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dsh-avatar-chat

Dual avatars for the DeepSeek Harness chat transcript — a user avatar on the right of every user turn, an assistant avatar on the left of every answer — plus an Avatars page in Settings to switch each side on or off, set a picture, and pick the size.

A DSH Web Client plugin: a Cordis bundle that registers one settings.section seat and decorates the transcript with a page-level stylesheet.

Quick start

Three ways in, easiest first. Plugin market — switch on Plugins → More → Experimental plugins → Custom plugin markets, add this source under Discover, and install the card:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/suwodhcbbc/dsh-avatar-chat/main/index.json

One command — quit the app first, then:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:suwodhcbbc/dsh-avatar-chat

From the app — Plugins → Add plugin in the sidebar, same spec. Restart DeepSeek Harness either way. Details in Install.

Screenshots

Transcript — the user's picture beside the request on the right, the assistant's beside the reply on the left, both at 50 px:

Settings — the Avatars page this plugin adds, with a picture chosen on each side:

Both come from the author's own desktop build (Chinese locale, custom wallpaper); the pictures, the size, and the toggles are exactly the controls the page exposes.

Features

• Two independent avatars. The user side and the assistant side each have their own visibility toggle, their own picture, and their own restore-to-default.
• Pictures from disk or from a URL. Upload PNG / JPEG / WebP / GIF (max 5 MiB, downscaled to 256 px), or paste an https://… address. The address is probed once before it is adopted.
• Built-in look with no picture at all. With no upload, each side draws a pure-CSS disc using theme tokens only — no bundled image, no literal colour, correct in light and dark.
• Size from 20 px to 64 px, applied live to both the transcript and the settings preview.
• Undecorated where it should be. One assistant reply is split into a reasoning row and a response row; only the answer row carries an avatar, so a reply never shows two.
• Clean unload. Every root attribute and custom property the plugin writes is removed when the plugin is disposed.

Requirements

• DeepSeek Harness 0.2.1-alpha.4 (Web / Desktop). The plugin uses only the shipped theme tokens and the settings.section slot.
• The four modules the bundle requires at runtime — react, react/jsx-runtime, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-store, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-primitives — are all part of the shell's frozen module table, so nothing extra needs installing next to this package.

Install

A profile-local plugin joins a profile as a bundle: its package.json declares dsh.bundle.patch, and the profile lists the package name in dsh.profile.bundles. The profile's own cordis.patch.yml is id-targeted — it can only override or disable an entry a bundle layer already declared — so adding a row there installs nothing.

From the plugin market

DSH ships a custom plugin market. Switch it on — Plugins → More → Experimental plugins → Custom plugin markets, then Plugins → Discover — add this index source, and the plugin appears as a card you install with one click:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/suwodhcbbc/dsh-avatar-chat/main/index.json

The index pins one exact commit, so a card install is reproducible rather than "whatever main is today". Switch the source back off at any time; the plugin stays installed.

From the app

In the sidebar, Plugins → Add plugin. Paste the spec, install, then restart:

github:suwodhcbbc/dsh-avatar-chat

From the CLI

Quit the app first: the desktop profile is locked while the application runs.

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:suwodhcbbc/dsh-avatar-chat

dsh plugin forwards the rest of the line to pnpm inside the profile directory, so every spec pnpm accepts works here — github:<owner>/<repo>, a git URL, an absolute path (bare or link:/file:), a .tgz URL, or a registry name. Two things happen and there is no third step:

1. pnpm installs the dependency into the profile.
2. Because the package declares dsh.bundle.patch, the profile's dsh.profile.bundles gains its name automatically.

Name the profile you actually run: desktop for the desktop application, web for dsh web. Restart afterwards — the bundle stack is composed at boot.

A git-hosted install runs the package's prepare script, which pnpm blocks until the exact key it prints is allowed under allowBuilds. This package declares no scripts at all, so there is nothing to allow.

