Dsh-Pond-Koi — a paper-and-ink theme for DeepSeek Harness

A theme bundle for the DSH Web GUI: warm paper, warm ink, hairline strokes, near-square corners — and a living ASCII koi pond behind the whole shell. The visual language is derived from a single-screen portfolio site; the analysis that produced it lives in cngtn-analysis.

Screenshots taken on the DeepSeek Harness desktop app 0.2.2-rc.1, where the theme follows the 0.2.2 frame hooks (see the changelog for 1.5.2–1.5.4). The older reference screenshots the palette was measured against: light / dark.

What it is

Three layers, registered through the sanctioned third-party-theme extension point (ctx.theme.overrideTokens) plus one stylesheet and one canvas:

Layer	What it does
Tokens (230+ pairs)	Paper and ink surfaces, hairline strokes, a tighter radius ladder, true (non-squircle) corners, frosted menus instead of acrylic, and the koi vermilion as the only accent. No font family: Settings → Appearance → Font decides, and the stock stacks apply when nothing is chosen.
Stylesheet	The canvas layer and its paint order, the transparency chain that lets the water show through the shell's frame, the frosted panels and Trajectory cards, and the site's underline-only link treatment.
Canvas	The pond: koi with a 20-node spine, burst-and-coast tail beats, curiosity toward the pointer, food on click, startle on a fast swipe, depth dives, and an ASCII raster that etches every fish into the same glyph grid as the interface.

Disabling the plugin removes all three and the GUI returns to its stock design.

Why it looks the way it does

The design system is four colours, one typeface and almost no decoration:

paper  #f5f4f1   ink    #262523      (light)
ink    #1a1917   cream  #fff7f0      (dark)

Everything else is derived: color-mix of ink over paper for strokes and muted text, one typeface, 8px on cards and 6px on media, and a single soft shadow reserved for the one elevated surface.

The one saturated colour is the koi. Its vermilion is step 3 of the pond's own highlight ramp (#cc3e1c on paper, #e86038 on ink) and it becomes the accent, the primary button and the business state — but deliberately not the error colour, because "error" and "brand" must never be confusable.

The pond

The engine is a faithful port of the reference site's koi-pond/ component, split the same way:

File	Ported from	Lines
src/world.js	world.ts	440
src/shape.js	shape.ts	79
src/renderer.js	renderer.ts	672
src/engine.js	koi-pond.tsx	205

Nothing was simplified: the seven steering forces, the burst-and-coast tail beats, the food-selection hysteresis, the startle threshold, the depth model, the five-point sub-sampled coverage test, the body-anchored glyph hash, the travelling sheen, the wake diffusion and both palettes are the original's. A pixel comparison of the darkest body colour against the reference agrees to within one unit per channel.

Three things did change, because a shell is not a landing page:

1. Population. The site seeds 3–6 adults plus two young koi on a full-screen canvas. The theme asks for budget: 0.55, so a typical 1440×900 window gets three fish — enough to read as a pond, few enough to stay out of the way.
2. Steering targets. The site tags its own prose with data-koi-avoid. A theme cannot edit the shell's markup, so it names the shell's published hooks instead ([data-slot="sidebar"], [data-composer-card], …). Panels that paint their own paper only steer the fish; the ones that do not also fade them to a watermark, exactly as the site fades its prose.
3. Re-seeding on resize. The site seeds once, because its canvas is always correctly sized on the first measurement. In a shell the canvas is inserted before its stylesheet lands, so the first rect can be the 300×150 default — and the fish would be trapped in that corner forever. The world therefore re-seeds whenever the box changes by more than a quarter.

Seven varieties

The school is stocked the way a real pond is: mostly white-and-red, a few patterned, and one or two metallic or blue fish for depth.

Variety	Look
kohaku	white, accent head and two or three saddles
sanke	kohaku plus small black spots
tancho	white, a single accent disc on the crown
showa	black back, accent and white patches
ogon	one metallic colour, paler along the belly
asagi	slate back, accent along the belly
bekko	white, black spots only

Each fish carries its own pigment, and the renderer derives a six-stop ramp from it — shadowed at the flanks, lit across the back — so a gold koi is shaded by the same logic as a red one instead of being a recoloured copy.

Layout

The sidebar floats. The frame is a three-column grid, and the sidebar keeps its 280px track; the cell gains 8px of padding so the card is drawn inside it (264px wide) rather than shrinking the track — the resize handle and the centre column stay exactly where the shell put them. The card has a 14px radius on all four corners, a hairline outline, the same frosted fill as the other panels, and a progressive shadow: seven stacked layers whose blur grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 28, 44px) at low alpha, plus a 0.5px contact ring. One wide shadow has a single edge and reads as a band; the stack falls off the way a real occluder does. Paper and ink get separate alphas, because a black shadow on a dark page is nearly invisible.

