Run Your Skills Scripts Safely

TL;DR: Alter now includes a sandboxed Code Runner that lets skills execute scripts in a secure, containerized local environment — with support for Intel Macs, persistent runtimes and outputs, web servers, and an integrated terminal. Also support Osaurus as a custom endpoint.

New Features & Enhancements

• Code Runner & Sandbox: A new sandboxed environment for running skill scripts securely inside containers, with runtime and output persistence across sessions. Comes pre-loaded with a rich set of libraries for data science, document processing, visualization, image/audio processing, geospatial analysis, machine learning, and more
• Intel Mac Support: The Code Runner now works on Intel-based Macs in addition to Apple Silicon
• Web Server in Sandbox: Containers can now spin up web servers with startup scripts and port mapping
• Terminal in Container: Open an interactive terminal directly inside a running container
• Osaurus Endpoint: Added Osaurus as a built-in custom endpoint option
• Performance: Non-blocking save panels, smoother Hub conversation scrolling, and faster input typing

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub: Fixed model selection UI not updating and model not being changeable during a conversation
• Streaming: Cancel tool calls properly when streaming is cancelled
• Title Generation: Avoid triggering multiple title generations simultaneously
• Scheduler: Better handling of schedules
• Skills: Display skill name correctly in the installed skills list
• Crashes: Fixed crash when fetching installed apps repeatedly, fixed crash on selection change

Alter now supports Agent Skills

TL;DR: Agent Skills are an open standard that enables Alter to extend its capabilities with modular, reusable functions. Also, for users using their own keys, Alter now supports multiple custom endpoints.

New Features & Enhancements

• Agent Skills: an open standard to package expertise, workflows, and best practices into reusable, file-system-based resources.
• MCP Servers: Refresh tool list for remote MCP servers, status badge in server listing, and automatic tool cache clearing when deactivating or removing servers
• Multiple Custom Endpoints: Support for configuring multiple custom endpoints with minor improvements
• Bifrost Integration: Added support for Basic Authentication and Virtual Keys
• Calendar Events: Added participants and descriptions to calendar event results
• Workspaces: Link tools and skills to provide special capabilities to your workspaces.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Actions Context: Fixed actor isolation issues, bad regex context keys, and active app name provider being late to update
• Microphone & Audio: Fixed wrong end-of-meeting detection on MS Teams, microphone state mismatch causing “no audio file” errors, and prevented other errors when starting recordings
• Live Captions: Fixed live transcriptions not being stopped when recording has ended
• Dictation: Fixed cleanup phase using the previous dictation instead of current one
• ApplicationObserver: Fixed crash when activating Enhanced User Interface
• App Sense: Fixed crash when trying to read children
• Floating Panel: Fixed focus stealing when Alter is used while another app is active
• Menu Bar: Fixed clickable area for menu bar item
• MCP Servers: Fixed duplicate entry on edit and API key not enabling saving
• Eagle MCP: Fixed connection issues by sending “initialized” event on connect
• OpenRouter Haiku: Fixed messages follow-up after tool call
• Action Loading: Avoid showing an error when trying to load an action that has no file on disk
• Editor: Minor performance improvements in system and user prompt editors
• Tools: Fixed icon symbols display

Make Most of Your Workspace with Alter.md

TL;DR: Make most of your workspace with Alter.md (or Claude.md, Agent.md). Workspace now supports instruction files for better project context, a new workspace tool for files and folders operations and a permission system. Also faster glob matching, bug fixes and optimizations for meetings and dictations.

