chat-pace

Configurable chat auto-scroll for the DeepSeek Harness web UI — agent output never flies by faster than you can read.

Adds five scroll modes, on-screen controls, global hotkeys, a full settings page, and per-session reading-position memory. Works alongside the shipped follow logic instead of replacing it, so any mode can be left on safely.

Install

dsh plugin add TheGoodMorty/chat-pace

Then restart the DSH server (compositions are read at boot) and refresh the page. The controls appear in the composer tool row, the composer dock, the session header, and under Settings → Chat Pace.

Modes

Mode	Behavior
Follow	Shipped default: jump to the newest output instantly.
Smooth	Keep the newest output in view, gliding at a configurable px/s.
Paced	Section-by-section reading: glide to each settled text section, pause for sectionHeight / screenHeight × seconds-per-screen, then continue. Tall sections spend the pause drifting through themselves. Between text sections the view keeps following tool output live, and while a text section is being written the view holds still so the text arrives unread below the fold. Sections already fully visible when they settle are skipped — they streamed in front of you.
Step	No auto-scroll; one section per press (button or hotkey), optionally animated.
Hold	The view is pinned; new output never moves it.

An "output section" is each settled assistant message (assistant-step with status settled/interrupted); tool results and command rows can be opted in.

The Paced reading pause is clamped between a configurable minimum and maximum (up to 80 s), so a single huge section never freezes the view for minutes, and tall sections drift through their text at reading speed instead of sitting still.

Controls

• Composer tool row — pause/resume, next-section, and the mode menu (always visible)
• Composer dock — live status line and reading-pause progress bar
• Session header — mode menu button
• Settings → Chat Pace — every option: mode, glide speed, seconds-per-screen reading pace, pause clamps, section kinds, behavior toggles, session open position, and a hotkey recorder with conflict detection
• Global hotkeys (defaults): F9 pause/resume, Ctrl+ArrowDown next section, Ctrl+ArrowUp previous, Ctrl+End jump to latest

User wheel/touch input instantly takes control back from any auto-scroll mode; an optional toggle resumes automatically when you scroll back to the bottom.

Settings persist in localStorage (dsh-chat-pace-settings-v1).

Session open position

"When a session opens" (Settings → Chat Pace) decides where a conversation lands when you open or switch to it: Top, Bottom, or Where I left it. The last reading position of every session is remembered per-session in localStorage (dsh-chat-pace-scrollpos-v1) regardless of this setting — as a row anchor plus offset, so it survives content growth and window resizing — so enabling "Where I left it" later still restores sessions you left before turning it on. Restores run on timers (not requestAnimationFrame), yield instantly if you touch the view mid-restore, and hold their position against the UI's own layout restores for up to 12 seconds.

How it coexists with the shipped follow logic

The shipped ChatView snaps to the bottom on content growth while the reader is at the bottom, and disengages when a scroll event shows reader movement. chat-pace recognizes those snaps (floor-adjacent jumps arriving with scrollHeight growth and no recent user input) and restores the reader's anchor row; the restore reads as reader movement to the shipped handler, so it disengages by itself. Smooth/paced motion is written frame-by-frame as engine-authored scrollTop values — ordinary reader scrolls to the shipped code — so the two never fight over a frame. Reader intent is tracked via wheel/touch/pointer/scroll-key listeners on the scrollport.

Support

A minimal read-only diagnostic handle is exposed as window.__chatPaceDebug in the page console: the engine state, the live settings (via getSettings()), and a bounded ring of recent engine decisions (scrollLog). If something misbehaves, that log is the fastest way to pinpoint it.

License

MIT