Open in Agent Desktop

One-click handoff from the Open Knowledge editor to Claude Cowork, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex Desktop, or Cursor via URL schemes.

"Open in Agent Desktop" hands the doc you're reading off to your AI agent of choice in one click. Open Knowledge composes a minimal prompt (the doc's path + an MCP hint), dispatches it through the OS's URL-scheme handler, and the target agent's desktop app foregrounds with the prompt pre-filled and the project folder scoped.

Supported targets

Target	Host	URL scheme	Folder scoping	Doc attachment
Claude Cowork	Electron + web	`claude://cowork/new`	yes (`folder=`)	yes (`file=`)
Claude Code	Electron + web	`claude://code/new`	yes (`folder=`)	see note below
Codex Desktop	Electron + web	`codex://new`	yes (`path=`)	agent resolves
Cursor	Electron only	`cursor://` (two-step)	yes (spawn + `workspace=`)	agent resolves

Cursor is disabled on the web host (open-knowledge start in a browser) because its handoff requires spawning cursor <folder> as a local step 1 before the prompt URL fires, which is only wired up in the Electron app.

Claude Code file attachment

Claude Code accepts file= in its URL and Open Knowledge emits it for forward compatibility, but the Epitaxy webview's composition path may not surface the attachment in the composer UI on every version of Claude Desktop. The folder scope + prompt pre-fill always apply.

Where to find it

Three surfaces mount the same dropdown — every path routes through one dispatch entry point, so behavior is identical wherever you trigger it.

Editor header — click the "Open in…" button in the action strip while viewing a doc.
Command palette — open with your palette shortcut and search "Open in" to see one entry per target.
Sidebar right-click — right-click any .md file in the file tree and choose "Open in…" from the submenu. This works on any doc, not just the active one.

Install prerequisites

Each row is disabled until the target's desktop app is installed on the machine. Hovering a disabled row shows an "Install …" link to the vendor's download page.

Target	Install page
Claude Cowork / Claude Code	claude.com/download
OpenAI Codex Desktop	openai.com/codex
Cursor	cursor.com

Install detection happens at boot and refreshes asynchronously when you open the dropdown — if you install a target app while Open Knowledge is running, the row flips live without a restart.

Claude.app fallback

Both Claude rows expose a secondary "Open in claude.ai →" affordance inside the disabled-state tooltip. Clicking it opens https://claude.ai/new?q=<prompt> in your default browser — the prompt pre-fills in the web UI without requiring Claude Desktop.

Data-egress note

The claude.ai fallback sends the composed prompt (which includes your doc's relative path) to Anthropic via the URL query string. For wiki pages containing confidential content, use the desktop targets instead — those dispatch via OS scheme handlers and don't traverse Anthropic's servers at dispatch time.

What the agent receives

Open Knowledge composes a deliberately minimal prompt so the agent can use its own context tools once the workspace is loaded:

Open Knowledge doc: <relative-path>. Use the open-knowledge MCP tool for backlinks and related context.

The path lets the agent open the doc directly via its native attachment (Claude's file=, Codex's path=, Cursor's workspace=); the MCP hint nudges the agent to use the [[mcp-integration|Open Knowledge MCP server]] when it's configured. If MCP isn't registered in the target agent's config, the agent falls back to its native file-read tools — the handoff still works.

Host parity

The feature ships with the same three mount points and the same four rows on both hosts:

Electron desktop app (packages/desktop): dispatch goes through IPC channels to shell.openExternal for URL schemes and to a dedicated ok:shell:spawn-cursor channel for Cursor step 1. All four targets are supported.
Web build (open-knowledge start): dispatch goes through an anchor-click in the browser. Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and Codex all work in the local-use-case (server + browser + target agent on the same machine). Cursor is always disabled on web.

The feature assumes the server, browser, and target agents are all on the same machine. Cross-machine ok start deployments (server on workstation A, browser on laptop B) are out of scope — the install detection probes the server's machine, not the browser's.

Feedback

Each dispatch renders a toast — success ("Opened in Claude Cowork.") or failure ("Couldn't reach Cursor — try again?") — and appends one JSONL line to ~/.open-knowledge/stats.jsonl for local diagnostics. Nothing is sent over the network.