New Features & Enhancements

• Workspace Instruction Files: Support for Alter.md, Claude.md, and AGENTS.md files to provide project context and instructions
• Workspace Permissions: Added read, write, and execute permissions support for workspace operations
• Workspace File System: New workspace_fs tool for complete file system operations without the need of bash
• Hub Stop Button: Added stop button with improved stop streaming between tool calls
• Copy Conversation ID: Add copy ID button in hub to use with Run Action tool

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub Input: Fixed prefix search issues when search term starts with or is preceded by a space
• Transcription: Optimized CPU resource usage
• Model Override: Fixed last message model overriding global user model of choice
• Custom Endpoints: Fixed conversation failure after tool call with empty arguments
• Deleted Conversations: Fixed deleted conversations not being removed from sidebar
• Workspace Performance: Faster glob matching on large folders
• Model Synchronization: Fixed current model synchronization issues in hub
• Workspace Context: Fixed fork reuse of workspace context and proper context removal
• Notch Integration: Fixed workspace attachment as context in notch

Cowork with Alter

TL;DR: Alter Workspaces lets you create, edit, and compose directly in your folders—no cloud, no sync delays, no data leaving your Mac. Pull from Gmail, YouTube, and the web. Write your newsletters, notes, and tasks. Everything stays local. Everything is yours. Plus run bash commands safely in your workspaces.

New Features & Enhancements

• Workspace Tools: Added bash tool, edit and multi-edit tools for file manipulation, and improved sandboxing with PDF syncing
• Workspace: Auto-name workspaces based on folder, and optimized prompt for small models use
• Hub Improvements: Added shortcuts to open Settings, Tools Manager and the Action Editor. Improved search with partial reindexing for chat messages, and better window management with dock access
• Conversations: Auto-scroll to bottom on initialization for better UX
• Providers: Added Privatemode.ai as a custom provider for access to confidential AI cloud models
• Routers: Deprecated cerebras oss-120b in favor of zai-glm-4.7

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Workspace: Improved search with spaces and lowercase matching
• Performance: Optimized keychain warmup, reduced JSON decoding overhead on message loading, fixed action editor and audio processor race conditions, and improved markdown rendering
• Audio Recording: Better handling when WhisperKit is not available, improved audio file URL uniqueness and earlier creation, fixed buffer appending errors, and ensured init tasks complete when stopping recordings
• Settings: Fixed model listing for custom providers
• Hub: Fixed restoration behavior and key window handling on open, improved message selection

New Workspace, manage 1000 of files, great with Obsidian

TL;DR: Alter’s new Workspaces feature lets you work via thousands of files—simply create a workspace, add your files (Obsidian vaults, documents, PDFs, etc.), and start chatting. Automatic indexing, suggestions and transparent tool usage to see exactly how Alter found your answers, with writing and editing features coming soon.

New Features & Enhancements

• Workspace System: List, Search Files, Search Patterns and Read tools scoped to the workspace files and folder for security
• File Management: Add files and folders to workspaces, handle large PDF files, and search across workspace contents
• Topic Suggestions: Intelligent topic suggestions and conversation starters based on workspace content
• Workspace Scoping: Scope tabs to workspace for better organization
• Hub Workspace Picker: New workspace picker in toolbar for easy workspace switching
• Open Files/Folders: Double-click to open folders and files in workspace view
• Workspace & Tab Switching: Preserve tabs with state and unload after some times to preserve system memory
• New Model: Cerebras GLM-4.7 at 1,000 tokens per second

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Popover Behavior: Improved popover behavior in hub
• Performance Optimizations: Fixed sidebar performance, input rendering performance, and multiple hangs/render performance issues
• Client Restart: Fixed restarting clients with wrong type and bad camel case tool names
• Hub Fixes: Fixed input model selection clear prefix

Multitask Like a Pro: Introducing The Hub

TL;DR: Organize your conversations like never before. With a full window, tags and tabs, you can now manage multiple workflows simultaneously, keeping everything organized and accessible. The menubar gets a sleek makeover in our path to remove the notch, and we’ve made the hub more powerful and stable than ever.

Features

• Tags & Tabs: Added tag management to sidebar and tabs
• Menubar: Introduced extendable menu bar (can be disabled in the Settings)
• Tools: Added computer use overlay to let you know Alter is controlling your app

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub: Limited upcoming section loads and fixed chat tag issues
• Hub: Fixed sidebar load more behavior for both short and long history
• Hub: Fixed refresh contexts holder on change
• Inspector: Optimized loading for tool call results
• Inspector: Fixed multiple crash issues on open and empty selection
• Shortcuts: Fixed hub shortcuts resetting to default values
• Tab Management: Fixed select and close preview behavior on tab click

🎁 A gift from us to you.

cmd+shift+h o ho ho…

You asked for it. We built it. Merry Xmas, and thanks for being here.

