Choose the skills your tools get

Dana's Home profile now delivers review-checklist and review-security to Claude Code in every repository, as two separate entries. Three things change for her this week. She wants to try Cursor, she wants the code-review stack from Write skills to replace her two entries, and the platform team has published skills she needs in a second catalog.

This page follows those changes, and shows what happens when two catalogs offer a skill with the same name.

Turn tools on and off

Dana wants to try Cursor alongside Claude Code, so she turns it on:

skc settings enable cursor

SkillCatalog delivers every profile to the new tool right away, so the skills in ~/.claude/skills/ now also appear in ~/.cursor/skills/, and each checkout's project skills appear in its .cursor/skills/ folder.

Later, Dana decides to stay with Claude Code and turns Cursor off:

skc settings disable cursor

Turning a tool off removes every skill folder SkillCatalog delivered to it, in your home folder and in your repositories, so no copies stay behind that SkillCatalog no longer updates. A file you edited in one of those folders stays, and the command prints a warning about it. Delete that file yourself once you no longer need your changes.

In the desktop app, open Settings, then use the switches under Sync Targets.

Add a catalog

Acme's platform team keeps its skills in its own catalog, platform-skills. Dana adds it with the remote URL she would give git clone:

skc catalog add git@github.com:acme/platform-skills.git

Added catalog 'Platform Skills' (platform-skills). Clone: ~/.skillcatalog/catalogs/platform-skills

SkillCatalog clones the catalog with your own Git access, so the URL never needs a password or token. Adding a catalog delivers nothing yet, because its skills reach your tools only when a profile selects them.

In the desktop app, choose Add catalog in the catalog menu at the top of the sidebar. Fill in Catalog name and Source, then choose Add catalog.

Add and remove Home profile entries

The code-review stack delivers both review skills with one entry, and a skill that Acme adds to the stack later reaches Dana without another entry. So she adds the stack to her Home profile, along with the platform team's incident-response skill:

skc profile add home --catalog-id acme-skills --kind stack --slug code-review
skc profile add home --catalog-id platform-skills --kind skill --slug incident-response

Then she removes the two skill entries that the stack replaces:

skc profile remove home --catalog-id acme-skills --kind skill --slug review-checklist
skc profile remove home --catalog-id acme-skills --kind skill --slug review-security

~/.claude/skills/ still holds review-checklist/ and review-security/, because the stack delivers them now, and it also holds incident-response/. Each of these commands saves the entry and delivers the Home profile at once.

In the desktop app, open a skill, stack, or bundle, choose Add to profiles, then choose Add or Remove next to your Home profile.

What if two entries deliver the same skill?

The platform catalog has its own review-checklist, and Dana wants to try it. Only one skill can fill ~/.claude/skills/review-checklist/, though. She adds the platform version below her stack, then delivers the Home profile to see the result:

skc profile add home --catalog-id platform-skills --kind skill --slug review-checklist
skc deliver home

Error: delivery-failed
Delivery for profile 'home' did not complete cleanly: 1 conflict, 0 failed items.
...
  CONFLICT: ~/.claude/skills/review-checklist/SKILL.md (Review checklist, Claude Code) - picked stack code-review (Acme Skills), dropped skill review-checklist (Platform Skills)
...

When two entries in one profile deliver skills with the same slug from different catalogs, the entry nearer the top wins. Here that is the Acme stack, so Acme's checklist stays in place and the platform version is dropped. The rest of the Home profile is still delivered. Until one of the two entries goes, though, every skc deliver and skc sync ends with this error, and skc status and skc validate report the conflict.

Dana decides to keep Acme's version and removes the platform entry:

skc profile remove home --catalog-id platform-skills --kind skill --slug review-checklist

To use the platform's version instead, replace the stack entry with an entry for each Acme skill you still want, so that only one entry delivers review-checklist.

skc profile show home lists a profile's entries top first, and skc profile reorder changes their order. In the desktop app, open Profiles and choose your Home profile. Its Priority tab marks the winning entry "Overrides 1 skill", and you can drag entries to change the order.

Two entries that take a skill from the same catalog deliver it once, as the stack and the skill entries did in the previous section. A Home profile skill and a project skill with the same slug never conflict either, because they go to different folders.

Remove a catalog

Dana has what she needs from the platform catalog and removes it.

Removing a catalog deletes its clone, including any changes you have not synced. So Dana syncs the catalog first, gives a commit message if it asks for one, and continues only when it prints Synced 1 catalog:

skc sync platform-skills

skc catalog remove refuses while a profile still uses the catalog, because SkillCatalog cannot deliver a profile whose entries name a catalog it no longer has. Dana's Home profile still has incident-response, so she removes that entry first, then the catalog:

skc profile remove home --catalog-id platform-skills --kind skill --slug incident-response
skc catalog remove platform-skills

Removed catalog 'Platform Skills' (platform-skills). Clone removed.

To keep the clone folder on disk, add --keep-clone. When a team manifest uses the catalog, removal needs one more step.

In the desktop app, choose View all in the catalog menu, then the trash button on the catalog's card. The app removes a catalog even when profiles use it: it marks their entries Unavailable and does not deliver those profiles until you remove the entries. It keeps the clone unless you select Also remove local files.