Skills UI

A local, open-source web UI for getting a holistic overview of your Agent Skills — built for Claude Desktop, but source-agnostic.

Claude Desktop's skills screen is a flat list. Skills UI merges every place skills live on your machine into one searchable, filterable view.

Status: Phase 4. Browse, auto-categorize, edit, and package skills into shareable Claude Code plugin marketplaces. Polish and npx skills-ui are next; see Roadmap.

What it scans

Source	Location	Editable
Claude Desktop	~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/skills-plugin/<org>/<account>/skills (+ manifest.json)	No (synced from your account)
Cowork plugins	~/.claude/plugins/synced/<bucket>/<plugin>	No
Claude Code plugins	installPaths in ~/.claude/plugins/installed_plugins.json	No
Personal skills	~/.claude/skills	Yes
Custom folders	SKILLS_UI_EXTRA_DIRS	Yes

Copies that Claude Code mirrors into ~/.claude/skills/synced/ are de-duplicated against the Desktop store.

Editing skills

Editable sources (Personal, custom folders) support full CRUD from the UI:

• New skill — name, description and Markdown instructions from a template. Names are validated live (lowercase-with-hyphens, ≤ 64 chars; description ≤ 1024).
• Edit — changes name-locked description and body; every other frontmatter key (e.g. license) is preserved. Saves are atomic, and a save is blocked if the file changed on disk after you opened it, so edits made in another editor are never silently overwritten.
• Duplicate — copies the whole folder (scripts and assets included). On read-only sources (Claude Desktop, plugins) this is Duplicate to Personal, which gives you an editable copy.
• Delete — moves the folder to ~/.skills-ui/trash/ and offers Undo; restore refuses to overwrite anything created since.
• Live updates — the server watches your editable folders and the Desktop store, so changes made in a terminal or editor appear without a refresh.

Claude Desktop's own store and plugin folders are never written to.

Packaging a marketplace

Turn any set of skills into a plugin marketplace that others can install:

1. On the Skills page, tick the skills you want and choose Add to plugin… (new or existing marketplace and plugin).
2. On the Marketplaces page, fill in the owner, plugin descriptions, versions and license. Everything autosaves to ~/.skills-ui/marketplaces/, and validation runs as you type (kebab-case names, reserved marketplace names, semver, duplicate skill names).
3. Review before sharing — every file that would be published is scanned for API keys and tokens, private keys, email addresses and personal home paths (e.g. /Users/you). Secrets are shown redacted. Export stays locked until you confirm you've reviewed the findings.
4. Download .zip or Save to folder (optionally git init + first commit). Push the folder to GitHub, then anyone can run:

/plugin marketplace add <github-owner>/<repo>
/plugin install <plugin>@<marketplace>

The output follows Claude Code's documented layout: .claude-plugin/marketplace.json, and per plugin plugins/<name>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json plus skills/<skill>/ (symlinks are dereferenced; node_modules and .git are skipped; each SKILL.md gets an explicit name). Exports are also checked against claude plugin validate . during development.

Automatic organization

No setup required — every skill gets a category, tags and a similarity check when scanned:

• Categories come from a built-in taxonomy (Engineering, Jobs & career, Finance & ops, …). A skill's name counts more than its description; skills that match nothing land in Other rather than being forced into a bucket. Low-confidence guesses show their runner-up in the detail drawer.
• Tags are the most distinctive terms in a skill relative to the rest of your library.
• Near-duplicates use TF-IDF cosine similarity over name + description (≥ 55%), which surfaces overlapping skills such as an old and a new version of the same workflow.
• Overrides: change any category in the detail drawer (or create a new one). Overrides are saved to ~/.skills-ui/overrides.json, never into your SKILL.md files, and you can revert to Auto at any time.

Everything is computed locally and deterministically — no API key, network access or model download.

Install & run

npm install
npm run build
npm run start -w @skills-ui/server   # http://localhost:4173

Development (API on :4173, Vite dev server with HMR):

npm run build -w @skills-ui/core
npm run dev -w @skills-ui/server
npm run dev -w @skills-ui/web

Test & lint

npm test
npm run typecheck
npm run lint

Configuration

See .env.example.

Variable	Purpose	Default
PORT	Server port	4173
SKILLS_UI_EXTRA_DIRS	Extra skill folders, colon-separated	—
SKILLS_UI_HOME	Override the home directory used for discovery	os.homedir()

Architecture

npm workspaces monorepo, TypeScript strict throughout.

• packages/core — pure Node library: SKILL.md parser, source discovery, scanner, facets, categorizer, similarity. No network.
• packages/server — Hono API for reading, editing and live events (/api/skills, /api/categories, /api/targets, /api/events, and POST/PUT/DELETE on skills), bound to 127.0.0.1 only. Serves the built web app.
• packages/web — Vite + React + Tailwind. Filtering and sorting run client-side over the skill summaries.

The filesystem is the source of truth. Skills UI writes only to editable skill folders you act on, plus its own ~/.skills-ui/ directory (category overrides, trash, marketplace drafts and exports); writes are same-origin and JSON-only to block cross-site requests.

Roadmap

1. ✅ Scanner + overview (grid/table, facets, search, detail drawer)
2. ✅ Automatic categories, tags and duplicate detection (local, deterministic). Optional: embeddings / Claude-generated labels
3. ✅ Create / edit / duplicate / delete with undo, live updates
4. ✅ Bundle skills into plugins, generate marketplace.json, pre-publish safety scan, zip / folder / git export
5. Polish, CI, npx skills-ui

License

MIT