Mike Maser · @mmaser · July 2026

I spend most of my day using Claude - terminal and Desktop. I have both business and personal accounts. On Desktop, for months I did the logout-login grind every time I wanted to switch accounts. I looked and looked for an account toggle which had to exist. Nope - Claude Desktop, as I write this on 7/16/26, doesn't have one. WTF.

So I attempted to wire up a fix using Claude to guide me, broke some stuff, and after much banging around, landed on the actual answer. Now both accounts seamlessly run side by side on my Mac all day, every day. Been rock solid for weeks, and a real unlock for switching accounts - ⌘-Tab and I have both on demand.

Here's the whole thing, including the part where I broke it, so you can skip that part.

Before you start

• Full disclosure: this guide distills a long working session with Claude into the clean path. The setup itself is battle-tested, but this is the first I’m sharing the steps start to finish. If something reads odd or doesn’t work, let me know.
• Skill level: basic Terminal comfort - copy, paste, and run a command, that's it, no scripting. I’m a non-dev vibe coder and while this takes a bit of time, none of it is complicated.
• Time: 20-30 minutes, and most of that is waiting on first launches while Cowork sets up its VM. (It took me a few hours, but that's because I did the broken version first. That's why you're reading this.)
• Watchout #1: do NOT duplicate Claude.app. Most guides tell you to clone the app and rename the copy. That path silently breaks logins and connectors in ways that look like your fault. Full post-mortem further down.
• Watchout #2: first logins happen one at a time. Claude signs you in with a claude:// link that bounces back from your browser, and macOS hands that link to ONE running instance - if both are open, it might be the wrong one. Then you're staring at two windows logged into the same account wondering what you did wrong. (You did nothing wrong. It's the link routing.) The steps below handle it - just don't improvise the order.
• Watchout #3: your browser has a side in this too. Every auth action - logging into Claude, authorizing a connector - bounces through your browser, and it uses whatever session is active there. If your frontmost Chrome window is logged into your business account, that's the identity your personal instance gets offered. Before any auth step, bring the browser window for the RIGHT account to the front.
• If you use Cowork: budget real disk for each instance. Details below.
• And needless to say, proceed at your own risk. It works great for me, but YMMV.

The core of it

Claude Desktop is an Electron app, which means it quietly inherits a browser trick: a --user-data-dir flag that moves ALL of its data - login, config, chats, everything - to whatever folder you point it at. Different folder = different account. No cloning the app. No second install. One Claude.app, launched twice, pointed at two folders.

The steps below just make sure each login lands in its own folder.

Setup steps

Step 1: pick the new account's folder name

The folder IS the account - that's the whole mental model. Your main account already lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude - leave that one alone. Every extra account gets its own folder - mine is Claude-Personal. Name it something you won't mix up. You don't need to create it; the app does that on first launch.

Step 2: quit every Claude instance