Manual install

When pnpm cannot run, the same two facts can be applied by hand: copy package.json, cordis.patch.yml and lib/ into <profile>/node_modules/dsh-avatar-chat/ (for example ~/.dsh/profiles/desktop), add "dsh-avatar-chat" to the profile's dsh.profile.bundles, and restart. Being listed in bundles is what composes the plugin into the tree; it does not also have to appear in dependencies.

Verify

After the restart, this should name the package and a real directory:

cordis_inspect → host / Config / listConfigs { "entry": "include:ui-avatar-chat" }

Usage

Open Settings → Avatars.

• User avatar / Assistant avatar — the switch hides that side from the transcript; the picture button opens a file picker; Restore default returns the side to the built-in disc.
• Picture address — paste an https://… URL and apply it.
• Avatar size — 20 px to 64 px. Changes apply immediately.

Nothing else to do: the transcript picks the settings up on the next paint.

Storage and privacy

Preferences live in the browser's localStorage under the single key dsh.avatar-chat.v1, as JSON:

{ "schemaVersion": 1, "size": 28,
  "user":      { "visible": true, "image": "data:image/webp;base64,…" },
  "assistant": { "visible": true, "image": null } }

• Uploaded pictures are stored as data URLs — they never leave the browser, and they are never written into the session log.
• The value is plain text in origin-shared storage: any script on the same origin can read it. Do not upload anything you would not put in a local file.
• Reads and writes are individually guarded. A denied origin, an exhausted quota, or a damaged value degrades to in-memory preferences plus an on-page notice instead of breaking the plugin load.
• A document with a foreign schemaVersion, an out-of-range size, or a malformed side is repaired in place and reported as damaged.

How it works

DSH has no slot that adds leading or trailing chrome to an individual chat message row: conversation.chat.node's keyed seats are already fully occupied by the shipped renderers (user, steering, assistant-step, …) and a third-party package cannot import or wrap them. Every class name inside the chat subtree is also a CSS-Modules hash, so it is not addressable from another package.

What is stable is the row element itself, which carries data-chat-flow-kind (equal to the chat node kind), data-chat-turn, and data-chat-group-part. So the plugin ships a page-level stylesheet that selects on those attributes, and drives it entirely from root-element state:

• attributes data-dsh-avatar-chat, -user, -user-image, -assistant, -assistant-image
• custom properties --dsh-avatar-chat-size and the two picture variables

The avatar is painted by an absolutely-positioned ::before inside padding the stylesheet reserves on the decorated row; the row keeps its shipped display, so host layout is untouched.

The stylesheet is a plain .css side-effect import, which the DSH client bundler turns into a tagged <style data-plugin-css> element — deduplicated by tag id, so re-running the plugin never double-injects it. Every root write is absolute, so applying twice is idempotent.

Known limitations

• The decoration depends on data-chat-flow-kind, which is not a published contract. If the chat row markup changes, avatars disappear silently until the selector is updated.
• Only user, steering and assistant-step rows are decorated. Tool calls, commands, system prompts and turn-process rows have no avatar.
• A decorated row becomes position: relative, so it is the containing block for its own absolutely-positioned descendants.
• The avatar carries no per-message identity — there is exactly one user picture and one assistant picture at a time.
• A remote picture address is probed once when it is applied and is not revalidated afterwards.
• The built-in disc uses --dsw-alias-brand-primary, which is near-black in light mode and near-white in dark mode — an inverse monochrome accent, not a brand blue.

Compatibility

Verified against DeepSeek Harness 0.2.1-alpha.4 on Windows with the shipped Web client, in both unit tests and a real headless-Chromium run against an assembled profile.

Building from source

The lib/ directory in this repository is the built artifact and is what the loader consumes. Rebuilding it requires a DeepSeek Harness source checkout: this package is compiled by the repository's shared client bundler preset (packages/client/tsdown.client.ts), which owns the window.__ModuleLoader__.load({ id, factory }) wrapper, the platform externals, and the CSS inlining.

To rebuild: place src/ at packages/client/ui-avatar-chat/src in the checkout, then

pnpm --filter @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-avatar-chat bundle

Keep the package name in sync — the module id baked into lib/client.js comes from package.json, and the loader matches the bundle row to that id.

License

MIT