Preface

The headless mode of DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is suitable for one-shot, submit-and-run tasks that write results to stdout. When continuous sessions, tool execution review, or on-the-fly follow-up questions are needed, using a browser directly interrupts the terminal flow. The dsh --profile tui plugin provides an interactive terminal client that brings the core capabilities of DeepSeek Harness to the command line.

Core Positioning

This is an out-of-tree profile bundle maintained by TheMcSwift under the MIT license. By mounting the tui profile, it adds a terminal chat interface to dsh, sharing the same agent state, settings, and plugins as the official Web client, without HTTP relay and without feature degradation.

Core Features

  • Rendering capabilities: supports streaming Markdown, hierarchical coloring of reasoning blocks, code highlighting, TeX math formulas, and Mermaid diagrams.
  • Tool execution visualization: displays tool execution cards, including terminal cards (exit codes), Read highlight cards, grep/glob grouped cards, web_search citation cards, and run_code sub-invocation trees. Artifact files support OSC 8 links (Cmd+click to open).
  • Interaction: fully keyboard-driven, supports Tab focus ring and Enter expand/collapse, and supports session-level panels (goal / todo / jobs / workflow).
  • Built-in documentation: installation ships with a /tui operation manual skill, viewable through the / menu or /skills.
  • Compatibility: this version is aligned with the breaking updates in dsh 0.1.2-alpha.5 (session event sequence / log offset refactoring, new settings registration surface, user-questions waterfall, etc.).

Installation and Enablement

Prerequisites: Node ≥ 22.19, pnpm.

Install the plugin:

dsh plugin --profile tui add @mcswift/dsh-tui

It is ready to use immediately after installation, does not modify the dsh source code itself, and does not apply dependency patches. The rendering engine pi is embedded as a vendored snapshot, with the version pinned to 0.84.1.

Typical Usage

Start a new session:

$ dsh --profile tui

Resume a specified session or the most recent session:

$ dsh --profile tui --resume <id>
$ dsh --profile tui -c

Switch view mode:

$ dsh --profile tui --fullscreen

Common slash commands include:

  • Session control: /new, /quit, /clone
  • Reasoning and configuration: /effort (reasoning effort), /lang (language), /rate (rating), /export (export session log)
  • Model and permissions: /model [provider/model], /permission [preset]
  • System inspection: /config (provider management), /status, /tokens, /cost, /tui (operation manual)

Applicable Scenarios and Notes

  • Applicable scenarios: continuously converse with the agent in the terminal, review the tool execution process, and quickly switch context or check session state.
  • Runtime limitation: this TUI runs only on the local machine where dsh is installed; there is no remote mode.
  • Rendering mode: regular rendering is enabled by default, and main-screen output remains in the terminal scrollback; in-app search jump/scrolling is unavailable (use the terminal’s native Cmd+F search). --fullscreen switches back to viewport mode (the previous default mode).
  • Feature degradation: browser capabilities (images / drag and drop / settings forms) are downgraded to terminal forms (images → placeholder lines, settings page → /config).
  • Version maintenance: the pi version is pinned (0.84.1 vendored snapshot), and upstream fixes must be followed manually.

Conclusion

DeepSeek-TUI is a supplementary solution for using DeepSeek Harness in a terminal environment. By reusing the core logic of dsh, it provides an interaction experience aligned with the Web client, suitable for developers accustomed to working in the terminal.