DSH-better-sidebar

If you use DSH daily to code alongside an AI, you know the awkward feeling: you want to peek at a file, run a quick command, or check Git status mid-conversation, but you have to juggle between your editor, terminal, and browser—breaking your flow every time. DSH-better-sidebar was built to solve exactly that: it embeds a complete workbench right into DSH's sidebar, letting you handle nearly all your day-to-day dev tasks without ever leaving the chat.

This is no ordinary file-tree sidebar; it's a genuinely all-in-one workspace. The built-in file workbench includes a lazy-loaded directory tree, CodeMirror editor, and inline previews for Markdown, images, and PDFs—even rendering Mermaid diagrams in your Markdown. A real terminal powered by xterm.js and node-pty supports transcript replay after disconnects. An embedded browser lets you open multiple pages in sandboxed iframes, with external links intelligently routed by protocol. A Git panel offers VSCode-style diffs, staging, commits, and reverts, and automatically discovers sub-repositories. And with both a right sidebar and bottom panel expandable simultaneously, plus tabs that can be dragged out into floating windows, it feels like the best bits of an IDE have been transplanted into your chat.

But the real ambition is in its service-oriented design. The whole sidebar is an open framework: every built-in feature is registered through the ctx.betterSidebar service, and third-party plugins can register their own tabs and file viewers through the exact same API. The community ecosystem has already grown to 28+ plugins—Office document previews, video playback, Jupyter notebooks, skill panels, SSH tunnels, and more. Whatever you need, you can add it like building blocks. Whether you're a heavy DSH user looking to boost productivity or a plugin developer wanting to extend the ecosystem, this framework will make you think "I never knew a sidebar could do this."

In short, DSH-better-sidebar upgrades DSH from a pure chat tool into an AI development environment with a full workbench. It solves the pain of getting things done inside an AI conversation, eliminating constant context-switching between tools, and gives plugin developers a stage to be creative. If you're tired of bouncing between DSH and external tools, give it a try—you'll probably never go back.