---

description: "Codex-style sidebar skin for the DeepSeek Harness Web GUI: a Projects + Recents browser and a New chat row that starts a real session with no project in a freshly minted working directory, reclaimed again the moment the chat is abandoned unused." kind: "package-reference"

dsh-plugin-codex-ui

English | 中文

A Codex-style sidebar skin for the DeepSeek Harness Web GUI.

It replaces the shipped browsing region with two collapsible sections — Projects and Recents — under a single New chat row that starts a session without choosing a project, allocating a fresh working directory for it exactly the way the Codex app does.

DeepSeek Harness                           ⇤      ← brand row (shipped shell, renamed)
＋ 新对话                                          ← starts a real chat in a fresh temporary directory
─────────────────────────────────────────────
项目                                        ＋      ← section title; click it to fold
    📁 pi                                     ← one row per project, no chevron
    📁 dsh-plugin-codex-ui
最近
    20260912-135505-27c0                       ← project-less chats only, title only
    …                                         显示更多
─────────────────────────────────────────────
⚙ 设置                                             ← shipped settings foot

Both sections fold, each fold survives a reload, and clicking a project folds its own chats out beneath it.

Section titles and rows read the way the Codex sidebar does: a section title is a small quiet label on the same left inset as the row glyphs under it, a row is a 32px line whose title owns the full width — no chevron, no relative time — and the row glyphs and titles carry the dark label-primary text while a section title and a collapsed section's count stay label-tertiary. Hover is a background change, not a colour change, and the current chat is marked by its filled pill.

What it changes

Surface	Change
Sidebar brand name	Shows DeepSeek Harness instead of the local build badge.
Sidebar browsing region	Replaced by this plugin's Projects + Recents browser.
Global panel rows	Hidden. This skin has no Pull requests / Scheduled / Plugins rows.
Shipped New Session button	Hidden while the column is expanded, replaced by this skin's 新对话 row. The collapsed rail keeps the shipped icon button.
--dsh-sidebar-inline-padding	Tightened from 12px to 10px.

Everything else is the shipped shell: the brand row, the collapse animation, the 36px rail, and the settings foot are all untouched.

Install

Requires the web profile of DeepSeek Harness (Node ≥ 20) and pnpm on PATH, because dsh plugin forwards to pnpm inside the profile directory.

# from GitHub
dsh plugin --profile web add github:ice-ai-lab/dsh-plugin-codex-ui

# or from a local checkout
dsh plugin --profile web add /absolute/path/to/dsh-plugin-codex-ui

The package declares dsh.bundle.patch, so dsh plugin add appends it to dsh.profile.bundles automatically and the layer applies on the next boot.

Then restart dsh web. The client half is composed into window.__DSH_BOOT__ at boot time, so a page refresh alone will not pick it up.

To remove it:

dsh plugin --profile web remove dsh-plugin-codex-ui

The two gestures that are not just styling

Start a chat with no project

新对话 starts a real chat with no project. It asks the node half for a fresh working directory, registers that directory as a Workspace, creates the session in it and opens it — the shipped New Session order, with a directory the reader never had to pick. The composer that comes up is the shipped one and fully live: the model picker, the permission chip, +, @, and the context meter all work from the first keystroke.

There is no mock composer and nothing is deferred, because a chat you can choose a model in has to exist, and a session cannot exist without a working directory. The directory is created when the chat is.

That is what the cleanup is for. The last chat this row minted is remembered, and reclaimed the moment the reader moves on without using it: the session is archived, its Workspace registration dropped, its directory removed. Ten clicks in a row leave one directory, not ten. A chat that was used is never reclaimed — messages make it an ordinary chat, and typed text keeps it (and keeps its row listed, so the text stays reachable) until it is sent or cleared. Anything this skin minted and then lost track of — a crash between minting and recording, a record lost with the browser's storage — is swept on the next load: a directory under this skin's root that no workspace and no chat refers to, or a minted workspace holding nothing but untouched chats, older than a grace period, goes.

Why the registration matters: a session rooted only at a working directory and owned by no workspace is treated by the conversation as incomplete — the composer goes inert behind "choose a workspace to start" and the model picker goes with it. Going through a workspace yields a chat byte-for-byte the same as one started inside a project, the only difference being which workspace it names.

Keeping that workspace out of Projects is then this skin's job, not a side effect: the node half reports the directory root it mints under, and any workspace inside that root counts as project-less, so its chat lands in Recents, which is where a chat with no project belongs.

Projects

Projects lists the working directories registered in the DSH workspace registry. A project row is just a folder glyph and a name — no chevron: the folder itself carries the fold state (closed when the chats are hidden, open when they are showing), so the row reads as one mark instead of two.

