dsh-session-tabs

dsh-session-tabs

Browser-style tabs for the Sessions a DeepSeek Harness window has open — switch, close, reorder by drag, and tear a tab off into a window of its own, as a DeepSeek Harness client plugin.

Every Session the window has touched becomes a tab in a strip above the whole app. Click a tab to switch to it, close it with × / middle click / the context menu, drag it left or right to reorder, or drag it out of the strip to hand it to a new window. Closing a tab never deletes a Session — exactly like closing a browser tab never deletes a page.

Nothing upstream is patched. The plugin registers into the official slot, locale and Session faces of the web client, so it survives DSH upgrades and uninstalls by removing one row.

What you get

• Tabs for open Sessions — one tab per Session this window shows, in the order you left them in.
• Switch — click a tab. If a global panel is open, the click returns to the conversation first.
• Close — × on the tab, the middle mouse button, or the context menu (Close tab, Close other tabs, Close all tabs). The Session itself stays in the sidebar and reopens with one click.
• Reorder — drag a tab left or right; the neighbours part as you go and the new order is written to this window's tab list.
• Tear off into its own window — drag a tab out of the strip and release: a hint appears under the cursor while the pointer is outside, and the Session opens in a new window. The context menu's Open in a new window does the same without dragging.
• Restore — the tab list of a window survives a page reload. A Session deleted in the sidebar loses its tab, and tab lists belonging to windows that are gone are dropped after 14 days instead of piling up in storage.
• State dots — a pulsing dot means that Session is working; a green one means it finished and has not been opened since.
• Wheel scrolling — the wheel over the strip scrolls it sideways when the tabs overflow.
• Keyboard — Enter / Space on a tab opens it, Delete / Backspace closes it; the strip is a tablist and the tabs are tabs.
• New Session square — the + at the left of the strip starts a Session through the client's own navigation service, so the reuse-or-create policy stays where it belongs.
• Caption-row mode — when the shell hands the page the window's title bar, the strip moves into the caption row itself and sits flush with the top of the window: the native Windows buttons stay native (Snap Layouts keep working) and their colours follow the live theme. Without that handover the strip is an ordinary band inside the page.
• A strip that does not get in the way — it starts to the right of the app's own leading controls and of the native window menu, and it is transparent to clicks except on its own controls, so the sidebar-collapse button underneath still works.

Install

The package declares dsh.client (browser half) and dsh.bundle.patch (loader row), so it installs like any other DSH plugin:

# from a checkout, or from a published copy
dsh plugin --profile 
 add 
# after that, reload the page once (a NEW row is picked up when the page's module table is built)

Manual mounting into a profile, which is what this repository was developed against:

# 1. live link so edits are picked up by client HMR without reinstalling
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\.dsh\profiles\
\node_modules\dsh-session-tabs" `
         -Target (Resolve-Path .).Path

# 2. dependency of the profile:  $DSH_HOME/profiles/
/package.json
#    "dsh-session-tabs": "file:
"

# 3. loader row:  $DSH_HOME/profiles/
/cordis.patch.yml
#    - insert:
#        - id: session-tabs
#          name: dsh-session-tabs

The row belongs in the profile's patch layer rather than in dsh.profile.bundles, because the patch layer reloads live: an edit to lib/client.js is picked up by client HMR without a restart, and a page reload picks up everything else. A patch file must not be empty — use [] to disable the layer.

Rollback = drop the insert row, then reload the page; the dependency and the junction can stay, since without the row the package is simply not mounted.

How it works

File	Role
index.js	Host half: an empty apply(), there only so the loader can mount the package and the client-modules scanner can find the dsh.client declaration
lib/client.js	The whole feature: the strip, the per-window tab store, the gestures, the caption-row handling, the tear-off hand-off
cordis.patch.yml	The loader row a bundle install applies

Five decisions worth keeping when editing:

