dsh-caps-beacon

You hand DeepSeek Harness a multi-step pipeline of tool calls and model turns, then turn away to do something else. But every twenty seconds you feel the pull to switch back to the terminal and check where things are stuck. dsh-caps-beacon turns the Caps Lock LED on your MacBook built-in keyboard into a live DSH status light: solid while a root agent is working, blinking when an approval, a question, or an error is waiting on you, and off when the session is idle. A quick glance at the keyboard replaces a dozen window switches.

The plugin is a pure observer under the hood. It subscribes only to DSH public host events (agent/status, approval/request, tools/execute, session/event) and delegates through next(), so it never makes a decision, never injects a key press, and never touches your approval policy. A small C helper drives the built-in keyboard LED via IOKit/IOHID; the plugin writes a single byte to its stdin to toggle the light, and a plugin-side timer handles blinking. If the helper dies from a system sleep or a stray signal, the plugin restarts it automatically with exponential backoff (1 s to 30 s) and re-applies the current mode, so the beacon self-heals without a dsh restart.

The target use case is specific: you work on a MacBook with the built-in Apple keyboard (external and Magic Keyboards are not supported), you routinely run DSH tasks in the background, and you would rather spare a glance than break your flow. The only prerequisite is Xcode Command Line Tools for a one-time compile of the tiny helper binary — no other dependencies, no persistent services, no policy changes.