dsh-terminal-keybar-dock
A DeepSeek Harness (DSH) Client plugin: the
mobile twin of
dsh-terminal-keybar, without the
floating look.
A phone's soft keyboard has no Escape, Tab, Ctrl, Shift or arrow keys, and the DSH
terminal has no on-screen replacement. The upstream plugin floats a translucent
column of those keys beside the terminal; this variant docks them instead:
- a solid horizontal bar along the bottom edge of the active terminal — on
a phone the right Sidebar presents the terminal fullscreen below 768px, so
the screen bottom is the terminal bottom;
- the terminal gives the bar its band: the body box holding the terminal
reserves a bottom padding of the bar's height (plus the keyboard inset while
the keyboard is open), so the terminal re-fits above the bar and its last row —
the prompt and the cursor — stays visible instead of being covered;
- rides the soft keyboard: while the keyboard is open the bar sits directly
on top of it, tracking its height, so the keys you need are always between
the terminal output and the keyboard;
- Ctrl / Shift modifiers: the two keys at the head of the row are sticky and
apply to the next bar key or the next character typed on the soft keyboard, so
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+D / Ctrl+R — the reason a terminal has Ctrl — become reachable;
- mobile only, and only while the terminal is on screen: it appears on touch
devices with a viewport narrower than 768px while the right Sidebar's active
tab is a terminal and that terminal's body is actually visible. On tablets and
landscape phones (side-by-side layout) it stays off, and collapsing the panel
takes the bar with it.
Keys: Ctrl · Shift · Esc · Tab · ↵ · ^C · ↑ · ↓ · ← · →
Modifier keys (Ctrl / Shift)
The Ctrl and Shift keys are sticky, one-shot modifiers: tap one and it
lights up, tap it again to cancel, and the two compose (Ctrl+Shift). An armed
modifier applies to the next key — a bar key or one character typed on the
soft keyboard — and then clears itself.
- Against the bar:
Shift+Tab sends ESC [ Z (back-tab), and Ctrl /
Shift + an arrow sends the standard xterm modifier sequence (ESC [ 1 ; 5 A
for Ctrl+↑, 1;2 for Shift, 1;6 for both), so Ctrl+←/→ moves by word in
readline and vim. Ctrl+Esc, Ctrl+↵ and Ctrl+^C send the same bytes
as the unmodified keys — terminals draw no further distinction.
- Against the soft keyboard: while a modifier is armed, the next typed
character is intercepted from the terminal's hidden textarea as a cancelable
beforeinput, the insertion is cancelled, and the rewritten byte goes through
the same terminal service. Ctrl+A…Z become the C0 control bytes (Ctrl+C
interrupt, Ctrl+D EOF, Ctrl+Z suspend, Ctrl+R reverse search, Ctrl+L clear,
Ctrl+W kill word); Ctrl+[ \ ] ^ _, space and ? map to their ASCII control
codes; Shift uppercases ASCII letters. Input that is not one keystroke — an IME
composition, a paste — is left alone and the modifiers stay armed.
- Tapping anywhere outside the bar, switching tabs or the bar disappearing clears
the armed state, so a modifier tapped by accident cannot rewrite a later
keystroke.
Shift only changes the case of ASCII letters; digits and symbols keep whatever
the soft keyboard's own Shift produced (layouts differ, and the plugin does not
guess). Ctrl sends a character with no control meaning exactly as typed.
How the keyboard inset works
iOS Safari and modern Android Chrome keep the layout viewport intact and shrink
window.visualViewport instead, so a plain position: fixed; bottom: 0 bar
would sit behind the keyboard. The bar reads the keyboard inset as
innerHeight − visualViewport.offsetTop − visualViewport.height and sets its own
bottom to max(inset, env(safe-area-inset-bottom)) — on the keyboard while it
is open, above the home indicator while it is closed. The reserved band the
terminal gives up is the same expression plus the bar's height, so the terminal's
bottom edge always meets the bar's top edge. Browsers that resize the layout
viewport instead (older Android, Firefox) report no inset and need none: their
bottom: 0 is already above the keyboard.
Presses use pointerdown with preventDefault, so the terminal's textarea keeps
focus and the soft keyboard stays open. Bytes go through the public Client
terminal service of the active tab (webTerminals.view(...).write(...)); no
terminal code is copied.
Install
Install as a local bundle from this directory (DeepSeek Harness, Plugins →
Install, or the plugin_manager tool with install_bundle). Then disable the
upstream dsh-terminal-keybar so the floating column does not appear beside
the docked bar. Reload the page after installation.
Notes
- Derived from
dsh-terminal-keybar (MIT); the write path, seat registration
and diagnosis badge are inherited from it, while the sticky Ctrl/Shift
modifiers and typed-character interception are new here. See MAINTENANCE.md
for every upstream API this plugin touches — including the tab-body markers the
visibility gate and the reserved band are built on, and the hidden textarea the
modifiers intercept.
- The keyboard-inset path follows the standard
visualViewport formula, which
desktop browsers cannot fully exercise (no soft keyboard); the closed-keyboard
docked layout, the reserved band and key delivery are verifiable in a narrow
touch-emulated viewport, the open-keyboard ride-up needs a real phone. The
modifier interception listens for beforeinput, which a touch-emulated page
can dispatch; the real soft-keyboard timing still deserves a pass on a phone.