The shadow needed the column to stop clipping: it had overflow: hidden, which cut the shadow to a 12px band at the column edge. The column is now overflow: visible and the rows are clipped by the inner root instead, whose box is exactly the card's box.

Collapsed, the column is an 18px rail holding one button, so the card styling is dropped and the rail stays bare.

The right panel matches it. Its column is also a grid track, but the panel is an absolutely positioned occupant that normally meets the window's right edge. The panel is inset to the same 10/12/20/18px box as the sidebar, with the same 14px radius, hairline and progressive shadow, while the track and resize handle stay where the shell put them. Expanded, it is the same card stretched over the conversation, frosted over the chat instead of clear: the sheet is a 58% paper tint under blur(26px), and the column is raised above the centre column so nothing paints over the card. Closed, the card, the sheet and the raised stacking all go away with it.

The titlebar is transparent, including the native buttons. No fill, no blur: the pond runs to the top edge of the window and the caption floats over the water. The three caption buttons follow because the desktop preload reads --dsw-specific-sidebar-fill, converts it to rgba(), and hands it to setTitleBarOverlay over IPC — so a transparent token makes a transparent button block. That is why the token is transparent here while the sidebar's own surfaces are painted from --dsw-alias-bg-base: one value drives both the panel and the native chrome.

The one thing a theme cannot reach is the hover fill Electron paints behind a pressed button.

Install

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:cngtn/dsh-cngtn-pond

That is the same command shape as any other DSH plugin: dsh plugin forwards to pnpm inside the profile, so the package is installed, its dsh.bundle patch is read, and the bundle is appended to dsh.profile.bundles automatically.

Once the package is on npm, the versioned form works too:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add @cngtn/dsh-cngtn-pond@latest

To pin an exact revision of the repository:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:cngtn/dsh-cngtn-pond#<commit>

Remove it the same way:

dsh plugin --profile desktop remove @cngtn/dsh-cngtn-pond

Then restart DeepSeek Harness. Only one theme at a time: token layers stack and the last one registered wins per token, so disable any other theme bundle first.

Settings on the plugin page

The pond's three settings are declared in the Host half (index.js, a schemastery Config), which is what lets the Plugins page describe them, and the Client half registers a form for the plugins.bundle.config slot under the bundle's package name. Open Plugins → Dsh-Pond-Koi and the form sits between the description and the component rows:

Field	Range	Meaning
Fish	3–12	Total school size, young koi included
Colour	mixed / warm / cool / mono	Which pigments the fish draw from
Young koi	on / off	The two small fish that keep to the deep water

Save writes through the Host config document; the running pond follows the same scope, so the change lands immediately without a restart. The same values can be set from the floating Pond panel or the console:

cngtnPond.open()
cngtnPond.set({ fish: 9, palette: 'warm' })
cngtnPond.get()
cngtnPond.list()
cngtnPond.diag()   // what the settings wiring reached

A profile can also ship a house style by setting the row's config in cordis.patch.yml; the Host config, once saved, takes precedence over it.

Manual install

cd $env:USERPROFILE\.dsh\profiles\desktop
dsh plugin --profile desktop add "file:C:/path/to/dsh-cngtn-pond"

Build and test

The shell evaluates client.js through window.__ModuleLoader__ and cannot compile anything, so the client half ships as one generated file. Edit src/, then:

npm run build   # inlines src/ + the vendored fonts into client.js
npm test        # boot contract + a ten-minute headless simulation
npm run verify http://127.0.0.1:9333   # read the live page over CDP

npm test runs both checks in test/. npm run verify connects to a running DSH (the desktop app needs --remote-debugging-port=9333; a web profile is already an HTTP page) and prints the state table below, so any claim about the theme can be re-checked rather than taken from a screenshot.

npm test runs two checks that a syntax pass cannot:

• boot.mjs — the factory registers, the module exports apply + inject, every token is a { light, dark } string pair (the rule the theme runtime enforces by throwing), and each effect returns a disposer.
• smoke.mjs — 36 000 fixed steps with a moving pointer, repeated feeds and swipes, asserting that no spine node ever goes NaN, that a fed koi takes a pellet, that the pellet and ripple counts stay capped, and that a large resize re-seeds while a small one does not.

The Trajectory tab

Trajectory is a different surface from the transcript: a <table> of every step, inside an overlay that paints the page colour. Left alone it is the one view where the pond disappears and the list reads as one long striped block.

