The terminal edition: where to get the current files, and which new features really work there

You run Booked Solid from the terminal, an update email lands describing a pipeline board and two new radars, and the fair question is the one owners keep asking us: "Does all of this work on the terminal only version as well?" Or you went looking for the download and could not find it: "Where do I find the most up to date files for the terminal installation of Otto". Or you got an answer that did not sit right and pushed back: "is there a reason why the radars can't work with the terminal only version of Booked Solid?" and "Am I not understanding how they work?" This page answers all of those, including the part where our first answer was wrong and we had to correct it.

The two names first, because they trip up almost everyone. Otto is the app you install on your computer. Booked Solid is the brain inside it. There are two front doors to that same brain: the Otto app, or typing to Claude in a terminal. What differs is the door, not the intelligence. What is honestly not the same in both doors is covered further down, and we are specific about it.

Where the current terminal files come from

There is no separate terminal version of Otto to hunt down, and you have not missed a download. Almost everyone asking this goes looking for a download page, an older zip, or a link in an old email. No such page exists, no such zip is newer than what you already have, and searching for one is a dead end. Skip that search.

Here is why. The skills and files the terminal reads ship inside the app itself, and the app places them exactly where the terminal looks for them. That means the app is always the newest source. Nothing in an older folder and nothing behind an older link will ever be newer than what an updated app puts down. So the whole path is:

1. Update Booked Solid to the latest version. Use Check for updates in the top bar, or download the current build from booked.kivimedia.co/download. One page covers Windows, Mac and Linux, and the app is free with the licence you already own. You are never asked to pay again.
2. Let the app set the terminal up for you. See the next section.
3. Open your booking folder in any terminal and type claude, or use the in-app terminal, which sits beside Chat on every task tab and is labelled Power view (the setup screens call it the Terminal view). Same door either way.

One thing to be careful about: do not point a terminal setup at a fresh folder and let anything unzip over your existing BookingHQ. You want one folder that both doors share. That is the whole design, and it is what makes your leads, notes and House Rules agree no matter which door you came in through.

The terminal door setup, and the booked command

The terminal is a door we set up for you now, not a project you attempt alone. After an update the app offers a guided setup of about a minute. It checks your assistant, mirrors your House Rules so the terminal follows the same rules Otto does, sets calm permissions so reading your folder never interrupts you while edits and sends still ask first, and then shows you the four things worth knowing before your first terminal session, including why you never need the setting called skip permissions.

If you said not now, nothing changed and nothing was lost. You can open it whenever you like: Settings > Advanced > The terminal door > Open the terminal door setup. It is safe to run again any time.

That setup also installs the booked command, so the two halves are not separate errands. The booked command runs the copy of the app you already installed, so there is nothing else to download and no developer tools needed. If you would rather install it on its own, there is an Install the booked command button in Settings.

From Booked Solid 1.11.40 onward, every Play and skill has a terminal door behind that command:

• booked skill catalog lists what your plan includes.
• booked skill guide <id> shows the short usage card for one of them.
• booked skill run <id> starts it.

The app and the terminal call the same Booked service, so they run one brain rather than two separate copies that can drift apart.

What actually runs in the terminal, and what does not

This is the section the original version of this article got wrong. It used to say "same brain, same booking folder, same skills" and stop there. The brain and the folder really are the same. The feature list is not, and pretending otherwise wastes your evening.

App only, because they are screens

The pipeline board (the Gig Desk), the money view, the Brain tab and the built-in web browsing are drawn and run by the desktop app. A terminal cannot render a drag-and-drop board. There is no terminal equivalent coming for the board itself, and that is not a packaging decision, it is what a board is.

Milestone Radar: the one genuine app-only exception

Milestone Radar runs a live scan using your own connected Apollo and Hunter keys, is launched from the Plays screen, and is built to run as an app job rather than a plain terminal task. This is the radar that truly needs the app.

School Radar and Library Radar: not app-only for GUI reasons

Our first answer on these was that they needed a GUI. That was wrong, and the owner who pushed back was right. At heart these two are a bundled offline dataset plus ranking logic, the tools scan_schools and scan_county, shipped as a small MCP server the app wires up for you. Then comes a live web search to enrich what was found, and a draft for you to approve. None of that is visual, and the ranking rules started life as a terminal play (the old scan-schools logic).

The real reason they read as app-only was packaging: the datasets ship with the app, the app wires the tool for you, and they sit on the Otto tier. Not a screen requirement. Which is why the next section exists.

booked-scout: where the terminal radar tool actually stands

You may have heard the name booked-scout. It is a scouting command line meant to let an Otto owner who lives in the terminal run the offline radars with the desktop app closed, and it came directly out of the ticket that asked the question at the top of this page.

