dsh-selection-quote
Select text in a DSH conversation and attach it to the composer as a quote
reference — an atomic chip, not pasted text. Nothing is sent.
English | 中文
Selecting a passage in the transcript; a floating "add to chat" pill appears next to the selection
What it does
-
Select a non-empty passage in the transcript (an assistant reply, your own
message, or a steering note).
-
A small pill appears next to the selection: 「添加到对话框」 / "Add to chat".
-
Clicking it places a quote chip in the composer, labelled with a short
taste of the passage:
what you had already typed [引用：the passage…]
-
The chip is a node in the editor, not a string:
- one Backspace removes the whole thing;
- it undoes in the same step as the typing around it;
- copying the draft expands it to the quote text (
> …), so it stays
readable wherever it is pasted;
- at submit time this plugin's reference codec turns it into the model
text, rather than splicing text into the draft when you click.
Which makes it the same kind of thing as @file / @session — DSH's own
answer to "an object in the composer".
-
Focus returns to the composer so you can type your question and send it
yourself.
What it does not do: it never sends, never writes storage, and never touches
the session log.
How a quote becomes model text
This is the plugin's actual mechanism, and the difference from "paste the text
in":
| Projection | Owner | Value |
|---|
| Chip label on screen | label at insertion | 引用：the passage… |
| Clipboard / persisted draft | codec.clipboardText(ref) | > the passage |
| What the model receives | codec.serialize(ref, signal) | > the passage |
-
The source is registered with
ctx.inputTriggers.registerSource({ trigger: '@', name: 'quote', codec }).
ReferenceInsert.source on every inserted chip must equal that name, or the
submit path cannot find the codec.
-
DSH defines a missing codec as a refused submission, not a silent
downgrade to the clipboard text. So ref is self-contained — the passage is
base64url-encoded inside it — and resolution never depends on plugin memory.
A restored draft, a hot reload, or a chip from another session can always be
serialized.
-
The insertion point is expressed in detect coordinates. The composer walks
its document into two projections: detectText, where each chip is exactly
one object-replacement character, and the clipboard projection the shell
publishes as InputState.draft, where each chip is its full clipboard form.
So "the end of the document" has to be folded back:
end = state.draft.length - Σ(occurrence.length - 1)
-
The entry point is the one the service documents in its own error message:
ctx.sessions.scope(sessionId).conversation.input.for(actx).insertReference(ref, span).
-
If the insertion is refused (a stale revision, a span the fold could not
place) the plugin falls back to plain-text quoting rather than dropping
the passage. Set DIAGNOSTIC = true in src/client.tsx to see which path was
taken.
Install
The plugin has a Host half and a browser half, and it is mounted by naming it in
a profile. There are three ways to do that. Pick one — listing the package as
a bundle and writing an explicit insert leaves two entries sharing an id, and
only one of them stays active.
| needs a package manager | edits | verified |
|---|
| 1. As a package | yes | none | yes |
| 2. From a clone, by absolute path | no | four lines of YAML | yes |
| 3. As a package, inserted by name | yes | four lines of YAML | yes |
1. As a package
dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:cfyofjackie/dsh-selection-quote
That is the whole install. The command forwards to pnpm inside the profile
directory, and because the package declares dsh.bundle.patch it also appends
the package name to dsh.profile.bundles — which is what actually mounts the
plugin. It does not say so in its output, so check the bundle list rather than
adding the name yourself: a duplicate entry mounts the same layer twice and
leaves two entries sharing one id, of which only one stays active.
A package listed as a bundle without declaring dsh.bundle fails the boot loudly
rather than silently doing nothing. Installing without being listed leaves the
package present but inert.
2. From a clone, by absolute path
No package manager involved. On macOS and Linux the desktop profile lives at
~/.dsh/profiles/desktop/cordis.patch.yml:
# ~/.dsh/profiles/desktop/cordis.patch.yml
- insert:
- id: dsh-selection-quote
name: "/absolute/path/to/dsh-selection-quote/lib/index.js"
A freshly created profile's patch file contains just []. Replace that
line with the block above — do not append after it, because [] followed by a
list item is a YAML parse error and the profile will fail to boot. If the file
already holds entries, append normally.
