@dennisrongo/dsh-git

npm: @dennisrongo/dsh-git · source: dennisrongo/dsh-plugins

A per-workspace source-control tab for the DeepSeek Harness web UI. It adds a Source Control tab beside Chat, Trajectory, and Todo that shows everything that differs in the workspace's repository, and lets you stage, commit (with an AI-written message), initialize, sync, branch, merge, stash, manage worktrees, and browse history — without leaving the session. The tab holds three panes, Changes, History and Repo, switched by a segmented control below the branch header.

What it does

• View changes — staged, unstaged, untracked, and conflicted files, each with a status letter and a click-to-open unified diff.
• Browse history — the recent commits, newest first. Click one to see the files it touched, then click a file for the patch that commit introduced, in the same diff pane the Changes pane uses.
• Stage / unstage / discard — per file or per section. Discard is the one destructive action and always confirms first.
• AI commit messages — "✦ AI message" sends the diff to the model you already selected for new sessions and writes a Conventional Commits message. It describes the staged changes whenever anything is staged, and every uncommitted change (including brand-new files) when the index is empty. The log strip says which it used.
• Commit — commits the index, and only the index. The button is live only with something staged and a message written; when it is not, the row says why. Ctrl/Cmd+Enter commits from the box.
• Initialize — a directory that is not a repository shows an Initialize button with an editable initial branch name.
• Sync — Fetch, Pull (fast-forward only), Push / Publish, and a combined pull-then-push, with ahead/behind counts on the buttons.
• Branches — the branch name in the header is a menu: switch, create, merge another branch in, delete, or rename. Nothing is ever auto-stashed; a switch git refuses offers an explicit "Stash changes and switch" instead.
• Merge — allowed to conflict. The repository is left mid-merge with a banner offering Abort and Continue, and the conflicts appear in the Changes list you already use, where staging a file marks it resolved.
• Stash — push, pop, apply and drop from the Repo pane, and click a stash to see the files it holds and their patches, the same way you read a commit.
• Worktrees — add, remove and prune, each row with an Open button that registers the directory as a workspace and switches to it.
• Live updates — the list follows the repository on its own. An edit from an agent, your editor, or a terminal git checkout shows up within about a second, with no refresh click.

The Repo pane: stashes and worktrees

A third pane lists your stashes and your worktrees. Both lists are fetched lazily — when you open the branch menu or enter the pane — and never polled, so the tab's idle cost is unchanged.

A stash is a commit, so clicking one expands into the files it holds and each file opens its patch, exactly like a commit in History. It is specifically a merge commit: parent 1 is the base, parent 2 the index, and parent 3 — present only when the stash was taken with -u — is a commit whose entire tree is the untracked files. That third parent is why viewing a stash needs its own endpoints rather than reusing the commit reader, which walks --first-parent and would hide every new file.

Worktrees go beside the project, named <project>-<branch>. Type a branch and the path fills itself in: feature/login in myproj suggests ../myproj-feature-login, which puts the worktree next to the project on disk and next to it in dsh's workspace list, since workspaces are listed by title. Slashes are flattened, because ../myproj-feature/login would quietly create a myproj-feature directory with the worktree buried inside it. The suggestion is editable and stops auto-filling the moment you type a path of your own.

Open the form with nothing in mind and it is already usable: the path is prefilled with a readable adjective-noun name (../myproj-brave-otter), so "just give me a worktree" needs no typing at all. An empty branch box creates a new branch from that generated name — a worktree cannot check out a branch that is already checked out somewhere else, so reusing the current one is not an option git would allow.

The model names the branch, not the path. Type a rough description — "fix login retry" — press ✦, and it becomes fix/login-retry, with the path following as ../myproj-fix-login-retry. Naming is a judgement call worth a model; deriving a path from a branch is arithmetic with one right answer, so a regex does that. It fails soft: no provider configured, or any error, leaves your text untouched with the reason in the log strip.

Paths resolve like a terminal opened at the repository root. ../worktree-test lands exactly where git worktree add ../worktree-test would put it, and the form shows the resolved absolute path live as you type. A path landing inside the repository is refused — a checkout does not belong in the project, and whether it would even be clean depends on that project's .gitignore.