The honest status, because sending you hunting would waste your evening. booked-scout is written. It wires the scouts into your own Claude Code with the safety guard attached (the guard and the tool wiring are written together or not at all, on purpose), and then runs the offline scans: ranked libraries in a county, and ranked dance-buying schools in a county, read straight off the datasets that ship with the app, with no tokens burned, no network calls and nothing contacting anyone.

What it is not, today, is part of the app you can install. If you have updated Booked Solid and your terminal does not know a booked-scout command, nothing is broken on your machine, and there is no download, no zip and no older folder that adds it. Please do not go looking. If having it matters to your week, say so on a ticket. That is exactly how it came to be written in the first place.

The scope it was built to, stated plainly rather than buried, because this part is a decision and not a gap. The terminal tier is the read-only offline scans and nothing else. The live-research enrich modes, the outreach drafts, the unattended sweeps, Circuit auto-send and the Booth dashboard stay in the app, where the guardrails and the approval flow live. Anything that contacts a buyer, spends something, or runs while you are not watching stays where you can approve it. The principle going forward is that if it reads and ranks, it should run where you live, and data-gathering features should ship terminal-first or at least terminal-runnable. That is a commitment about direction, not a promise about a date.

Until then, both radars run from the app. Library Radar and School Radar are one-tap requests on the Otto tier, and the ranking still happens offline against the same bundled datasets before any live search goes out to enrich it.

The app does not replace your terminal, it wraps it

If you built your system in the terminal, installing the app does not ask you to start over. It opens your existing BookingHQ, drops you into the in-app terminal first (your setup, your past sessions, right where you left off), and keeps Pearl exactly as you taught her. The app also reads the older terminal folder layout, with your profile in brain/profile.md and your notes in BOOKED-SOLID-BRAIN.md, so pointing it at a folder you built before the app existed finds your work instead of offering to start fresh over it.

The pipeline board reads the same pipeline your terminal already keeps, your own leads and gigs. It is a visual window onto one system, not a second system to maintain. Drag a card and it saves back to the same place, with one-click undo.

Which door should you use?

Use the Otto app if you want to see your business rather than read about it, if you want the approval floor in front of you (outreach is drafted and never sent on its own, money never moves by itself, and every run's token use is recorded in Token History so you can see where your Claude plan actually went), if you want us to be able to help when something breaks (you can send us that exact run with one tap, whereas what you do in your own terminal is invisible to us, which is good for privacy and bad for support), or if you are not especially technical. Either door thinks with your own Claude plan, and Claude Pro at about $20 a month covers most performers. When a run reaches that plan's limit, the app says plainly that it was your Claude plan and not a meter of ours, and offers to pick the work back up.

Use the terminal if you are comfortable there already and like it, if you want the most battle-tested connection layer (Claude's own terminal is used by an enormous number of people, so its connectors have been hammered on far harder than ours have), or if you want to go off the map with your own scripts and your own tools without waiting for us to build a screen for it.

You do not actually have to choose

Both doors open onto the same booking folder. Run the app most days and drop into the terminal when you want to do something unusual. Nothing has to be exported or moved between them.

Your House Rules travel with you. Set a rule in the app and the terminal follows it. Teach a rule in the terminal by adding it to _config/house-rules.md in your booking folder, and Otto follows it on its next message. There is nothing to export and no restart. The app keeps a mirrored copy of those rules inside your folder's own CLAUDE.md between two marked lines, and anything you wrote in that file outside those lines is left exactly as you wrote it.

Every task tab in the app also has a Power view: a real terminal running the Booked Solid command line, with Chat, Board, Plays and Inbox views you can cycle with Tab. Nothing was dumbed down.

What is honestly better in each one

The app is younger and still has rough edges we are finding and fixing weekly. The terminal is more robust today, especially when connecting to outside services. The app is where every new visual feature lands. Our recommendation for most performers is the app, because the approval flow and the visual pipeline are worth more day to day, and because when you hit a bug in the app we can actually see it and fix it for everyone. If your own terminal setup works for you, keep it. The app is additive and free with the licence you already own.

Common ways people ask this

• Where do I download the terminal version?
• Should I use the app or the terminal?
• Is the terminal version being abandoned?
• What is the difference between Otto and Booked Solid?
• Is Otto the app or the brain?
• Do I lose anything by using the app instead of the terminal?
• Can I run School Radar or Library Radar without opening the app?

If it still does not work

If the update does not offer you the terminal door setup, or booked is not found after you have updated and run the setup, open a ticket at support.booked.kivimedia.co. Tell us your operating system, your Booked Solid version (Settings shows it under Updates), and the exact command you typed with what came back. Those three details are usually enough to fix it on the first reply, and you will get a straight answer rather than a sales one.