dsh-edit-panel

Live writing of text files for DeepSeek Harness (DSH):
the AI writes a text or Markdown file section by section into an editor in the right sidebar, and
you can type in the same file at the same time.

> Maintenance: best-effort. Issues may go unanswered; forks are welcome.

What it adds

• Five tools for the model, in every conversation:
• edit_begin(path, outline, title?) creates the file with its headings and opens the panel;
• edit_write_section(section, content) writes one section, saved to disk at once;
• edit_status() says what is written, what you changed, and what to do next;
• edit_finish() ends the draft;
• edit_open(path) shows an existing file in the panel without changing it.
• The panel (a right-sidebar tab, Live writing): each section in a small word-processor editor
  (bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, links, undo; read and written as Markdown). What you type is
  saved after a short pause, and the AI cannot overwrite a section while you are typing in it.
• Proposals instead of overwrites: when the AI rewrites a section that already has text, the
  file does not change; the panel shows its proposal word by word (added in green, removed struck in
  red), and you keep or refuse each change, or all of them.
• Existing files are safe: an existing file is drafted in .draft and replaces the original
  only when you press Finish (the original is copied to the backup folder first); Cancel
  discards the draft. A file opened with edit_open is edited in place, after a backup copy.
• Ask the AI about a passage: select text, then the ✦ Ask the AI pill (or Ctrl+K) puts the
  passage, with its section, in the message box, with quick actions (shorten, rephrase, fix,
  translate).
• Documents of the conversation: a drawer above the message box lists the files opened in this
  conversation; a click reopens one. A click on a text file link [name](/path/file.md) in the
  conversation opens it in the panel.
• Your instructions per section and your decisions are given back to the model as runtime context,
  so they survive compaction.

Files: .md, .markdown, .txt, .text, .tex, .org, .rst, .qmd, .rmd, inside your home
folder and not in a hidden folder. In Markdown files, sections are the ## headings.

The interface is in English, and in French when DSH's language is French (tables en and fr at
the top of client.js).

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add github:MathieuPortmann/dsh-edit-panel

Restart the profile afterwards. Requires Node ^22.19.0 || >=24 and DSH >=0.2.0-rc.2 <0.3.0 (see
Compatibility). Once the package is on npm, dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-edit-panel works too.

Configuration

Options of the edit-panel row:

How it works

• lib/draft.js holds the drafts: it renders the file from its sections, reads it back to see
  what you changed (a fingerprint per section), keeps proposals waiting, locks a section for 30 s
  while you type, and replaces or restores files with backups. lib/docs.js keeps the document
  list. Both are pure Node.js and covered by tests/.
• index.js (host side) registers the tools, sends the draft state as runtime context, and serves
  the panel through an RPC channel at /edit-api/, behind DSH's own connection check.
• client.js (page side) draws the tab, the drawer and the editors. The editor itself
  (web/editor.js) is a bundle of ProseMirror and
  markdown-it built from web-src/editor.js; the
  page receives it from the host and loads it once.

Compatibility

Tested with DSH 0.2.0-rc.2 on Node 22.23 (see Verification).

Permissions and external services

Everything the plugin can touch, and what happens when it fails:

Verification

Checked on a disposable profile (DSH_HOME pointing at a temporary folder, so the real profile is
never touched):

npm pack
dsh plugin --profile t add file:$PWD/dsh-edit-panel-0.1.0.tgz   # install
dsh t --port 3095 --no-open                                      # start: plugin loads, no error
dsh plugin --profile t remove dsh-edit-panel                      # uninstall

npm test runs 9 standalone tests (drafts: new and existing files, the user's edits, locks,
proposals kept, merged or refused, open in place, cancel, duplicate headings, path rules; the
document list) with no DSH installation needed.

web/editor.js is reproducible: cd web-src && npm ci && npm run build rebuilds it byte for byte
with the versions pinned in web-src/package-lock.json (esbuild 0.28.2). The bundled libraries and
their licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Develop

npm test
cd web-src && npm ci && npm run build   # after changing web-src/editor.js

License

MIT for this plugin. The bundled libraries keep their own licenses (MIT, and BSD-2-Clause for
entities), see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.