In DSH Web use cases, users often need to follow up on a specific excerpt from an assistant response. Appending a message directly to the main conversation may disrupt the current streaming output and contextual continuity, while starting a new session is too heavyweight and hard to trace back to. The dsh-ask-in-sidebar plugin solves this pain point by creating a temporary, isolated sidebar.

This is an online tooling plugin maintained by Ruiming-cn. It allows users to select assistant text in the main conversation and ask questions or discuss in a right-side panel based on a snapshot of the main conversation, without modifying the main conversation content.

Core Features

  1. Selection interaction: Select any text in an assistant response in the main DSH conversation (such as a solution, terminology, or explanation); a floating action button, “Ask in Sidebar,” appears next to the selection.
  2. Sidebar panel: Clicking the button opens a temporary panel on the right. The panel displays the quoted selected text, a question input box, continuously updated discussion history, and real-time streaming output.
  3. Thinking process display: The panel supports collapsible thinking processes and displays thinking time, time to first token, total elapsed time, and token usage (when available).
  4. Markdown rendering: Answer content is safely rendered as Markdown, supporting headings, lists, inline code, code blocks, blockquotes, links, and tables.
  5. Snapshot mechanism: The first question is answered based on a snapshot of the existing LLM message history in the main conversation at the time the question was submitted, plus the quoted text. Follow-up questions are supported within the same sidebar discussion.
  6. State management: Closing the panel discards the current discussion and its host-side in-memory snapshot. When selecting another assistant text to start a new question, a new discussion is created and the main-conversation context snapshot is fetched again.

Installation and Enablement

This plugin requires a local DSH Web profile and a Node.js 20+ environment.

Installation command:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:Ruiming-cn/dsh-ask-in-sidebar

It can also be installed by using the following methods:
* Install from a pinned Release:

    dsh plugin --profile web add https://github.com/Ruiming-cn/dsh-ask-in-sidebar/archive/refs/tags/v0.2.0.tar.gz
  • Build from a local checkout and then install:
    npm run build
    dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/dsh-ask-in-sidebar

Typical Usage

  1. Open a DSH Web conversation.
  2. Select a passage in an assistant response.
  3. Click the “Ask in Sidebar” button that appears.
  4. Enter a question in the panel’s question input box (for example, “Why was this done?” or “What does this mean?”), then press Enter or click “Send.”
  5. Read the answer in the panel and continue following up.
  6. Close the panel at any time to return to the main conversation.

Use Cases and Notes

Use cases: Suitable for scenarios that require in-depth discussion of specific technical details without interrupting the main conversation flow or introducing complex tool calls.

Important notes:

  • Context reuse: The model context follows the main session. If the main conversation is long, sidebar requests can also be large because the full derived history is reused.
  • Permission limits: The plugin does not provide any tools to the sidebar model, so it cannot call host tools from the panel or modify the workspace.
  • Rendering limits: Markdown rendering is a lightweight implementation and does not cover all extended Markdown syntax (for example, complex nested tables, footnotes, task lists, etc.).
  • In-process state: Temporary snapshots are in-process state. Snapshots are lost after the host restarts; follow-up questions after restart fall back to the current main-conversation context snapshot.
  • Technical dependencies: The panel is a pure DOM overlay, not a native DSH slot, and depends on the current Web UI’s data-chat-flow-kind="assistant-step" conversation DOM convention.

Summary

dsh-ask-in-sidebar provides DSH Web users with lightweight contextual follow-up capability. Through its snapshot mechanism and independent sidebar view, it provides a focused discussion space while preserving the integrity of the main conversation.