dsh-editor-link
The link between DeepSeek Harness and your editor
Answer approvals and questions in VS Code, and let the agent see your editor.
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Using DSH today means living in two windows: the DSH web UI and VS Code. The ecosystem has fragments — a selection inserter, a file jumper, an ACP bridge — but nobody covers the two highest-frequency actions: answering approvals where you already are, and giving the agent the editor context that Claude Code users take for granted.
dsh-editor-link is one product with two halves — a DSH plugin and a VS Code extension — talking over a token-authenticated loopback JSON-RPC channel.
📑 Table of Contents
✨ Features
- Approvals in VS Code — a tool call needs permission and a native VS Code notification offers Allow once / Reject. No Alt-Tab.
- Questions in the sidebar —
ask_user_question renders as a card in the sidebar: click to answer single-select, tick and submit for multi-select, or type a custom answer. No QuickPick pops up outside the sidebar.
- Editor context for the agent — the
ide_context tool reads the active file, its diagnostics (file:line:col), and the current selection.
- Selection to composer —
DSH Link: Send Selection to Composer drops path:lines plus a fenced block into the DSH composer.
- Jump to what the agent touched — a status-bar item opens the last file the agent read or wrote at its line, and file tool cards in the web UI grow a small
↗ button that does the same.
- Sidebar panel — an activity-bar view with the live transcript, inline approvals, and a composer that sends, steers, or stops a turn.
- Session picker that follows your folder — sessions are grouped by DSH workspace and scoped to the VS Code folder; archived and blank sessions stay hidden; switching folders re-scopes the list.
- Model, effort, and permission pickers — switch the session's model, reasoning effort, and permission preset without opening the web UI.
- Prompt completion — when a turn ends, the composer predicts your next message; typing cancels it,
Tab accepts, ↻ rerolls, Esc dismisses.
- Full DSH in a tab — open the complete web UI inside VS Code with the authenticated URL already applied.
Both surfaces stay live: approvals and questions also appear in the web UI, and whichever you answer first wins — late answers are refused with an explicit error.
🚀 Install
1. Install the DSH plugin (recommended)
The plugin half runs inside DSH and publishes this package to npm.
- GUI: Plugins → Add plugin → paste
dsh-editor-link → install.
- CLI:
dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-editor-link
The CLI only installs the package. It does not register the profile bundle, so the plugin stays unloaded until dsh-editor-link is appended to dsh.profile.bundles in ~/.dsh/profiles/<profile>/package.json. The GUI does that step for you.
2. Install the VS Code extension
Install from the VS Code Marketplace:
code --install-extension ferrisching.dsh-editor-link
Or, offline, download dsh-editor-link-extension-<version>.vsix from Releases and run code --install-extension <file>.vsix --force.
Then reload the VS Code window. The DSH view appears in the activity bar.
3. From source
git clone https://github.com/ferrisching/dsh-editor-link
cd dsh-editor-link
npm install # plugin tests (linkedom)
cd extension && npm install # extension build (esbuild, @types/vscode)
Requirements
| Component | Requirement |
|---|
| DSH | 0.2.0-rc.2, 0.2.1-rc.1, 0.2.1-rc.2 verified |
| VS Code | 1.85 or newer |
| Node | 20 or newer (plugin side) |
⌨️ Usage
- Start DSH. The bridge connects on its own; the status-bar item appears the first time the agent touches a file.
- Open the DSH view in the VS Code activity bar. Sessions load for the DSH workspace that contains your VS Code folder.
- Ask something in the composer. When a tool needs permission, answer it in the notification — the web UI card disappears at the same time.
- Mention "@ the file I'm looking at" and the agent gets it through
ide_context; select code and run Send Selection to Composer to hand over an excerpt instead.
⚙️ Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|
DSH Link: Send Selection to Composer | Push the selection into the DSH composer as path:lines plus a fenced block |
DSH Link: Open Last File Touched by the Agent | Jump to the last file the agent read or wrote |
DSH Link: Open Active Session in Browser | Open the running DSH web UI in your browser |
The sidebar toolbar also exposes model, reasoning effort, permission preset, a + menu (/goal, /plan, /feedback, /compact, /export plus a file picker and the permission/model pickers), and the send/stop control.
🔌 Host routes
| Method | Path | Purpose |
|---|
GET | /editor-link/events | Server-sent events to the browser half (composer.insert, editor/reveal) |
POST | /editor-link/open | Mirrors the ↗ button on file tool cards: { filePath, line } |
🧩 How it works
- Host plugin (
lib/) opens a loopback TCP listener on ports 7410–7419 and writes a discovery file (~/.dsh/editor-link/<pid>.json, mode 0600) carrying the port and a token.
- VS Code extension (
extension/) reads the discovery file, keeps one JSON-RPC 2.0 connection per DSH process and multiplexes every call over it, and answers the approval/request and user-questions/request waterfalls from native UI.
- Browser half (
client/) subscribes to /editor-link/events and decorates file tool cards; the extension calls back through the host when a card button is clicked.
- Approvals race all surfaces. The first answer wins; later answers are rejected with
-32002 instead of silently succeeding.
🛠️ Development
.
├── lib/ host plugin (bridge, forwarding, panel RPC, ide capture)
├── client/ web UI half (SSE listener, tool-card buttons)
├── cordis.patch.yml bundle patch — required for `dsh plugin add`
├── test/ node:test suites (81 cases)
├── extension/ VS Code extension (TypeScript + esbuild)
│ ├── src/ extension host and sidebar webview
│ └── test/ runtime smoke test (vm.Script parse + linkedom DOM)
├── scripts/ real-cordis integration harness
└── docs/ design notes, verified seams, verification log
npm test # plugin suites
npm run test:extension # build + extension smoke test
DSH_BUNDLE_DIR=/path/to/dsh node scripts/integration-cordis.mjs # real cordis harness
🔐 Security and cost
- The bridge listens on loopback only, requires the token from the discovery file on every request, and rotates when DSH restarts.
- No telemetry, no outbound network calls, no credentials stored in the repository or the discovery file beyond the per-process token.
- Prompt completion and session titles spend model tokens: completion pins the shallowest reasoning effort the model advertises and caps the reply at 80 tokens.
⚠️ Known limitations
- Multiple VS Code windows on one host are untested.
- With more than one DSH process running, requests go to the instance that
connected first: the session list, approvals and questions all belong to it.
There is no per-session routing between hosts yet.
- A question answered in VS Code stays visible in the DSH web/desktop client as a
reply card until it is dismissed there. The answer itself is recorded — the
tool result and the session projection both settle — but the client only
closes its own card when that client submits the answer.
- Windows and WSL paths are untested; the discovery and path logic assume POSIX paths.
- The SSE route is loopback-only and unauthenticated; it carries no secrets but is not suitable for exposing.
- Verification targets DSH
0.2.0-rc.2, 0.2.1-rc.1 and 0.2.1-rc.2; other versions may move the seams this plugin relies on.
📄 License
MIT — see LICENSE.