On Windows the profile is %USERPROFILE%\.dsh\profiles\desktop\cordis.patch.yml
and the path is a Windows path. Forward slashes work and avoid YAML escaping:
- insert:
- id: dsh-selection-quote
name: "C:/path/to/dsh-selection-quote/lib/index.js"
3. As a package, inserted by name
Same dsh plugin … add as above, but mount it through the profile's patch file
instead of its bundle list. The Loader resolves a bare name from the profile's
own node_modules, which is where the package manager put it:
# ~/.dsh/profiles/desktop/cordis.patch.yml
- insert:
- id: dsh-selection-quote
name: "dsh-selection-quote"
After mounting
Profile patches reload live, but an already-loaded page keeps the boot graph it
was served — reload once (Cmd+R on macOS, Ctrl+R elsewhere, or restart DSH).
To remove it, undo whichever mount you chose and reload.
lib/ is committed on purpose: the profile loads lib/index.js and
lib/client.js directly, so a checkout works without a build step.
Trying it without touching your main profile
A profile is a self-contained plugin tree, so a throwaway one is the safe way to
evaluate this — and pointing a separate DSH_HOME at it keeps sessions and
storage out of the way too:
CLI="/Applications/DeepSeek Harness.app/Contents/Resources/runtime/cli/bin/dsh"
export DSH_HOME=/tmp/dsh-sandbox
"$CLI" --profile sandbox --from-default-profile web --dump-config # create
"$CLI" plugin --profile sandbox add github:cfyofjackie/dsh-selection-quote
"$CLI" --profile sandbox --port 3917 # boot
(Without a package manager, skip the second line and put install route 2's YAML
in $DSH_HOME/profiles/sandbox/cordis.patch.yml instead.)
To check the mount actually took before booting, --dump-config prints the
composed tree, and the dsh web page's boot graph carries one row per client
plugin with the content hash of its bundle.
Two things that surprise people about a fresh DSH_HOME:
- it has no model credentials. The UI loads and the plugin registers, but a
conversation has nothing to answer with. Copy
~/.dsh/.credentials.yaml into
the sandbox home to lend it your key — or, if you would rather not, create the
second profile inside your real DSH_HOME instead (--profile sandbox --from-default-profile web without the export); that shares credentials and
sessions and differs only in its plugin tree.
- the web auth token is not a setting. It is minted per boot and carried in
the URL
dsh web prints. Opening the bare 127.0.0.1:<port> answers 401; open
the printed URL instead.
UI language
The pill follows DSH's active locale. The plugin registers both zh and en
dictionaries (ctx.locale.register), matching the shipped convention that a
language's fallback chain terminates at English — so switching DSH's language to
English shows "Add to chat" with no plugin change.
Development
npm install --no-save esbuild # the only build tool; DSH's own runtime also works
npm run build # writes lib/index.js and lib/client.js
npm run watch # rebuild on change
npm test # build, then the headless suite (no browser needed)
The underlying commands are plain Node, so npm is a convenience rather than a
requirement: node build.mjs, node build.mjs --watch, node --test. Nothing
in the repository depends on a package being installed — npm install above is
only there to supply esbuild when the machine has no DSH runtime to borrow it
from. build.mjs looks for esbuild in the plugin folder,
$DSH_HOME/profiles/node_modules, the npm npx cache (POSIX and Windows), and the
DSH app runtime; DSH_ESBUILD=/path/to/esbuild overrides the search.