A from select lets a worktree fork from a branch other than the one you are on, defaulting to the current one. Rows for the main worktree and the one you are currently in carry no Remove button: git refuses both, and on Windows it refuses the second with a file-lock Permission denied that reads like a bug in the tab. Removing a worktree dsh has registered as a workspace offers to remove that workspace too — registration was otherwise one-way, leaving a workspace pointing at a deleted directory.

Dialogs

Both forms — New worktree and New branch — are modals on one shared component, as is the confirmation every destructive action goes through. A modal portals to document.body, traps Tab, closes on Escape or a backdrop click, focuses the first field on open, and hands focus back to the opener on close. Dismissing never validates: backdrop, Escape and ✕ all just close, and only the action button commits — a dialog you cannot leave while a field is half-typed is a trap, and this one holds a path.

Two details are load-bearing and both shipped as bugs first. The backdrop sits below DSH Desktop's window-drag strip with padding to clear it, because that strip resolves drag regions before hit-testing and swallows clicks no z-index can outrank. And the plugin's palette is redeclared on the backdrop: every --g-* is declared on .dshgit, and a portalled dialog renders outside it, so without that the primary button — background: var(--g-accent) with hard-coded dark text — painted as a blank rectangle on a dark panel.

Staying live without polling git

Re-reading status on a timer would be the obvious way to keep the list fresh and the wrong one: a status read spawns four git processes, so a one-second poll would cost that per second, per open tab. Measured on a real repository, status averages 141 ms per call.

Instead the host watches the repository with fs.watch and keeps a monotonic change token. The tab polls changeToken, which answers from that counter and never runs git — 52 ms per call, essentially all HTTP round-trip — and only re-reads the full status when the token actually moves. Idle repositories cost nothing beyond the probe, because a watcher that fires no events never advances the token.

Three details make it behave:

• Two watches, not one. The worktree watch is recursive and catches file edits; a second watch on .git is what catches staging, commits, and branch switches, because git's metadata writes never surface as worktree events. Without it the tab looks live until you commit, and then silently stops.
• Events are debounced (120 ms). One logical action fires many events — git writes index.lock, then the index, then ORIG_HEAD; an editor save writes a temp file and renames it. A burst of 40 writes collapses to a couple of refreshes rather than 40.
• Hidden tabs don't poll. The loop is gated on visibilitychange, and a focus handler re-checks immediately, so the list is already correct the moment you look at it and costs nothing while you're in Chat.

Watchers are reference-counted per repository root, so ten tabs on one workspace share a single OS handle, and released through ctx.effect() when the fiber unloads.

The layout

The diff sits beside the file list when the tab is wide and below it when it is narrow. The switch is a container query (@container dshgit (min-width: 720px)), not a media query: this is a tab inside a shell whose sidebar and panels resize independently of the viewport, so the width that matters is the tab's own. container-type is declared on .dshgit — the root — because a container query cannot style its own container.

Opening a diff never moves a row. The list's column width is reserved even with no diff open, so the first click can't cut it from full width to a column and reflow every filename under the pointer. Stacked, the diff takes the lower 55% in normal flow rather than floating over the list — shrinking a scrollport does not move the content inside it (scrollTop stays put and the maximum scrollTop rises), whereas an overlay hid the very row you had just clicked whenever the list was scrolled near its end.

While a patch is in flight the pane shows a skeleton shaped like a diff — shimmering meta / hunk / add / del bands at varied widths, sized off the real 18px diff line — instead of a spinner, which blanks a large surface. The shimmer animates background-position over an oversized gradient, never a transform or a box dimension, so it cannot shift layout, and prefers-reduced-motion flattens the bars to a static tone. Loading is a separate flag rather than a sentinel string, so a diff whose text genuinely reads "Loading diff…" can't render as a skeleton. Clicking down a list starts overlapping requests, so each carries a monotonic sequence number and any reply that isn't the newest is discarded — otherwise a slow one settling late paints the wrong file's patch under the right filename.

