What's new in 1.0

1.0 is the first stable version of Handler. It brings few big new features: the releases leading up to it went into making everything that already exists work reliably from the first launch. Below is the main part of what changed since 0.193.

If you are updating from 0.181 or earlier, when Handler was still called Clauder, read Updating first.

Checked on a clean machine

The installation was run on a fresh Windows with no Handler and none of its settings — and everything a person stumbled over was fixed.

• The firewall asks about Handler. The network access prompt now comes from "Handler server" with the publisher Handler, not from an unclear program called "Bun".
• The first-run wizard no longer offers the desktop app to move its settings to itself, and the Claude Code install buttons look like the rest of the interface and speak its language.
• A crashed server comes back by itself. If the server inside the app crashed or was closed, the window shows a splash screen and brings it back, and launching Handler again revives even a server that gave up. Before, the window stayed white forever. See The desktop app.
• Updating on Windows no longer goes in circles, and the macOS app opens on Apple Silicon again.

Security

• Handler's keys are not visible to the agent. The agent, the terminal, ! commands and automations start without the main access key, the bot tokens and Handler's other own keys. Your own environment variables stay.
• The access key doesn't end up in the log, and secrets in the output of ACP agents are covered with "•••". More in Security.
• The secret vault remembers the master password on macOS and Linux, not only on Windows: in the keychain or in Secret Service. See Secrets.

Chat and composer

• A lower composer. The next-step suggestion, "Interrupt", "Continue" and "Disconnect", quick commands and "Automations" share one row with the attachments instead of three rows above the field. See Chat with the agent.
• A chat background of your own — a gradient or a picture under a veil of the theme colour.
• The Ctrl+N new-chat dialog is a full composer: slash commands, files, voice; it opens in the project of whatever is in front of you.
• Chats the agent opened appear as cards in a tree under their parent, and any of them can be moved out into the common row. At the bottom of a card there is a progress bar for the agent's plan. See Who's working now.
• Images page in a loop, and command output in the console streams live and in colour.

Your own models and providers

• A proxy on a connection — http, https or socks5, for when the cloud is not reachable from the machine's network. A 403 is no longer passed off as "wrong key". See Models and providers.
• Your own servers are more reliable: images go only to models with vision, the error line shows the server's name and its real answer, switching models no longer rolls back silently, and a long conversation is compacted first before moving to a model with a small window.
• Models with a strict template (Nemotron and others on llama.cpp) answer in chats again.

Speed

• Faster lists: projects on a machine with Windows storage open in a second instead of 10–15, the project feed after a restart — in a second instead of two minutes.
• The first load no longer hangs on skeletons: lists answer with the previous data while fresh data is gathered.

The full list of changes by version is in the CHANGELOG.