELYRA_NODE`)
Updates	`npm update -g` or `/update`	`/update`, or the banner on start; signed and installed in place
Themes	The six reference themes	The same six, plus Tokyo Night as the default; custom themes in `~/.elyra/agent/themes/` hot-reload

Everything the terminal edition can do, the desktop edition does with the same slash commands: /tree, /rewind, /fork, /compact, /goal, /review, /bisect, /replay, /learn, /share, /doctor, /decisions, /config, /update. The usage guide applies to both.

Installing

macOS

Download the disk image, open it and drag Elyra Desktop to Applications. The build is for Apple silicon, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens without warnings. No Intel build is offered: it has not been run on Intel hardware, and shipping one nobody has run would be worse than shipping none.

Linux

Two packages per architecture, x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64):

AppImage — one file, no installation. Make it executable and run it:
```
chmod +x Elyra-Desktop-*-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./Elyra-Desktop-*-linux-x86_64.AppImage
```
This is the package the in-app updater replaces, so use it if you want /update to work.
deb — for Debian and Ubuntu (22.04 or later, which provides WebKitGTK 4.1):
```
sudo apt install ./Elyra-Desktop-*-linux-x86_64.deb
```

Both need libwebkit2gtk-4.1, which apt pulls in for the deb and the AppImage expects on the system.

Checking what you downloaded

Every download has a .sha256 beside it on the download page:

shasum -a 256 Elyra-Desktop-0.1.0-arm64.dmg

Updates

Elyra Desktop checks https://elyracode.com/elyra/desktop/latest.json for a newer version. /update downloads and installs it and restarts; the banner on start offers the same when a release is installable. Every update is verified against a public key compiled into the application before it is installed — a manifest or a download that does not carry the right signature is refused, whatever it says.

Release notes are in the Elyra Desktop changelog. The terminal edition's are in the Elyra changelog; the two are versioned separately.

Providers and credentials

All nine provider protocols — Anthropic, OpenAI completions and responses, OpenAI Codex, Azure OpenAI, Google, Vertex, Mistral, Bedrock — and the OAuth logins (Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Google Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Cloud Code) with a token refresher. Credentials are stored where the terminal edition stores them, so a login in one is a login in the other. See Providers.

Extensions

Elyra Desktop ships its own extension host, a Node sidecar that loads the same TypeScript extensions the terminal edition does over a JSONL protocol. It is bundled with the application; the extensions it loads run under the Node 20+ found on your PATH (or named by ELYRA_NODE). Extension tools, commands, dialogs, status lines and widgets appear in the window. /reload re-discovers extension paths; /config turns individual extensions, skills, prompts and themes on or off.

Extensions that shell out to the terminal edition (elyra -p …) need it installed separately: the desktop bundle carries the extension host, not the elyra command.