📄 dsh-md-preview

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Turn Markdown into a page you can send to someone.

A Markdown renderer for the DeepSeek Harness with two front doors and one engine behind them:

• md_html_render — a tool the model can call. Give it Markdown, get back a complete, self-contained HTML document, optionally written to disk. Works in a headless profile with no GUI at all.
• The MD drawer — press MD in the web session header, browse your working directory, click a .md file. It renders in place. No new tab, no second editor, no context switch.

Both go through the same renderer, so a page the model generates and a page you export from the drawer are byte-for-byte identical. A test asserts that on every case in the corpus.

---

Install

Not on npm yet — install straight from GitHub. Add it to your profile's package.json:

// ~/.dsh/profiles/<profile>/package.json
{
  "dependencies": {
    "dsh-md-preview": "github:LeslieWylie/dsh-md-preview#v0.2.2"
  },
  "dsh": {
    "profile": {
      "bundles": ["dsh-md-preview"]
    }
  }
}

Then reinstall and restart the profile:

cd ~/.dsh/profiles/<profile> && pnpm install
dsh --profile <profile>

Drop the #v0.2.2 to track the default branch instead of pinning.

Try it without editing your profile

dsh --profile web --patch <(printf -- "- insert:\n    - id: md-preview\n      name: dsh-md-preview\n")

The package still has to resolve from the profile's node_modules, so run the pnpm install above first.

---

The tool

md_html_render(markdown, title?, save_path?) -> { html, savedPath?, error? }

Parameter
markdown	required	The Markdown source.
title	optional	Page <title>. Defaults to Markdown.
save_path	optional	Where to write the file. Resolved through the session filesystem service, so it obeys the same sandbox policy as every other write.

Ask for a report, a plan, a comparison table — anything the model would otherwise dump into the transcript — and get a file you can open in a browser or mail to a colleague.

Render this migration plan to ~/Desktop/plan.html

The output is standalone: styles are embedded, there is no stylesheet, font, script, or image loaded from anywhere. It opens from disk, from a USB stick, or on an airgapped machine and looks the same. It follows the reader's dark mode. Nothing phones home, because there is nothing to phone home to.

If save_path is refused by the sandbox, the tool still returns the HTML along with the error, so the work is never lost to a permissions problem.

The drawer

Browse in place	Opens on your working directory. Click a folder to descend, ↑ to go back. No system file dialog.
Render on click	Headings, bold/italic/strikethrough, inline code, fenced code, blockquotes, ordered/unordered/task lists, tables, links, images, rules.
Edit	Toggle to a plain textarea to scratch a note or fix a line, then toggle back.
Export	Writes a standalone HTML page next to the source — the same document md_html_render produces.
Theme-aware	Reads the harness theme variables, so it matches light and dark without configuration.

Why another Markdown plugin

Three things this one does not do:

• No runtime dependencies. The client half loads as a plain script with no bundler, so marked and markdown-it are not available to it. The renderer is ~150 lines of hand-written JavaScript. The dependency tree you audit is one file.
• No second path to your disk. Every read and write goes through the harness fs service, so the plugin inherits whatever sandbox policy the session already runs under. It never opens its own filesystem access. The drawer's readFile refuses anything that is not .md, .markdown, .mdx, or .txt.
• No raw HTML execution. Every scrap of document text is HTML-escaped before any inline syntax runs, and link targets that are not http(s):, #, /, or mailto: collapse to #. A document containing <script> or a javascript: link renders as literal characters.

How it works

                        lib/render.js          ← the only renderer
                       ╱             ╲
   md_html_render  ◀──╯               ╰──▶  Export button
   (host, headless)                          (client, in-browser)
          │                                        │
          ╰──────────▶  ctx.fs  ◀──────────────────╯
                   every read and write

Only fs is a hard requirement. The tool registry and the client connection are picked up opportunistically through ctx.inject, so the plugin runs headless, in the GUI, or in both, and degrades to whichever surface the profile actually has instead of failing to load.

Compatibility

Profile	What you get
Headless / CLI	md_html_render
Web GUI	md_html_render and the MD drawer
No fs service	Logs a warning and stays inert rather than half-loading

Requires Node ^22.19.0 || >=24.0.0.

Tests

npm test

Four executing suites, no mocks of the thing under test:

• tests/render.test.cjs extracts the client renderer from the browser bundle and runs it.
• tests/host.test.mjs runs the host renderer on the same corpus, asserts the two agree exactly (a drift between them is what produced two competing Markdown plugins before they were merged), then drives apply() against a stub context to check the tool shape, the RPC endpoints, and the sandbox-refusal path.
• tests/client.test.mjs covers the drawer's path rendering, including the bidi guard described below.
• tests/boot.test.mjs boots a real harness Context with the harness's own filesystem service, loads this package the way a profile does, then asks the real tool registry for md_html_render and executes it against the real disk.

That last one exists because a DSH plugin can import cleanly, pass every unit test, and still register nothing when a Context actually boots it — silently, with no error. Unit tests cannot see that.

It needs the harness packages, so it is written to skip rather than fail when they are missing. That makes the skip path dangerous: a green tick proves nothing if the integration half never ran. The harness packages are therefore ordinary devDependencies, not optional peers — npm does not auto-install optional peers, so declaring them that way is exactly what leaves this suite permanently skipped in CI. A plain npm install && npm test from a fresh clone runs it for real. If the log says SKIPPED, treat the run as unverified.

The XSS checks assert a structural invariant — no emitted tag ever carries an unterminated attribute or an on*= handler — and the suite includes checks that the checker itself goes red on genuinely unsafe markup, so a security assertion cannot silently rot into one that always passes.

Notes

The ~/ in the path bar. The breadcrumb is direction: rtl so that when a path outgrows the bar, text-overflow: ellipsis trims it from the front and keeps the deepest directory — the part you are actually looking at — visible. The side effect is that a leading run of bidi-neutral characters, which is precisely what ~/ is, gets reordered to the far end: ~/projects/app displayed as projects/app/~. The fix is a single leading U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK), which anchors the run without disturbing the front-truncation. unicode-bidi: plaintext also fixes the order but flips the ellipsis back to the tail, losing the property the rtl was there for; a trailing mark does nothing at all. tests/client.test.mjs pins this.

The screenshots are generated, not staged. node docs/screenshot.mjs --shoot rebuilds both images from the real renderer, with the drawer CSS sliced out of lib/client.js rather than retyped, so they cannot drift from what the plugin actually draws.

License

MIT