1. The strip is one entry in the shell's shell.overlay seat. That seat is a click-through absolute layer above every column, so the strip can sit above the whole app. The frame itself is shifted down by the strip's height through a CSS rule keyed on the data-dsh-session-tabs attribute and the --dsh-session-tabs-h variable this plugin sets — the strip then occupies exactly the reserved band, drag handles included.
2. Session identity and selection come from the official client services: the Session Controller's list snapshot plus the workspace navigation service, which owns the current Session (selection, openSession, startSession, clearMain). A tab is just a Session id this window keeps around.
3. Which tabs a window has is per-window state: sessionStorage holds the window's own id (and a flag for a window born by tearing a tab off) and localStorage holds the tab list filed behind that id, under dsh.session-tabs.v1:. That is what lets several windows show different Sessions at once and lets each of them restore its own tabs after a reload. A window handed a Session over ?dshTab= always mints a fresh identity, because Chromium clones sessionStorage into script-opened windows and inheriting the source window's list would duplicate every tab.
4. Tearing a tab off asks the shell for a real window. The desktop shell exposes the preload verb window.dshShell.openSessionWindow({ href, x, y, width, height }), which the plugin calls with the drop point; anywhere else it falls back to window.open with a popup geometry. Either way the new window is handed the Session as ?dshTab= on this page's own address, reads it on boot through the official openSession, and strips the parameter with history.replaceState — so the mechanism does not depend on who created the window. The launch token is not forwarded; the signed cookie is enough.
5. The caption row is shared with chrome the page cannot see. The window draws its own controls and its native menu bar in that band, and a translucent title bar lets the menu show through. The app's own controls are measured at runtime and the menu is reserved for; the strip then starts after both. The strip itself is pointer-events: none (its own controls opt back in) — otherwise it swallowed the click on the sidebar-collapse button, which then looked broken — and the free space after the tabs is a separate sibling drag region, because the strip must stay no-drag for tab dragging and wheel scrolling to work.

Verify it yourself

# 1. syntax
node --check index.js && node --check lib/client.js

# 2. headless logic (93 checks): registration, the per-window store, restore, switching,
#    closing, middle click, reorder, tear-off into a new window, a refused shell,
#    the ?dshTab hand-off, housekeeping, the new-session square, and the caption-row geometry
node tools/smoke.mjs

# 3. a running GUI is serving THIS revision (needs a live host and its launcher log)
node tools/verify-live.mjs

# 4. the pre-publish gate: no personal data anywhere, no forbidden APIs in the payload
node tools/audit-public.mjs

tools/smoke.mjs runs the browser half against a mock React (hooks with persistent cells), a mock DOM (elements, rects, ref, attribute queries) and a mock client context (slots, locale, the Session Controller, the navigation service) — no browser, no host, no model call.

tools/verify-live.mjs reads the last dsh web: line a launcher wrote, authenticates with the launch token, and then proves two things: that dsh-session-tabs is a row of the boot graph the page receives, and that the served bundle carries this revision's markers. It is read-only.

Security and privacy

The plugin payload (index.js, lib/client.js, cordis.patch.yml, package.json) is deliberately boring, and tools/audit-public.mjs fails the build if that changes:

• No network access — no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, EventSource, sendBeacon, no dynamic import. The plugin talks only to the client's own services.
• Storage, declared and bounded — exactly ten localStorage / sessionStorage calls, all of them the per-window state described above: a window id, a detached-window flag, the tab list behind that id, and one knob for the caption inset. The keys hold Session ids, the order they were opened in, and the label the app already shows on screen — not message content. No cookies, no indexedDB. The audit prints every declared hit with its reason and fails on the first one beyond the declared count.
• No code or HTML injection — no eval, no new Function, no document.write, no dangerouslySetInnerHTML, no innerHTML assignment. All UI goes through React elements, and the stylesheet is a static string inserted once as a `` tag.
• Permissions — none requested; the plugin never touches the clipboard API.
• Where the pixels and the data go — nowhere. The strip renders text the app already has, and tear-off hands a Session id to a window of the same origin. Nothing leaves the page on the plugin's initiative.
• Contacts with the host — a running GUI's HTTP endpoint is queried only by the development tools in tools/ (read-only: the boot graph and the served bundle), and only at the URL you pass.

Personal data: the repository contains no user paths, no e-mail addresses, no tokens and no logs. tools/audit-public.mjs scans the payload and the whole tree for those, so a re-run is a one-liner instead of a promise.

