dsh-desk-card

Bottom-right native desktop cards for DSH (DeepSeek Harness) approvals, questions, turn completion and errors.

Each card is a small always-on-top window drawn by PowerShell/WPF — not a system toast — so it can carry a button that answers the request. An approval can be allowed straight from the card, and the moment a card would interrupt something else (a fullscreen app, a game, Do-Not-Disturb) it is skipped and the decision goes back to the normal DSH UI.

Windows only. No dependencies, no network, no build step.

Why not just a toast

	system toast	this card
carries a button that returns an answer	depends on the shell / extra runtime	yes, the card's own button
can allow an approval in place	no (toasts only focus the app)	yes — 确认允许 / Allow
respects fullscreen games and Do-Not-Disturb	only if the OS suppresses it	explicit gate, checked before the window is drawn
UI language	whatever the OS shows	follows the DSH locale, or forced with language

Screenshots

Requirements

• Windows 10/11 (cards are drawn with powershell.exe + WPF, which ship with Windows).
• DSH desktop profile (the cards are injected by the host process, no browser side needed).
• Node.js 20+ (whatever DSH ships is fine).

Install

From this repository:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:nanshang328/dsh-desk-card

Or from a local clone / download:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add ./dsh-desk-card

Then restart DSH. The package declares dsh.bundle, so the CLI records it in dsh.profile.bundles and mounts it as a normal profile layer — no hand-written paths.

Windows developer helper: powershell.exe -File tools/deploy-local.ps1 copies the working tree into %USERPROFILE%\.dsh\profiles\desktop\plugins\dsh-desk-card and registers it the same way.

What shows up

card	when	auto-close	buttons
Approval	a tool call needs permission	never (waits for you)	确认允许 / Allow approves once · clicking the card opens DSH for the full dialog
Question	the agent asks you something	never, closes when the question is answered	知道了 / Got it
Completion	a turn ends normally	doneTimeoutSeconds (default 5s)	知晓 / OK
Error	a turn fails	never	知道了 / Got it

The completion card also carries a short summary of your last message, the elapsed time, the remaining todo count and the turn/session token usage.

Cards never overlap: a new card stacks above the ones already on screen. If the DSH window is closed while a card is open, the card closes itself too.

Configuration

Everything has a built-in default, so this section is optional. To change something, add a row with the same id from your profile's own cordis.patch.yml (~/.dsh/profiles/desktop/cordis.patch.yml):

- insert:
    - id: dsh-desk-card
      name: dsh-desk-card
      config:
        doneTimeoutSeconds: 10
        scale: 1.0
        language: en

Only the keys you list are changed — a config object replaces the whole object, and every key you leave out falls back to the defaults below.

key	default	meaning
timeoutSeconds	0	auto-close seconds for cards that wait for you (approval / question). 0 = stay until answered
doneTimeoutSeconds	5	auto-close seconds for the completion card. 0 = keep it until clicked
scale	1.2	card scale factor
skipWhenFullscreen	true	skip cards while a fullscreen app is in the foreground, or while Windows says Do-Not-Disturb
notifyQuestions	true	show the question card
notifyErrors	true	show the error card
notifyDone	true	show the completion card
language	auto	auto (follow the DSH locale), zh or en
hostProcess	DeepSeek Harness	the process whose window is brought to front when you click a card

The three notify* switches only control the cards — approvals and questions always keep working, the card just does not appear.

The fullscreen gate

A card is not drawn when either of these is true:

• SHQueryUserNotificationState reports a fullscreen app, presentation mode or Do-Not-Disturb; or
• the foreground window covers its whole monitor and is not the desktop (this keeps games that hide the real state from being interrupted).

When a card is skipped the approval is handed back to the normal DSH UI (with prepend: true this plugin speaks first, and a skipped card always delegates to the next answerer), so nothing gets stuck. Two test tools reproduce the condition without a game:

powershell.exe -File test/gate-probe.ps1 -MaxSeconds 20          # watch the gate flip blocked -> free
powershell.exe -File test/fake-fullscreen.ps1 -HoldSeconds 8     # paint a fullscreen window for 8s

How it works

lib/index.js      host half: listens to approval/request, user-questions/request,
                  agent/error, agent/status; spawns one card per event and maps the
                  card's exit code back to an approval outcome.
scripts/card.ps1  render half: one PowerShell process per card. Runs the gate, draws the
                  WPF window, stacks it above sibling cards, runs timers, then exits with
                  a code that the host half reads.

Exit-code protocol between the two halves:

code	meaning
10	the card's primary button was pressed
12	the card body was clicked — bring the DSH window to the front, let the UI decide
0	gate skipped the card (fullscreen / Do-Not-Disturb)
3	rendering failed

Being one process per card keeps the render half stateless: a card can never wedge the host, and a card that is killed by the OS just delegates the decision.

Logs and troubleshooting

%TEMP%\dsh-desk-card.log records card placement, exit codes, config and gate decisions:

apply() started config={"skipWhenFullscreen":true,...}
showCard[approval]: exit 10
approval resolved: allowed-once
done card (41234ms, autoClose=5s)

Cards are spawned without a console window. If no card ever appears, check in order: a fullscreen app is holding the gate (-SkipWhenFullscreen false for a manual test), PowerShell is blocked by policy for the DSH process, and finally the log file.

Manual card render (bypasses the host half entirely):

$payload = [Convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes('{"badge":"test","head":"hello","body":"line","okLabel":"OK","okCode":10}'))
powershell.exe -File scripts/card.ps1 -Payload $payload -TimeoutSeconds 5 -Scale 1.2 -SkipWhenFullscreen false -DebugLog "$env:TEMP\card-test.log"

Limitations

• Windows only. The render half is PowerShell + WPF; there is no macOS/Linux path.
• Cards are ordinary top-level windows, so they appear above other windows but not above a fullscreen exclusive game — which is why the gate exists.
• One PowerShell process per card (about 100 ms of warm-up). A card is not a notification center entry: once it is closed it is gone.
• This plugin deliberately does not restart or shut down DSH. If you want power controls, dsh-power-button and dsh-restart do that well.

Privacy

The host half never opens a socket and never reads a file. It spawns one local PowerShell process per card and appends a line to %TEMP%\dsh-desk-card.log. Card payloads contain short excerpts of your session (task title, tool name, approval reason, error message) and are passed to that child process as a command-line argument.

License

MIT