dsh-tool-terminal-search

A terminal_search tool plugin for DeepSeek Harness (dsh): locate lines in large retained terminal scrollback by literal substring or regular expression, without paging backward blindly through tens of thousands of log lines.

The tool is composed only over the public ctx.terminals.read seam — no upstream package changes, so it runs on published dsh releases today.

Why

terminal_read pages retained scrollback by newest-relative offset/count. With backend log output running to tens of thousands of lines, a model cannot tell where the interesting lines are: it has to page backward from the newest output one page at a time, and totalLines alone does not locate a needle in the retained buffer. terminal_search closes that gap by finding lines by content.

Install

In your dsh profile directory (e.g. ~/.dsh/profiles/web), add the dependency and the patch entry:

npm install dsh-tool-terminal-search

# ~/.dsh/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml
- insert:
    - id: terminal
      name: '@deepseek-ai/dsh-terminal'
    - id: terminal-bash
      name: '@deepseek-ai/dsh-terminal-bash'
    - id: tool-terminal
      name: '@deepseek-ai/dsh-tool-terminal'
    - id: tool-terminal-search
      name: 'dsh-tool-terminal-search'

Restart your dsh profile. The model gains terminal_search next to the official terminal_open / terminal_send / terminal_read tools.

Behavior

terminal_search(sessionId, pattern, regex?, offset?, limit?):

• Pages the whole retained scrollback (newest → oldest) through terminal_read and matches each line.
• pattern is a literal substring by default (grep -F style) — no regex metacharacters to escape; pass regex: true to treat it as a JavaScript regular expression. Compiled regexes go through a process-wide bounded FIFO cache (oldest entries evicted first), so repeated patterns never recompile.
• Returns matching lines newest first, each with a newest-relative offset that is directly usable as a offset (jump to a match's context in one follow-up call).