dsh-lively
Live wallpaper layer for the DeepSeek Harness Web GUI: an animated wallpaper
behind the interface — procedural presets, images, GIF or video — with a small
settings page to pick the look.
Light theme preview
▶ Watch the 47-second intro video — narrated tour of the presets, custom wallpapers, playlist and controls (1080p30, Chinese narration).
Features
- Six procedural presets — Flow, Aurora, Starfield, Lava, Mesh, Neon grid.
Flow is the deliberately animated one (position + size drift); each preset has
a dark variant for the dark palette and a bright variant for the light
palette, so a light theme never ends up with a grey wash.
- Custom wallpaper — image, GIF, WebP, AVIF, MP4 or WebM, by URL or uploaded
from disk. Uploads live under
$DSH_HOME/dsh-lively-media/ and are served by
the plugin's own route, so they survive a reload and a restart.
- Controls — wallpaper strength (how much wallpaper shows through), dim,
video softness, animation speed, a motion switch (the reduced-motion escape
hatch), pause when the window is hidden.
- Playlist — rotate through any subset of the presets every 1–240 minutes,
in order or shuffled.
- Wallpaper library — every uploaded file is listed in Settings, so a
wallpaper picked last week is one click away; the host lists
$DSH_HOME/dsh-lively-media/ through /dsh-lively/library.
- Theme aware — the veil is keyed on
body[data-ds-dark-theme]; the
bright/dark preset variants are keyed on html:has(> body[data-ds-dark-theme]).
Install
git clone https://github.com/hero-jianghaojie/dsh-lively.git
dsh plugin --profile desktop add ./dsh-lively
Then restart DSH (the sidebar's restart button, if installed) and open
Settings → Live wallpaper.
How it works
- The wallpaper lives in one fixed layer at
z-index:-1 (#dsh-lively-layer)
with three children: the animated surface, the theme-coloured veil
(strength) and the dim overlay. The layer is appended to the root so it
sits under every column.
- Why not the root element's own background? Chromium paints the root background
into the canvas background layer; a
background-position/background-size
animation on html advances the animation clock but does not repaint on
screen, so the presets looked static. An ordinary element repaints, and that
is what the layer uses.
- The shell paints
--dsw-alias-bg-base on the frame and on the centre
column, and alphas multiply. The token is therefore fully transparent, so
the layer shows through with the single veil painted once, above the surface.
- No
backdrop-filter on the shell columns: it would make them the containing
block for fixed-position descendants, and the sidebar's fold toggle is
position: fixed — frosting the column drags that button onto the brand mark.
- Settings persist twice:
localStorage (instant) and
$DSH_HOME/dsh-lively-state.json via /dsh-lively/state, because the Desktop
app's loopback port changes on every launch.
Limitations
- A video wallpaper needs a real
<video> element; CSS alone cannot play video.
- The softness control applies to video only — CSS cannot blur the root
background, and blurring the columns breaks fixed-position shell chrome.
- The frame-transparency rule targets
[class$='_frame'], which follows the
shell's CSS-module naming.
License
MIT
