dsh-theme

A configurable skin for the DeepSeek Harness web UI.

One plugin, many looks: colours, fonts and artwork are all configuration, so a new skin is a config block rather than a fork.

Presets

Preset	Palette	Display font
presets/code-geass.yml	Gold #c9a227 · crimson #a01c26 on near-black #0b0810	Songti / serif
presets/spy-family.yml	Forest green #2f5d50 · rose #d4788a on green-black #0f1512	PingFang / rounded sans

Each preset carries a full palette, a display font and one path per image slot. Switching skins is swapping that block in your profile's patch layer — there is no second plugin to install or disable.

Both presets ship with the light scheme tuned separately, not derived: a pale ground needs a denser accent and darker secondary text than a dark ground does, so accentLight and labelLight are their own values.

What it restyles

Surface	Treatment
Page background	Your wallpaper, separate images for light and dark
Sidebar	Character art behind the session list, on a vertical ramp so the list keeps a clean ground
Sidebar wordmark	Replaced
New-session button	Icon replaced
Empty-state logo	Replaced
Favicon	Replaced, by claiming an exact route ahead of the SPA fallback
Composer	Accent border, blur, focus glow, centre ornament, hand-drawn corner flourishes
Messages	User bubbles take the highlight colour; assistant prose gets a halo or a blurred ground
Secondary text	Contrast raised — the stock greys vanish over artwork
Tool rows, cards, dialogs, scrollbars, focus rings, selection	All themed
Ambient motion	Drifting motes, silenced under prefers-reduced-motion

Everything is scoped to one attribute and one <style> element, and the effect destructor removes both, so unloading the plugin restores the stock UI exactly. No DeepSeek Harness source is modified.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/dsh-theme

Installing a local checkout with link: does not install the plugin's own dependencies. Run npm install in this directory once, or the profile fails to boot with Cannot find package '@deepseek-ai/schemastery'.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/naniwet/dsh-themes.git
cd dsh-themes && npm install
dsh plugin --profile web add .

Then paste a preset into $DSH_HOME/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml, replace the /path/to/... lines with your own image files, and restart. dsh --profile web --dump-config prints the composed result and marks which layer patched what, which is the fastest way to confirm a change landed.

Configure

Copy a file from presets/ into your profile's cordis.patch.yml and point the asset paths at your own images. Switching skins means swapping that block — there is no second plugin to enable.

A config block REPLACES the whole config of an entry; it is not merged key by key. Keep every key you want in the block.

Artwork

Both presets ship with artwork under assets/, and their paths are relative to the plugin, so a fresh checkout renders without editing anything. An absolute path in any slot overrides the bundled file.

Provenance. The images in assets/code-geass/ and assets/spy-family/ are AI-generated (GPT) fan art made for this theme. They are not official studio material. The characters they depict belong to their respective rights holders — Code Geass to Sunrise, SPY×FAMILY to Tatsuya Endo / Shueisha — and neither rights holder is affiliated with or endorses this project. Use is non-commercial. assets/background-light.svg and assets/background-dark.svg are original abstract fallbacks used when a slot is left empty.

The plugin serves every image from the host process, so the browser never needs access to your filesystem and the paths never leave the machine.

Slot	Suggested
backgroundLight / backgroundDark	≥1920×1080. Keep the subject right of centre — the sidebar covers the left and the composer the lower middle
overlay	Transparent PNG, portrait, ~800×1200
iconNewSession	Square, ≥64×64, simple enough to read at 28px
favicon	SVG or 512×512 PNG
heroLogo	Transparent, landscape ~3:1
sidebarWordmark	Transparent, ~400×100
border9Slice	120×120 with ~40px corners, transparent centre

Every option

Key	Default	What it does
palette.accent	#c9a227	Borders, focus, ornament — dark scheme
palette.accentLight	#8a6d13	Same role, light scheme; needs to be denser
palette.highlight	#a01c26	Primary buttons, selection, user bubbles
palette.groundDark / groundLight	#0b0810 / #f3ead6	Base colour each scheme derives its washes and halos from
palette.labelDark / labelLight	#e6ddc9 / #46392c	Secondary text; tertiary and caption derive from it
palette.displayFont	Songti serif	Headings and the empty-state title only; body copy keeps the system stack
backgroundOpacity	0.5	Wallpaper strength; also controls how evenly halo works
readingSurface	halo	halo / panel / none — see below
overlayPlacement	sidebar	sidebar / corner / none
overlayOpacity	0.30	How strongly the character art shows through its panel
sidebarOverlayHeight	46	Character art height, percent of the sidebar
overlayWidth	320	Character art width in pixels, corner placement only
frameOnToolCards	false	Draw the nine-slice frame on tool cards; squares off their corners

Reading surface

Prose renders over the wallpaper, so it needs help. readingSurface picks which kind, and the two trade against each other:

• halo (default) — outlines the glyphs. The artwork stays fully visible, but text crossing a region whose luminance matches the halo loses contrast.
• panel — a blurred ground behind the conversation column, faded at its left and right edges. Always readable; hides the artwork it covers.
• none — neither.

Lowering backgroundOpacity narrows the wallpaper's light-to-dark range, which is what lets halo work evenly across the whole image rather than only over its mid tones.

Known limits

• border9Slice is drawn as four corner flourishes, not a full frame: border-image overrides border-radius and stops the background being clipped to it, so a full frame squares off corners the rest of the UI keeps round.
• Built-in icons are matched by a substring of their CSS-module class name. That survives a changed build hash, but not a rename upstream.
• The sidebar character art is hidden while the sidebar is collapsed; a 55px rail cannot show a figure.

Adding a theme

A theme is a file in presets/ plus a folder in assets/. No code changes: copy a preset, swap the seven palette values and the display font, point the slots at your own images. If you build one, a pull request is welcome.

License

MIT for the code. The bundled fan art is not covered by that licence — see Provenance above; it is AI-generated, non-commercial, and the characters belong to their rights holders.