Icons are inline 16px SVGs on a matching 0 0 16 16 viewBox, in 20px buttons. The size is fixed and not a prop: the shell pairs each icon size with its own viewBox, so 16-unit path data rendered into a 14px box comes out shrunk with thinned strokes. The 20px button box (not 24px) and .dshgit-row's pinned line-height: 20px are what keep file rows at 32px — in a flex row the tallest child sets the height.

History without a second fetch

The commit list costs nothing extra: status already returns the 15 most recent commits, so the History pane renders what the tab has been fetching all along. Only expanding a commit talks to the host, and only for that one commit — a commit touching hundreds of files ships its file names (--name-status), not its entire patch, and the patch arrives only for the file you actually click.

A commit sha arrives from the browser, so it is validated as plain hex before it reaches git. The risk isn't a shell — git is always invoked with an argument array — it's git's own argument grammar: a value starting with - is read as a flag, and revision syntax like HEAD~3, main..dev or :/secret would address commits the UI never offered. Merge commits are read with --first-parent, without which git show prints no file list at all and a merge would expand into a convincing but false "No files in this commit."

Architecture

The plugin ships two halves that never share a process:

File	Half	Role
src/index.ts	host	The dshGit service. Resolves a workspace id to its directory via workspaceRegistry, runs git, and calls llm for messages.
src/git.ts	host	The git engine: execFile wrapper and porcelain parsers.
src/watch.ts	host	Filesystem watchers behind the change token, so the tab stays live without polling git.
src/remote.ts	both	Strict zod Typert descriptors — the wire contract.
src/client.tsx	browser	The Source Control tab (Changes + History + Repo), registered into the conversation.view slot at order: 30.
src/types.ts	both	Shared, dependency-free vocabulary.

The browser never touches a repository: it calls ctx.remote.dshGit.* over the Typert bridge, and the host does the work.

Things that are load-bearing

Several details are easy to "clean up" and thereby break:

• The host half must not be minified, and must target es2021. The Typert gateway discovers a @Remote method's wire fields by reading its parameter names from Function.prototype.toString(); minification renames request and silently breaks the contract. @Remote is also a TC39 standard decorator, which Node cannot yet parse — esbuild only downlevels it when the target predates decorators.
• Every remote codec must be strict. The client's $mount rejects src-json codecs, and a rejected mount means the tab silently never appears.
• provider and model are required on ctx.llm.stream(). Omitting them yields an empty stream that looks like "the model produced no message".
• Git status is parsed from -z output. The default format quotes and escapes paths containing spaces or non-ASCII bytes; -z emits them raw.
• The .git watch is not optional. Dropping it leaves a watcher that reports file edits but never notices a stage, commit, or branch switch — and every other test still passes. pnpm run test:watch is the guard.
• Watchers are released through ctx.effect(). cordis's Service has no stop symbol (only Service.init) and dispose is not in its Events map, so the two obvious spellings leak an OS handle per repository on each reload.
• Git is invoked with an argument array, never a shell. Paths, branch names, and commit messages are untrusted text. Branch names and shas are additionally validated, because git's own argument grammar is the risk: a leading - is read as a flag, .. forms a revision range, and ~/^/:/@{ all address commits the UI never offered.
• A stash index is a cursor, not an identifier. Dropping or popping an earlier entry renumbers everything after it, so the client re-reads refs after every mutation.
• refs returns a discriminated outcome, never bare arrays. Collapsing a failed read into empty lists renders "this repository has no branches" when the truth is "restart the profile" — measured against a stale host half, where status answered 200 while refs 404'd.
• Worktree paths are the one place this plugin writes outside the workspace, so they get resolveWorktreePath rather than assertSafePath, which refuses absolute paths and .. — correct for repo files, wrong for a worktree by definition. The path arithmetic lives in types.ts because the host needs it to build the command and the browser needs it to show where the input lands.

