dsh-chat-shell

A Chat / Harness switch for DeepSeek Harness: embed DeepSeek, Doubao or ChatGPT in the whole window, and get back to Harness with one click — without losing your conversation, your scroll position or a reply that is still streaming.

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What it does

DeepSeek Harness is one window with one interface. This plugin adds a second one: a glass segmented switch in the title bar, with the sites you use beside it.

Harness                            Chat
┌────────────────────────────┐    ┌────────────────────────────┐
│  应用  编辑   Chat│Harness  │    │  应用  编辑  ⬤▾  Chat│Harness│
├────────────────────────────┤    ├────────────────────────────┤
│                            │    │                            │
│   the untouched DSH UI     │ ⇄  │   a real browser showing   │
│   (sessions, tools, tasks) │    │   chat.deepseek.com        │
│                            │    │   (or Doubao / ChatGPT)    │
└────────────────────────────┘    └────────────────────────────┘

Both sides stay alive. Switching is a fade, not a page load:

• the DSH session, its scroll position and any running tool call are untouched;
• every AI website stays mounted, so an answer that is still being generated keeps generating while you are looking at Harness;
• each site has its own session partition, so three logins do not overwrite each other.

Features

Segmented switch	Chat | Harness, centred in the title bar. Click either label, or drag the glass thumb and drop it where you want it.
Site button	Real brand mark + a caret, left of the switch. Open it to pick a site, or to add one of your own.
Three presets	DeepSeek, Doubao (豆包), ChatGPT — each in its own browser session.
Add any website	Paste a URL; the label is derived from the hostname. Custom sites are stored next to the presets.
Instant switching	Sites are mounted once and toggled with CSS, never torn down on a switch.
Remembers everything	Last mode, last site and your site list survive a reload.
Follows the theme	Light and dark are detected from the live page and re-applied whenever the app theme changes.
Fails soft	On a browser-hosted DSH (no desktop bridge) the switch simply hides itself instead of breaking the page.

Requirements

• DeepSeek Harness desktop 0.2.x — the embedded browser is provided by the Electron shell and does not exist in dsh web.
• Windows (the desktop build this was developed and tested against).

Install

With the plugin market / CLI

dsh plugin add dsh-chat-shell

Manually (local folder)

1. Copy this folder into the profile's node_modules:

   %USERPROFILE%\.dsh\profiles\desktop\node_modules\dsh-chat-shell
   

2. Add the plugin to the profile patch, …\profiles\desktop\cordis.patch.yml:

   - insert:
       - id: chat-shell
         name: dsh-chat-shell
   

3. Save. The desktop app hot-reloads the plugin graph, so the switch appears without restarting; if it does not, restart the app once.

Use

• Switch — click Chat or Harness, or drag the thumb.
• Pick a site — click the round button left of the switch.
• Add a site — open the picker, choose ＋ 添加 AI 网页, paste a URL, Enter.
• Go back to Harness — one click; nothing else changes.

The plugin keeps exactly one preference key in localStorage:

// dsh-chat-shell:state
{
  "mode": "chat",                                  // "chat" | "harness"
  "active": "deepseek",                            // id of the selected site
  "sites": [{ "id": "deepseek", "label": "DeepSeek", "url": "https://chat.deepseek.com/" }]
}

To reset everything, run localStorage.removeItem("dsh-chat-shell:state") in the app's devtools and reload.

Staying logged in (optional)

Out of the box the embedded browsers use an in-memory session partition, so every restart of the app logs you out again. That is a property of the shell, not of this plugin.

scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs fixes it with a one-line change to the shell, made on a copy, with the original archive kept for rollback:

- partition = `dsh-sidebar-browser-${randomUUID()}`;
+ partition = `persist:dsh-sidebar-browser-${createHash("sha1").update(workspace)…}`;

node scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs status     # is the shell patched?
node scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs build      # extract + patch (no swap)
node scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs apply      # prepare the swap…
# …then double-click apply-patch.cmd and quit DSH (应用 → 退出)

Read docs/persistent-login.md before running it: it edits the installed application, it is Windows-only, and a DSH update overwrites it (re-run build + apply afterwards). The plugin works without it.

Limits worth knowing

• Desktop only. The switch needs the desktop bridge dshDesktop.browser, which the browser-hosted DSH does not expose. The plugin detects this and stays out of the way.
• The bridge is not a documented API. It is a stable-looking internal contract of the 0.2.x shell; a future DSH release may rename it. If that happens the switch hides itself rather than throwing.
• The embedded browser is locked down by the shell — no downloads, no permission prompts, no nested webviews, no HTTP authentication dialogs. That is deliberate and this plugin does not try to relax it.
• Some sites may notice the embedded browser. DeepSeek, Doubao and ChatGPT all render and accept input today; a site that blocks automation will show its own notice, which no plugin-side workaround should try to defeat.
• One window per site is not on the roadmap — each site is a single tab.

Uninstall

1. Remove the chat-shell entry from cordis.patch.yml (or run dsh plugin remove dsh-chat-shell).
2. Delete …\profiles\desktop\node_modules\dsh-chat-shell.
3. If you applied the optional shell patch, run node scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs restore first — otherwise the patched shell keeps loading, which is harmless but no longer updated by the plugin's uninstall.

How it works

The 60-second version

• The package is a client plugin: lib/client.js is a plain ES module wrapped in window.__ModuleLoader__.load({ id, factory }), and lib/index.js exists only because the loader mounts every package on both sides.

• On mount it registers nothing into the slot tree. Instead it paints three elements into document.body — a full-screen panel, the site button and the switch — and positions them over the app shell (z-index above the layout, -webkit-app-region: no-drag so the title bar stays clickable).

• Each site becomes a <webview> created exactly the way the built-in sidebar browser creates it:

  const { lease, partition } = await window.dshDesktop.browser.acquire("chat-shell:" + site.id);
  const view = document.createElement("webview");
  view.setAttribute("name", lease);
  view.setAttribute("partition", partition);
  view.setAttribute("allowpopups", "");
  view.setAttribute("src", "about:blank#" + lease);
  view.addEventListener("dom-ready", () => view.loadURL(site.url));
  

  The shell only attaches a webview whose src is about:blank#<lease> and overwrites the web preferences itself, so a wrong element is rejected rather than silently running with different privileges.

• Colours are read from the live page (getComputedStyle), turned into a small palette of CSS custom properties, and recomputed when the app theme changes (MutationObserver on <html>/<body> + prefers-color-scheme).

• No build step, no dependencies, no network requests of its own.

Development

The package is plain JavaScript, aimed at the browser. There is nothing to compile:

node --check lib/client.js                    # syntax only
node scripts/patch-persistent-login.mjs status

To iterate: edit lib/client.js in your profile's node_modules, save, and the desktop app reloads the plugin graph. The file is UTF-8 and contains Chinese labels inline — edit it with a UTF-8 aware editor (PowerShell Set-Content will corrupt it).

License

MIT