dash

DASH is a terminal-native front door for DeepSeek Harness: the same everything-is-a-plugin agent core and multi-provider model switching — inside your shell.

dash is a Cordis plugin (bundle) mounted over the official dsh-base layer, installed with a single dsh plugin add. DASH = DeepSeek AweSome Harness.

中文版见 README.md。

Why the terminal?

• One keystroke from your prompt to a coding agent.
• Multi-model in one session — /model switches providers without leaving the TUI.
• Scriptable, pipe-friendly, and it works over SSH.

Features

• Full-screen TUI with an ANSI-Shadow DASH logo, scrollback (banner, hint, transcript, and editor all scroll as one stream), and a live footer (cwd (branch) + cumulative tokens + session id).
• Multi-line editor with history, undo, and kill-ring — Enter sends, Shift+Enter inserts a newline.
• Markdown rendering for assistant replies: code blocks, lists, inline code, tables.
• Collapsible thinking — reasoning is hidden by default; Ctrl+O expands it into a dim block.
• Collapsible tool output — each tool result folds to a one-line ↳ N lines summary; Ctrl+T expands it into a code block. Errors stay inline.
• Slash commands with a search-box menu and accent highlighting.
• Multi-model via /model (a picker over the shared llm catalog).
• API keys via /login (stores through the credential seam and activates the provider route).
• Tool cards with argument summaries; output is collapsed until expanded.
• Session resume — /resume opens a picker (in the input area) over saved sessions; dash tui --resume <id> restores one directly.
• Rewind (time-travel fork) — double-Esc opens a behavior ledger in the input area: one row per user message, tool call, and assistant reply, each tagged [user]/[tool]/[assistant] with its turn number and measured duration. Selecting a row forks back to that turn's boundary — a non-destructive branch, not an undo stack.
• Live activity footer — cumulative tokens · streaming TPS (64t/s) · context occupancy warning (yellow ≥80%, red ≥95%) · running tools (⚙ name).
• @ file completion — type @ + a path prefix for fuzzy file suggestions via fd/fdfind.
• Mouse select-to-copy — drag to select text and release to copy (OSC 52); double-click a word, triple-click a line, wheel to scroll.

What we inherited from dsh

dash reuses the entire dsh-base plugin tree — nothing agent-related is reimplemented:

• Everything-is-a-plugin core — the Cordis runtime, agent loop, tool registry, and session log are all upstream.
• Multi-provider llm — /model switches over the shared ctx.llm catalog.
• Skill system — skill-filesystem scans ~/.agents/skills and <project>/.agents/skills, so skills shared with Claude Code / Codex / Grok are available to dash's model through the skill tool.
• Tools — bash, fs, web, subagent, todo, and the rest register through ctx.tools unchanged.
• Session persistence & resume — --resume <id> and /resume restore a persisted session.
• Plan mode, commands, credentials, settings — the host seams and their handlers.

Our take

What dash adds is not new capability but a new surface — and a few ideas the terminal can express better than a browser:

• The terminal is the assembly language of agents. dsh's "everything is a plugin" is the Unix philosophy applied to agents; dash tries to make composing an agent feel like composing a shell environment.
• Rewind is a fork, not an undo stack. Double-Esc opens a behavior ledger — one row per user message, tool call, and assistant reply. Selecting a row forks back to that turn's boundary, keeping the old branch (fork lineage preserved) instead of destroying it. Only an append-only behavior log can express this; chat-only harnesses can only rewind messages.
• A behavior ledger, not a message list. Mirrors the web Trajectory view: [user] / [tool] / [assistant] rows with turn number and measured duration, so plugin/tool activity is visible.
• The input rides the content stream. No docked input box — the editor scrolls away with history, Claude Code-style.
• One color family. Everything brand-adjacent sits on the DeepSeek indigo→azure gradient (#4D6BFE → #3982FF → #2498FF).

Install

dash installs as a dsh bundle plugin on top of the official dsh CLI:

# 1. Install the official dsh CLI (skip if already installed)
npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh

# 2. Add the dash plugin to the tui profile (`dsh plugin add` recognizes the
#    `dsh.bundle.patch` declaration and joins it to the bundle layer)
dsh plugin --profile tui add @realchenwenqiao/dash

# 3. Launch
dsh --profile tui

Before the npm publish, run from source:

git clone https://github.com/realchenwenqiao/dash.git
cd dash
pnpm install
pnpm run build
pnpm dash tui

Requires Node.js and pnpm. Resume a previous session with dash tui --resume <session-id> (the id is printed on exit), or from inside the TUI with /resume.

Usage

Type a prompt and press Enter. The session streams the reply and any tool activity, with a footer showing cumulative ↑ in ↓ out R reasoning, cache-hit rate, context-window usage, and the current session id (for --resume).

Slash commands

Keys

Mouse: drag to select & copy · double-click word · triple-click line · wheel to scroll.

Color card

One indigo→azure brand family, a neutral pair, and three conventional status colors:

Ecosystem

dash is a member of the DeepSeek Harness plugin ecosystem — browse every community plugin under the dsh-plugin topic, or the curated list.

Architecture

dash is a Cordis bundle — @realchenwenqiao/dash — mounted over dsh-base through the tui profile, the same pattern as the web and headless bundles. The TUI drives the stable surface (agents.create / agent.followup / agent.whenIdle / session/event) and renders through pi-tui components. Everything upstream stays intact; the TUI is one more surface.

Development

Start with docs/development.md and AGENTS.md.

License

MIT. Third-party notices: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.