paper is now paperctl — and installs no longer need sudo

v0.21.0 is a breaking release: the CLI binary is renamed from paper to paperctl. This is a hard cut — no compat symlink, no dual-publish — so scripts and aliases that call paper need to say paperctl after you update.

The rename sharpens the vocabulary: paper is the product, paperctl operates on your machine, and paperd is the running daemon. It also clears a real collision — libpaper ships a /usr/bin/paper on many Linux distros, and that shadow is now gone for good.

To move, re-run the installer:

curl -fsSL https://download.papercompute.com/install | sh

What didn’t change: PAPER_* environment variables, ~/.config/paper/, the paperd daemon name, and the launchd/systemd service labels. Your credentials and daemon config survive the migration byte-for-byte.

If something you can’t immediately update — a script, a CI job, a coding agent’s saved instructions — is blocked because it still calls paper, an alias bridges the gap:

alias paper=paperctl

Or, for callers that don’t go through your shell, a symlink:

ln -s ~/.local/bin/paperctl ~/.local/bin/paper

Treat it as a bridge, not a destination: it re-creates the name collision the rename removed, so drop it once the caller says paperctl.

Rootless installs

The install location moves to ~/.local/bin, and with it the last routine sudo leaves the product. A fresh install is ordinary user file I/O end to end — download, symlink, and a guarded PATH export written into the same managed shell-rc block the shell integration already uses. Re-installs rewrite the block instead of stacking duplicates, and paperctl uninstall removes the binaries and the block without a trace.

If you installed before v0.21.0, the old binaries in /usr/local/bin are root-owned, so the installer asks for sudo one final time to remove them — and says so plainly. Declining is fine: the new install still lands, and the manual removal command is printed. If anything is off afterward, paperctl doctor now names the two degraded states — install directory missing from PATH, or a stale binary shadowing the new one — and prints the exact command to fix each.

paperctl upgrade

Staying current is one command now:

paperctl upgrade

It checks the published version, reports “already up to date” when there’s nothing to do, and otherwise swaps the binary in place — downloaded and checksum-verified before it’s trusted, crash-safe at every step — then restarts the daemon and prints old → new. --version pins an exact release (older included, as an escape hatch), and --version nightly always fetches.

Read the quickstart to get set up, or the CLI reference for the full command surface.