Clicking a project folds out its chats; the row's ＋ starts a new chat inside it; the 🗑 removes the registration only (the directory and the session logs stay).

Add one with the section's ＋ (or the 选择项目 button in the empty state): it asks the Host for its directory chooser straight away, with no form in between, and adopts whatever comes back. Cancelling the chooser is not an error and changes nothing.

That chooser is the Host's own directory-picking capability — the same one the shipped "choose a workspace" gesture uses. If a composition omits the directory-picking packages, adding a project is unavailable, and the skin says so inline rather than silently doing nothing.

Recents

Recents lists the chats that belong to no project — the ones this skin starts from 新对话, plus any session the registry accounts to nothing. A project's own chats are reached by folding that project open, so listing them here too would show the same chat twice under two headings.

A chat moves from Recents into its project as soon as it is accounted to one, and it keeps a working directory of its own throughout — nothing is moved on disk.

A session row carries a hover-revealed 🗑, and what it does is archive the chat — archiveSession is the only session removal the Host has. The chat leaves every grouping surface and its log file stays on disk. Archiving is one-way: no unarchive exists in the client API, in the Host commands, or in the shipped UI. So the control is deliberately two steps — the trash turns that row into the question Archive “”?, naming the chat it would retire, and only the answer archives it. A one-click, one-way, hover-revealed control at the exact right edge of a row you are aiming at is a trap; a question is not.

That the row disappears immediately is this skin's own doing: the session list does not carry the archive set, so the set is read from the Workspace projection and subtracted here — exactly as the shipped browsing region does.

Where project-less working directories live

$DSH_HOME/codex-workspaces/-/     # $DSH_HOME defaults to ~/.dsh

Deliberately not the scratch directory other sidebar skins use: two plugins sharing one root would let either one's cleanup delete the other's live session directories.

Nothing prunes this directory automatically, and none of it shows as a project — project-less chats appear under 最近, which is the intended shape. Delete a directory by hand once you no longer want its chat.

One consequence worth knowing: every 新对话 click mints a new directory and registers it, so the workspace registry gains one row per project-less chat — a new chat means a new working directory, the way the Codex app does it. Those rows stay out of Projects but they are real registrations; removing one (🗑 works on projects only, so use the shipped workspace UI or workspace.json) removes the registration and keeps the directory and the chat log.

Customising

The wordmark. lib/client.js defines BrandName; change the string it returns.

Not hiding the global panel rows. Delete this line from CSS in lib/client.js:

nav[class*="_panelList"] { display: none !important; }

It exists because a dynamically loaded client plugin may register a global panel row (that is how a Pull requests / Scheduled / Plugins row reaches the sidebar). The default composition registers none, so with the rule in place the sidebar simply shows Projects and Recents; with it removed, any panel row a plugin contributes becomes reachable again.

What this skin does not do

The shipped browser also offers session search, rename, fork, drag reordering, and subagent lineage. This skin deliberately ships none of them — it is a skin, not a second browser. (Removing a chat it does ship, because a list you cannot prune is not a list you own.) If you need the rest, remove the plugin. (Setting SHADOW_PRIORITY in lib/client.js above 0 hands both claimed cells back to the shipped implementations, which switches the skin off without uninstalling it.)

How it works

• The node half (lib/index.js) exposes two exact routes over the harness web server — allocate a working directory (and report the root plus everything already minted under it), and delete directories this plugin allocated. Names are entirely server-generated, deletion accepts names only, and every name is validated as a single path segment and re-checked for containment after resolution. No caller-supplied path ever reaches the filesystem. The listing is what the browser half's load-time sweep reads to tell a directory nothing refers to from one live work sits in.
• The browser half (lib/client.js) claims two single slots: sidebar.brand.name for the wordmark and sidebar.workspaces for the browsing region. A single slot is claimed rather than composed — the registry refuses a second registration at the same priority — so this skin registers at SHADOW_PRIORITY (-10), and the lowest priority renders. If the plugin is unloaded, or this entry ever abdicates after a render crash, the shipped browser takes the cell back with no reload.
• The subtractions are CSS, not shadowed components. Removing the shipped panel rows and the shipped New Session button is a subtraction, and shadowing the whole sidebar slot to achieve it would mean reimplementing the brand row, the collapse animation, the rail, and the settings foot — four shipped behaviours this skin has no opinion about.

Verify the source

npm run check          # node --check on both halves of the plugin

Ecosystem

This plugin is published the way the harness asks third parties to publish: the repository carries the dsh-plugin topic for discoverability, and installation goes through dsh plugin add github:… rather than a pull request to the core repository, which does not accept external PRs.

License

MIT