dsh-TUI gives DeepSeek Harness a chat interface in the terminal

Ccch1mneyyy's dsh-TUI, published on GitHub on 13 August 2026, is an interactive terminal UI for the DeepSeek Harness runtime, installed as a Cordis plugin and released under MIT. The repository has received 2,881 stars and 164 forks in the twenty-six days since it was created, reached daily rank seven on the TypeScript GitHub Trending board over the same window, and is published on npm as @deepseek-harness-tui/dsh-tui. It touches no DSH core code: installing the plugin turns the interface on, and removing it leaves no patches behind.

What the interface adds

The plugin gives DSH a chat interface that looks like Claude Code inside a terminal. Streaming Markdown renders live. Tool cards fold multi-line command headers to one line plus a count and expand on click or Ctrl+O. Command and file completion work everywhere, @ file references attach text, directory listings and image blocks, and @path#L12-14 line ranges attach only the requested lines and stop cleanly at end-of-file. History search, message selection, and a /lang switch between simplified Chinese and English are all built-in commands.

Terminal image previews are the part that is new for a coding CLI. On terminals that report Kitty graphics or Sixel through DA1, dsh-TUI renders transcript thumbnails inline, opens a shared preview centered over the transcript on click, and disables graphics cleanly under non-TTY output, tmux, screen or accessibility mode. Sixel uses a bounded 256-colour adaptive palette and encodes only the visible crop while scrolling. A text fallback with matching size preserves layout when graphics are unavailable.

The session and editing model

Double-Esc goes back through a session fork, so going back and asking again keeps the branch that ran. /resume groups history by working directory with search and preview, pinned sessions appear in a Pinned group at the top, and pins persist under ~/.dsh-tui. The composer accepts vim editing (/vim), mouse selection, drag-select, Shift+click extension, Ctrl+C copy of the selection, and a full-screen draft editor on Ctrl+Shift+E with line numbers, Enter for newline and Ctrl+Enter to send. Pasting a Finder-copied image stages it as [Image #N] in the composer, and vim x, X, d and u treat the attachment as a single unit.

Why the star count is worth noting

DeepSeek Harness itself is a runtime that uses the same tool interface as Codex and Claude Code, and its main pitch is that a team can use it with a cheaper model without giving up agent behaviour. Most of the DSH plugins reaching Trending recently belong to that automation layer, as routers, agent-team orchestrators, or plugin managers. dsh-TUI covers the developer-facing side of the DSH tools: the interface a person keeps open while the automation runs.

The pixel-whale mascot animation, ported from dsh-ui-whale by @lhh010, plays one of three randomised startup intros, wakes and dozes off during the welcome phase, and stops on a static frame as soon as the first agent task begins so there is no ongoing render cost. That last detail matters more than it looks: the README's performance section lists zero per-frame allocations on the most frequently run code, message virtualisation, differential output and bounded caches, saving about 200 KB of garbage-collection work every sixteen-millisecond tick in a 3,200-row session. A TUI that stays fast on a long agent run needs this kind of measured work in the profiler, and the maintainer has done it.

The repository is in public beta and the maintainer says so. Read the architecture and limitations page before relying on the permission model in a shared environment. For DSH users, this front end makes the runtime something worth opening every morning.

Source

• ccch1mneyyy/dsh-TUI on GitHub