Build output
| File | Role |
|---|
lib/index.js | Host half. It must exist: the client module system only composes a browser bundle for packages that appear as Loader entries and declare dsh.client. The body is deliberately empty. |
lib/client.js | Browser half: a CJS bundle wrapped in the window.__ModuleLoader__.load({ id, factory }) registration envelope. |
cordis.patch.yml | This package's own profile layer, named by dsh.bundle.patch. It is what makes "add the name to dsh.profile.bundles" a complete install. |
Tests
npm test runs the built bundle, not the TypeScript source: it stubs the
browser globals and the platform-seed modules, renders components with a small
hook runtime that also implements React's error-boundary semantics, and replays
real event orderings (pointerdown capture before click). Regression tests
cover each failure this plugin has actually had.
Notes from building this
Four failures shaped the current design; every one of them was invisible
without instrumentation, and each is generalizable to any DSH client plugin:
- A slot entry that throws once is silently abdicated. The slot renderer
wraps every entry in an error boundary and marks a crashed entry
abdicated, after which it is skipped forever — no error UI, no log the user
sees, and the plugin still reports active in the loader.
- Platform-seed module exports drift between shell builds. The desktop app
serves the
dsh-web-frontend dist bundled inside app.asar, which is not
the copy published in the profile's node_modules. In that build the icon
set is named Icon*OutlineRegular / Icon*OutlineMedium, so
IconPlusOutline16 resolved to undefined and React raised error #130.
- A document-level capture
scroll listener that measures the selection
forces a layout per event. During a drag-select with autoscroll that is
dozens of forced layouts, and it made the pill take a second or two to
appear.
- A transcript selection does not clear by itself. Chromium only collapses
an existing selection when the press lands on a selectable target, and the
transcript's own chrome opts out of selection — so pressing next to a message
left the blue highlight up with no way to remove it. The plugin now dismisses
it on a primary press, while deliberately leaving shift-press (extend) and
secondary press (context menu → Copy) alone.
The full writeup, with the code each conclusion came from, is in
docs/gotchas.md.
Known limitations
- The quote lands at the end of the document, not at the caret. The caret is
not part of the public standard props (
ComposerKeyboard.caretSpan() is
package-internal), whereas the document end can be computed exactly.
- If insertion is refused the quote falls back to plain text: the passage is
not lost, it just stops being a chip.
- One quote is capped at 20 000 characters; beyond that it is truncated with an
explicit marker in the quote, never silently shortened.
- A quote is not editable — it is an atomic node; delete it and select
again.
- The pill is disabled while the composer is
adjudicating / claimed /
submitting.
- Chat view only. The selection must sit inside
[data-chat-flow]; the
trajectory and waterfall views do not carry those anchors.
- A selection spanning several transcript nodes is judged by the node it starts
in.
- A quote carries no provenance (which message it came from). The
INCLUDE_PROVENANCE constant is the hook for adding it.
Compatibility
Built and verified against DSH 0.1.5-rc.3 client packages on the macOS desktop
profile. It deliberately depends on nothing but React from the platform seed, so
it does not break when a shell build renames its own exports.
Platform support. Nothing in the plugin is OS-specific: the browser half is
React plus DOM APIs, and the build script uses only node:fs/node:path. The
parts that could differ are covered explicitly:
- the esbuild search walks POSIX and Windows locations
(
%LOCALAPPDATA%\npm-cache\_npx, the packaged runtime under %PROGRAMFILES%),
and DSH_ESBUILD overrides it outright;
lib/ is committed, so a user never needs the build step at all — the only
thing a Windows user does is point a patch at the path;- line endings are pinned by
.gitattributes, esbuild normalizes output to LF,
and a test asserts the committed bundle contains no CRLF;
- the test that imports the Host half goes through
pathToFileURL, because a
dynamic import() of C:\… is rejected as an unsupported URL scheme;
- CI runs the build and the full test suite on ubuntu, windows and macos,
and fails if the committed
lib/ no longer matches the source.
What is not verified is DSH's own Windows build: the desktop app's Electron
shell, and therefore which dist it serves, was only inspected on macOS. If
something misbehaves there, the plugin's DIAGNOSTIC switch will say which gate
refused the selection.
Not affiliated with DeepSeek.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.