The theme turns the tab into a ledger of glass cards:

Layer	What it becomes
[data-conversation-composer-overlay]	transparent — this hook exists only in Trajectory, so the rule cannot touch Chat
the sticky filter bar	a 58 % tint over blur(16px), so Duration / Turns / Calls / Search stay readable while the ledger scrolls under it
[data-trajectory-scroll]	an 18 % sheet over blur(14px)
each tr[data-trajectory-row-key]	a card: 30 % tint, blur(14px), 10px corners, hairline outline, 6px gap to the next card

A <tr> cannot carry a radius, so the card is drawn through its two cells — first cell takes the left corners, last cell the right ones, both share one tint and one filter. border-spacing: 0 6px supplies the gap. The table keeps table-layout: fixed and the virtualiser keeps measuring rows; a row is simply 36px tall instead of 30px now, which it observes like any other size change.

What is deliberately not copied

From the site	Why not
One screen, overflow: hidden	The shell is a multi-panel application; locking scroll would break it
px-[20vw] gutters	The shell has a sidebar; gutters must follow the container, not the viewport
pond / projects / gallery / blog nav	The shell owns its navigation
Citation hover cards	There is no source data in the shell to cite
defaultTheme="dark" hard-coded	The user's Light/Dark preference is theirs to set
Playfair 14vw mobile menu	The shell has no full-screen mobile menu

The rule: copy the visual language, not the information architecture.

Licence

The theme sets no font family, so nothing is redistributed: typography comes from DSH's own stacks and the user's Settings choice. The fonts/ directory is kept only as the source of the original reference; it is no longer inlined into client.js. Everything else in this bundle is original work. Verified on Host 0.2.2-rc.1, desktop, light and dark (screenshots above, recorded 2026-11-06 after the 1.5.2–1.5.4 fixes). The 0.2.2 shell renamed the frame hooks this theme reads ([data-slot="main"], [data-slot="sidebar"]) and rewrote the Windows frame surface; the transparency chain now clears the window ground, the frame's second grid cell (the centre column), and the conversation pane through the hooks 0.2.2 publishes. The table below was recorded on 0.2.1; its frame and titlebar rows describe that host's frame.

Verified on this machine

Recorded on the DSH desktop app (0.2.1-rc.3, Windows 11) and the web profile, after dsh plugin --profile … install and a restart.

Check	Result
Bundle activates	@cngtn/dsh-cngtn-pond reaches active; no boot-audit entry
Canvas mounted	#cngtn-pond-canvas present, 1280×820 in the app, 1440×900 in the browser
Pond painting	23k–66k non-transparent pixels, moving between frames
Tokens (light)	--dsw-alias-bg-base #f5f4f1, --dsw-alias-label-primary #262523, brand #cc3e1c
Tokens (dark)	--dsw-alias-bg-base #1a1917, --dsw-alias-label-primary #fff7f0, brand #e86038
Shape	--dsw-radius-md 8px, --dsw-corner-shape round
Material	menus and panels frosted: --dsw-menu-backdrop-filter blur(26px) saturate(160%), fills color-mix(… 55%, transparent)
Fonts	the theme sets none: --dsh-font-family-text-default keeps the shell's stack (Segoe UI on this machine) and a font chosen in Settings wins
Frame transparency	frame and centre column compute to rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); every panel is a frosted sheet
Titlebar	the 40 px Windows caption strip computes to a 58 % tint over blur(22px), so Application / Edit floats on the same glass as the panels
Chat glass	only two blocks are frosted: the sent bubble (46 % tint + blur(14px)) and the code / command card (30 % + blur(14px)). The transcript column itself computes to backdrop-filter: none, so response prose stays crisp
Trajectory glass	the tab's overlay is transparent, the ledger scrolls on an 18 % sheet, and every row is a card: 30 % tint, blur(14px), 10px corners on all four sides, 6px gap between rows
Koi steering	the koi swim under the glass panels rather than around them
Text legibility	response prose sits on the open water; the two frosted blocks carry their own tint
Frame budget	180 frames: p50 16.7 ms, p95 16.8 ms, max 16.9 ms (60 Hz, no dropped frame)
Other plugins	Task Board renders and scrolls normally under the theme
Fidelity	darkest koi body pixel rgb(114,28,14) vs the live site's rgb(113,26,14)

Two things this machine cannot check, and which the user should confirm:

• Subjective feel. The pond's population is a judgement call (three adults plus two young koi at 1280–1440 px wide); budget in src/apply.js is the one number to change.
• A real prefers-reduced-transparency toggle. The code path is implemented and the engine clears its canvas on it, but Windows exposes the flag through Settings → Accessibility → Visual effects, which was not toggled here.