Endpoints

POST /api/dshGit/<method>, each taking a single parameter named request:

Method	Does
status	One workspace's repository snapshot — branch, upstream, files, recent commits, plus merging, mergeHead and stashCount
diff	A unified patch for the workspace or one path
commitFiles	The paths one commit touched
commitDiff	The patch one commit introduced
stage	Stage, unstage or discard paths
commit	Commit the staged tree
init	Initialize a repository in the workspace
sync	Pull, push, fetch, sync or publish
suggestMessage	Draft a commit message from the diff via the LLM
refs	Branches, stashes and worktrees in one read, fetched lazily
branch	Create, switch, delete or rename a branch
merge	Merge a branch, or abort/continue one in progress
stash	Push, pop, apply, drop or clear stash entries
worktree	Add, remove or prune a worktree
suggestBranch	Draft a branch name from a short description via the LLM
stashFiles	Every path a stash holds, untracked additions flagged
stashDiff	The patch a stash holds, optionally narrowed to one path
changeToken	The polled endpoint. Answers from an fs.watch counter and never spawns git; 0 means "not a repository"

Requires workspaceRegistry and llm (both composed by dsh-base), and agentDefaultModel for the two drafting endpoints.

Install

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bash
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dsh plugin --profile web add @dennisrongo/dsh-git

That is the whole install. The package declares dsh.bundle, so it mounts itself — do not also add an insert: row to the profile's cordis.patch.yml. A second row with the same id is fatal (duplicate loader entry id: dsh-git). Restart the profile and the Changes tab is there.

Works the same on the dsh CLI and on DSH Desktop, which keeps its own DSH_HOME; pass that profile's name instead.

To track main or pick up an unreleased change, install from git — quote it, since # and & are shell metacharacters:

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bash
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dsh plugin --profile web add "github:dennisrongo/dsh-plugins#path:/plugins/dsh-git"

The built lib/ is committed, so a git install works even though it runs no build step.

Update

dsh plugin forwards to pnpm, so the usual verbs work:

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dsh plugin --profile web outdated                        # what is behind
dsh plugin --profile web update @dennisrongo/dsh-git     # within the caret range
dsh plugin --profile web add @dennisrongo/dsh-git@latest # cross a major

Restart the profile after updating. The client half would reload on a browser refresh, but the host half will not: the Typert loader caches its per-package verdict for the life of the process, so a version that adds an endpoint (as changeToken did) returns 404 on it until the profile restarts.

Develop

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bash
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pnpm install
pnpm build        # emits lib/index.js + lib/client.js
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test         # parsers, contract, and real-git operations

pnpm test runs git against throwaway repositories across three layers: the parsers (test:branch), the host service driven directly against real repositories (test:worktree, test:ops, test:core, test:read), and the wire contract pushed through the real zod codecs (test:wire). That middle layer exists because two bugs lived in the gap between the parsers below the endpoint and the client store above it — branch switching never worked at all, and every command reported ok: true even when git failed.

The codecs matter more than they look: zod objects strip unknown keys rather than rejecting them, so a field the schema does not declare silently never arrives, in either direction. Every wire check asserts a lossless round trip rather than that parsing merely succeeded.

Seven probes drive headless Chrome against the built lib/client.js and need no running harness:

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bash
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pnpm test:layout     # the diff sits beside the list at 1200px, below it at 560px
pnpm test:stability  # opening a diff moves no row, and never covers the list
pnpm test:skeleton   # the loading placeholder matches the real diff line's rhythm
pnpm test:icons      # icon geometry and the 32px row budget
pnpm test:history    # expanding a commit moves no row, and holds the row budget
pnpm test:menu       # the branch menu stacks above the panes and stays on-screen
pnpm test:modal      # the dialog clears the drag strip and is actually clickable

Three further checks drive a real headless Chrome against a running server:

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bash
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pnpm test:ui      # the tab registers, mounts, and renders
pnpm test:ai      # the AI button produces a Conventional Commits message
pnpm test:commit  # staging + committing changes real bytes on disk

A probe passing proves less than it appears to. test:menu's first version had no positioned elements to compete with, so deleting the menu's z-index still passed; test:modal measured only the panel, so it stayed green while every control inside it rendered unstyled. Both now assert against the real competitor and a real control.

test:layout and test:stability both slice the CSS out of the built bundle, which is also why a backtick must never appear in the stylesheet's comments: it is a template literal, so a stray one closes it early and silently truncates every rule after it.

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About the author

Plugins and walkthroughs on YouTube @codingmenace — I build AI coding tools in public, including DeepSeek Harness itself. More at dennisrongo.com.