The Alter team - Olivier, Kévin, Gaël and Sam

P.S. Thoughts? Head to #cmd-shift-h on Discord.

P.P.S MacOS 14 is now required, do not update if you are on macOS 13

Features

You’ll have to unwrap this one.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• History: Fixed crash when saving messages
• Background Jobs: Fixed built-in action background job disabling issue
• MCP Status: Fixed async status handling for MCP connections
• AppSense: Better support for Discord
• Recording: Improved wake up/sleep while recording
• Data Races: Fixed data race in process termination
• Transcripts: Fixed transcript renaming

Sub-agents in Alter

TL;DR: Alter now supports sub-agents, enabling you to trigger multiple Alter actions within a single conversation. Sub-agents let you create complex workflows and get more done, faster. Imagine having a team of experts working for you, all within a single Alter chat. Plus comprehensive internationalization support for Spanish and Chinese, improved tool control, and enhanced audio recording stability.

New Features & Enhancements

• Run Action Tool: Run Alter actions as sub-agents within conversations, enabling complex multi-step workflows and parallel task execution
• Stop Tool Calls: Added ability to stop tool calls mid-execution, similar to text streaming cancellation
• Internationalization: Added support for Spanish and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) languages with comprehensive translations across the app
• Localized Tool Names: Tool names and descriptions are now translated and localized
• Flow Messages Localization: Flow messages in conversation view are now localized
• Faster Microphone Start: Improved microphone start performance
• Screen Capture: Automatic restart of screen capture streams when the system stops them
• New Models: Gemini 3.0 Flash and Mistral Small Creative

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Notch: Fixed indexing indicator not showing when triggered manually
• Microphone: Avoid low audio cutoff when transcriptions are coming in
• MCP Tools: Return proper ToolError when no response is received from MCP tools
• Crash Fixes: Fixed crash when saving messages
• Data Races: Fixed data race in Models service

Hotfix for Listing Custom Models

TL;DR: Several users experienced their custom models no longer appearing (Open Router, LM Studio, etc.). This release fixes that issue and includes some additional fixes.

New Features & Enhancements

• Conversation History: Allow manual reindexing when conversation search results are empty, with a reindex button for easy access
• Flow Planner: 3-models swarm and GLM 4.6 for better plans
• Quick Actions: New sheet view to add quick actions

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Custom Endpoint Models: Fixed issue where custom endpoint models were not showing properly
• Flow Tools: Improved tool descriptions from search results
• Audio Recording: Fixed multiple key triggers issue during audio recording
• Meeting: Fixed parsing of speaker names with non-letter or non-digit characters
• Tool Lists: Fixed missing actions in Alter tool lists
• Notch: Fixed crash when notification appears and mouse is close to the notch
• Error Reporting: Enhanced Apple processor error reporting

Remote MCP servers

TL;DR: The community voted last month for this feature, and it’s finally here. You can now connect with any apps using remote MCP servers!

New Features & Enhancements

• Remote MCP Servers: Support for remote MCP servers enabling you to connect Alter with your favorite apps and services. Includes Oauth 2.1 and API key authentication modes.
• Transcript Metadata: Added date and duration metadata to transcript files.
• Context Preview: Added right-click menu on context preview cards to create a workspace.
• Flow: Improved effeciency by merging the first two steps in one. Flow is still highly experimental.
• Flow & Websearch Display: Better display of flow steps and websearch results.
• New Models: GPT-5.2 (thinking low) and GPT-5.2 Chat (Instant)

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Audio Recording: Fixed crashes when finishing a recording and starting a new one in succession, plus other issues.
• Message Saving: Fixed crash when saving a message.
• Tool Display: Fixed tool detail pretty name display.
• Speaker Editor: Fixed issue where renaming speakers required a double save.