[FEATURE] The native installer follows existing OS conventions

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

This feature request was replaced as requested by Voltech. My apologies to Voltechs.

Problem Statement

The native installer hardcodes ~/.local/bin, which is the XDG/freedesktop.org convention popularized by tools like pip install --user. The longstanding Unix convention is ~/bin, predating XDG by decades, and many user shell configs (including macOS defaults) include ~/bin in $PATH but not ~/.local/bin.

This matters more than it might seem because in-app messaging actively steers users toward the native installer rather than package managers like Homebrew. If Anthropic recommends the native installer as the preferred path, the choice of install location becomes consequential.

Proposed Solution

The installer should either:

Default to ~/bin (the established Unix convention), or
Respect a PREFIX or INSTALL_DIR environment variable (standard for Unix installers), or
Detect which convention already exists in $PATH and install it there
Bonus: For the native install warning—just check which Claude comes first, and only warn if it can't be found. For example, symlinking from ~/bin/claude to ~/.local/bin/claude should suppress the warning.
Enforcing XDG on users who didn't ask for it — especially while nudging them away from package managers that do follow platform conventions — is the wrong default.

Claude should review the home directory structure and use the existing convention. There was no reason to enforce the XDG convention.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Critical - Blocking my work

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_