dsh-snapcompact

Configuration

Configuration lives on the snapcompact row inside the selected Snapcompact preset's isolated compaction group. The settings card on the Plugins → Snapcompact page covers the common keys; the preset/config editor covers everything else. Both write into the active profile's configuration patch, so neither requires editing profile files by hand.

methodOrder: [snapcompact, handoff, shake, soft]
policy:
  auto: true
  # Trigger at 80% of the window; /snapcompact status shows the effective token count.
  thresholdRatio: 0.8
rendering:
  width: 1568
  height: 1568
  maxFrames: 20
  lineHeight: 20
  minGlyphPx: 12
serialization:
  toolResultMaxChars: 2000
  toolArgumentMaxChars: 500
  messageTextMaxChars: 8000
  headChars: 2000
  tailChars: 2000
  includeReasoning: false
  maxCarriedImages: 4

Defaults use 1568×1568 frames and 20 frames per checkpoint, with a configurable maximum of 64; the host's per-message image cap (20 by default) still clamps the effective count. Other limits are 16 MiB of generated images, 64 MiB of source/archive data and a 15-second render deadline. The frame count is chosen dynamically under the checkpoint budget implied by the trigger (see the configuration reference).

In-app settings

The Snapcompact detail page under Plugins carries a settings card backed by a snapcompact-settings row in the current profile. The card writes through DSH's settings service into that profile's configuration patch, so saved values survive restarts without hand-editing YAML. It manages:

Control	Config path	Default
Method chain	methodOrder	[snapcompact, handoff, shake, soft]
Custom trigger threshold	policy.thresholdRatio	unset (host default 0.8)
Frame size	rendering.width and rendering.height	1568
Maximum frames	rendering.maxFrames	20 (max 64)
Archive limit	archiveMaxBytes	64 MiB
Handoff budget	handoffMaxTokens	4096
Externalize above	shakeThresholdChars	8192

Rules worth knowing:

• The engine is built when a session mounts the preset, so saved changes apply to new sessions; a running session keeps its configuration.
• For a key the card manages, the saved value overrides the same key in preset YAML. thresholdRatio is the exception: it stays unset until you enable the custom threshold, so a preset-level policy.thresholdRatio still applies.
• "Restore default" removes the override and falls back to the plugin default (or to YAML, for the threshold).
• Everything else — the rest of policy, serialization, routePolicies, render timeouts — remains YAML-only.

Custom method chains and thresholds

methodOrder is a priority list: the engine tries methods in order and the first candidate that succeeds within its compression constraint wins, so the order is the fallback order. The final method must be soft. Subsets are allowed:

Preset	methodOrder	Behavior
Visual-first (default)	[snapcompact, handoff, shake, soft]	Local visuals first, then handoff, excerpts, native summary
Visual + native	[snapcompact, soft]	Skip handoff/shake; native summary when visuals fail
Local-first	[snapcompact, shake, soft]	Call the native summarizer only after both local paths fail
Text-first	[handoff, shake, soft]	Spend one model call on a structured handoff first
Native-only	[soft]	Back to the DSH native summary; archive and recall remain

Two easy misreadings: shake succeeds whenever any tool output exceeds shakeThresholdChars, so putting it first preempts the visual path; and the checkpoint budget (half of the room left under the trigger) only constrains snapcompact, while every other method merely has to shrink the source.

The trigger is still the native policy.thresholdRatio (a window fraction, default 0.8). /snapcompact status converts it into tokens for the current route and explains whether each method will run or be skipped.

If a model genuinely has image input and a known price but DSH's adapter exposes no image pricing, DeepSeek model IDs use a labelled 1024-token/frame conservative estimate. Other models can declare a conservative ceiling explicitly:

routePolicies:
  - provider: your-provider
    model: exact-model-id
    visualTokensPerFrame: 4096 # Example only; calibrate for the model and frame size.

A ceiling is not actual usage and cannot grant missing image modality. See configuration for every field, the native policy pass-through and route-matching rules.