dsh-plugin-whale-pet: my DSH plugin setup diary

DSH plugins are easy to install and easy to forget, which is exactly what happened when I added a whale to my DeepSeek Harness desktop. I wanted something playful during long review sessions, not another panel competing for space. This is the diary of how the pet got in, how it behaved for a week, and how I turned it off without leaving residue.

Why I wanted a DSH plugin whale on my desktop

I did not need a whale; I wanted a small break in a workspace that had become all panels and logs.

My days were spent reading diffs and waiting for long tool calls, and the interface had slowly turned into a wall of text. A desktop pet seemed like a harmless way to make the window feel less like a control room. I also wanted to test how a purely presentational plugin behaved before recommending it to anyone else.

I was skeptical about overlays, though, because I had already seen UI plugins fight over the same corner. The plugin notes described a floating element rather than a separate window, which meant it would share space with status indicators. That detail decided where I would look first if something overlapped. I bookmarked the entry and read the comments before installing anything.

Finding the DeepSeek Harness plugin in the hub

The hub was more useful for judging maintenance than for judging cuteness, so I read the boring fields first.

I searched for whale and whale-pet in the DSH Plugin Hub and found a small set of similar entries. The screenshots all looked charming, but the version history and update date told a more practical story. One entry had a recent release and a clear description of the rendering layer; the others were vague about where the pet would appear.

I copied the package name from the detail page instead of trusting the display title. That habit came from an earlier install where the market name and the npm name did not match. Here they were close enough to avoid confusion, but the version pin still mattered. I noted the package and version in my scratch file before opening a terminal.

Installing the DSH plugin from the terminal

The CLI felt like overkill for a toy, until I remembered that I wanted an exact version and a clean removal path.

My startup script already used the CLI for other plugins, so adding one more line kept the whole setup reproducible. I pinned the version rather than taking whatever the latest tag resolved to that afternoon. The command was short, and the output confirmed the package before the interface changed.

dsh plugin add dsh-plugin-whale-pet@<version>
dsh plugin list

After the install I restarted the client instead of refreshing the page. The list showed the package and the version I had pinned, which was the first real confirmation that the CLI and the profile agreed. The whale appeared in the lower corner a few seconds after the window reopened. Nothing else in the layout moved, which I counted as a good sign.

A week with the DeepSeek Harness plugin running

The pet cost almost nothing at rest and became noticeable only when the machine was already busy.

For the first two days I left the default position and watched the idle numbers. Memory use was flat, and the animation did not register in the tasks I normally run. During a long build the fans were already loud, so the pet was not the variable I could blame. The plugin never touched a model call or a session result.

The position was the bigger annoyance. In a narrow window the whale covered the lower-right status area, and I moved it to the left edge after the second day. That is also where other DSH plugins wanted to draw, so I kept only one visible at a time. If two pets had been enabled, the overlap would have looked like a rendering bug rather than a layout choice.

Turning the DSH plugin off without uninstalling it

When the novelty faded, hiding the pet was enough; I did not need to remove the package to get my space back.

I started with the settings toggle, because it stops rendering while keeping the version and position. The animation disappeared immediately and the status area became readable again. A restart confirmed that the setting survived, which is the part a quick test often misses. Only then did I decide whether the plugin deserved a place in my work profile.

The sequence I used was deliberately reversible and short. It moved from the lightest control to the heaviest one, so I could stop as soon as the workspace felt right. The five steps below are exactly what I did.

1. Hide the pet in settings and confirm the animation cost disappears.
2. Disable the plugin in my work profile, keeping the install and configuration.
3. Restart the client and check that the pet stays gone.
4. Open my other profile to see whether it is still enabled there.
5. Leave the package installed until I am sure I will not want it back.

That last step is the one I would repeat. Uninstalling a presentational plugin is easy, but it also throws away the position and timing I had tuned. If the whale returns in a future release, I can enable it again without rediscovering the settings. For now it sits disabled in one profile, which is the quietest outcome I could ask for.

Sources: dsh-whale-pet plugin entry, your first plugin, DeepSeek Harness quickstart.