Compatibility

• Written against the DSH 0.2.0 client contract: Session selection lives in the uiWorkspace service (selection, openSession, startSession, clearMain), and dsh.client.inject lists @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-workspace so that module is loaded before this one.
• On a client that does not expose uiWorkspace the strip still draws correctly but shows no tabs, because there is no selection to reconcile against. That is the one seam this plugin needs; if a future client moves it, the strip fails visibly rather than half-working.
• Caption-row mode needs a shell that hands the page the window's title bar (Electron titleBarStyle: 'hidden' with titleBarOverlay, as this account's own shell does). Without it the plugin falls back to a plain band inside the page, and nothing is lost.
• Russian and English copy is registered through the client's own locale service, so the strip follows whatever language the app is in.
• Node 22+ for the tooling (engines), browser-side: whatever the DSH web client runs on.

Limitations

• In the window of the official DeepSeek Harness app a tab cannot be torn off, and that is a host limitation, not a setting. That host denies every window.open and gives the page no IPC for creating a window. So the tab stays where it is and a hint explains why instead of failing silently. Tear-off works in a shell that exposes the openSessionWindow bridge and in an ordinary browser.
• The caption row belongs to the window, not to the page: the native menu bar is invisible to the page and its width can only be reserved for. If the reserve is wrong for your chrome, it is overridable (see Diagnostics).
• The same Session can be open in two windows at once. The host is the source of truth, but edits made in one window are visible in the other; and the stored "current session" is a single cell shared by all windows, so on load each window re-opens its own active tab and any disagreement corrects itself.
• The window cannot be dragged by the strip once the tabs fill it completely — the same behaviour Chrome has. A 4 px sliver at the top and an 8 px column on the right always stay draggable.
• The strip is 36 px tall (or exactly the height the caption reports) and is drawn in the overlay layer, so it does not scroll with the app.
• In caption mode a tab is 200 px wide, shrinks to 92 px and only then does the strip scroll.

Diagnostics

There is no diagnostics object in this plugin; the strip reports through the client's own logger with a dsh-session-tabs: prefix — mount failures, a shell that refused the new window, a window.open that failed, a Session that is gone, a click that could not leave a global panel. Those lines appear in the page console (F12) and in the host's log.

Two things worth knowing when the strip misbehaves:

• The caption inset is tunable without touching code. The strip measures the app's own leading controls, then adds a reserve for the native menu. Override it, in order of precedence, with window.__DSH_TABS_LEAD__ = set before the page boots, with localStorage['dsh.session-tabs.lead'] = (then reload), or with the --dsh-session-tabs-lead custom property on ``; 0 disables the reserve and leaves the measured chrome only.
• A crashed slot entry is gone for the rest of the page's life — that is the framework's own error boundary, not this plugin. If the strip disappears, document.querySelector('[data-slot-error]') naming shell.overlay means the entry was retired and only a page reload brings it back.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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По-русски, коротко

Плагин для веб-интерфейса DeepSeek Harness: открытые сессии становятся вкладками в полосе над всем окном — как в браузере. Клик переключает, × / средняя кнопка / контекстное меню закрывают (сессия при этом не удаляется), перетаскивание меняет порядок, а вытаскивание вкладки за пределы полосы отцепляет её в отдельное окно. Список вкладок окна переживает перезагрузку страницы.

Состояние вкладок — на окно: sessionStorage хранит идентификатор окна, localStorage — список вкладок этого окна, поэтому несколько окон показывают разные сессии одновременно.

Отцепление идёт через мост оболочки window.dshShell.openSessionWindow({href,x,y,width,height}), а новое окно получает сессию параметром ?dshTab=; в обычном браузере используется window.open. В окне официального приложения DeepSeek Harness отцепить вкладку невозможно: хост запрещает все window.open и не даёт странице IPC для создания окна — вкладка остаётся на месте и показывает подсказку с причиной.

Когда оболочка отдаёт странице полосу заголовка (caption row), вкладки встают вплотную к верху окна, нативные кнопки Windows остаются нативными, а их цвет берётся из темы. Полоса сдвинута правее кнопки панели и нативного меню и прозрачна для кликов, кроме своих элементов.

Проверки: npm run check, npm run smoke (93 проверки), npm run audit; npm run verify требует живого GUI. Лицензия MIT.