dsh-session-search

DSH Session Search

English | 简体中文

Search stored DeepSeek Harness (DSH) conversation text across all or selected workspaces and sessions, with exact, regular-expression, typo-tolerant or word-internal subsequence matching. Open the search panel from the sidebar or with Ctrl+F / ⌘F.

See the bilingual Changelog for changes in every package version.

An independent community plugin, not an official DSH package. Package version: 1.3.6.

Features

• All or multiple workspaces and sessions, with searchable checkbox pickers and a latest-user-activity-first conversation list. Workspace and session scopes intersect; empty selection means all.
• Message-time filters: Today, Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, This month, or custom local calendar dates.
• Profile-persistent Live / Enter or Search search timing, configurable on the plugin's settings page.
• VS Code-style Aa (Match Case), ab (Whole Word) and . (Regular Expression)* toggles, combinable with one another.
• Optional Typo-tolerant and Subsequence fuzzy modes alongside default Exact matching.
• Timeline results or collapsible By session groups with complete matching-message counts.
• Newest first / Oldest first, ordered by matching-message time rather than unrelated session activity.
• Optional subagent conversations and archived sessions, clearly labeled.
• Final model replies only by default; optionally search stored inputs, intermediate replies, tool calls/results and reasoning too.
• A compact, theme-aware search card, grouped workspace/session filters, collapsible search tips, and result-local view/order controls.
• Highlighted snippets, pagination, conversation-opening buttons, English/Chinese UI and DSH theme support. Narrow panels stack controls automatically; reduced-motion preferences are respected.
• A read-only search_session_text agent tool backed by the same engine as the UI.
• Local operation without a separate search service, FTS index, third-party dependencies or build step.

Requirements and compatibility

Development reference: DSH Desktop runtime 0.2.1-rc.3. This is not a guaranteed minimum version or a promise of compatibility with every DSH release. The bundle requires DSH's session-query/controller services, plugin management and Web UI plugin APIs; these may change between releases.

Node.js 22+ is required for development checks and tests. DSH Desktop uses its bundled runtime; installing a separate Node version does not change that runtime.

Installation

DSH Desktop

1. Open Plugins → Add plugin (or Install a third-party plugin).
2. Enter the repository URL:

   https://github.com/Ziminli/dsh-session-search
   

3. Review the source/trust prompt, install, and enable the bundle if needed. Follow any restart/reload instructions returned by Plugin Manager.

Local checkout / agent tool

Clone or download this repository, then install its absolute package directory through DSH's Plugin Manager. An agent with the required permission can call the plugin_manager tool with:

{
  "action": "install_bundle",
  "target": "/absolute/path/to/dsh-session-search"
}

This is tool input, not a shell command. Replace the target with the actual absolute directory, including the Windows drive when applicable. Use Plugin Manager instead of editing profile manifests or composition files by hand. Installation affects the current DSH profile, not only the current conversation.

Do not enable multiple Session Search copies at the same time. Disable an existing local @local/dsh-session-search bundle first. The public package does not automatically migrate/remove it; overlapping shortcuts, UI registrations, routes, services and tool names can conflict. The repository name is not a claim of npm availability.

Usage

1. Click the sidebar magnifying glass or press Ctrl+F / ⌘F. By default, typing searches after a 300 ms debounce. Use the top-right Settings shortcut to open Plugins → Session Search without changing the selected conversation. There, set When to search → Only on Enter / Search and Save to require explicit submission. In that mode, text and filter changes wait together; stale outcomes are hidden until you submit.
2. All workspaces is the default. Open the workspace picker to select one or more workspaces; changing selection clears selected sessions. Clear selection (all) restores all-workspace scope. Ungrouped / no workspace includes conversations outside registered workspaces. Session choices and cross-workspace results show workspace names; hover a label to see its path.
3. Keep All sessions, select multiple conversations using checkboxes, or click Search this session on a result. Filter picker options by title or ID; Select all listed adds the currently filtered choices. Each choice is a whole conversation, latest user activity first. Forks and unnamed conversations remain available. Workspace and session selections intersect.
4. Adjust matching, scope and Message time options. Presets include Today, Last 24 hours, Last 7 days and This month. Custom start/end dates use your browser's local timezone; an end date includes that entire calendar day. Either bound may be omitted. Time uses individual message timestamps, not session activity, and relative windows stay fixed while loading more. Final model replies only starts on; subagents and archived sessions start off.
5. Choose result order and, for all-session scope, Timeline / By session. Groups are ordered by their newest matching message, or oldest matching message when reversed. A message counts once even when the query occurs repeatedly in it.
6. Expand groups and use Load more results / Load more sessions (40 entries per page). Group counts include all matching events, not just loaded pages.
7. Click Refresh sessions after activity, rename, deletion or archival elsewhere. Open conversation navigates to an unarchived conversation and temporarily highlights matching displayed text in yellow, using that result's exact/regex/fuzzy options. Press Esc or the header's Clear highlights button to remove it. Restore archived sessions in DSH's sidebar/archive manager before opening; search never restores them.

Highlighted results remain in native Conversation mode so DSH’s selected-session file/link viewers stay available. Only during highlighting, the plugin temporarily replaces the Conversation shell using its own uniquely declared session child and the shared content factory. Clearing highlights, pressing Esc or switching to another session disposes that replacement and restores the resident shell; the resident slot declarations are not recreated.

Conversation highlights are view-only: saved messages, selection/copying and original Chat renderers are unchanged. They apply to currently rendered, non-hidden text blocks, not unloaded history or collapsed content; loading older messages or expanding content refreshes them. The result's time/final-only filters select search outcomes, not which text is painted after opening. Markdown rendering can change whitespace or remove syntax, so highlights follow displayed text and cannot span separate block elements. Opening a result preserves its event sequence and loads history through that event before mounting Chat. A compatibility adapter identifies an exact matching Chat row (never a nearby unrelated event), scrolls that row and its first rendered match into view, and spends the highlight budget on it first. It stops automatic scrolling after user interaction. Shipped Chat has no public selected-event reveal API, so collapsed reasoning/tool content or changed Chat markup can prevent the jump; the header reports this rather than jumping to another message. Expand the relevant content to reveal its highlights. Highlighting uses the browser CSS Custom Highlight API, with an explicit unsupported-browser notice, a 100 ms Host deadline, and bounded scans (500 blocks / 200,000 UTF-16 units / 2,048 ranges); partial coverage and errors are shown in the header. “Highlighting is capped” refers only to this bounded display pass, not missing search results or changed messages. The query is temporary, not saved or added to the URL.

Escape or the close button returns to the conversation. Query/options survive while the client module stays loaded; loaded pages and expansion state survive view switches while the panel stays mounted. These are not permanent settings across application restarts; the saved search-timing preference is profile-persistent. For native browser page-find while the plugin owns Ctrl+F/⌘F, use the browser menu.

Matching rules and searchable content

Toggle	Meaning
Aa — Match Case	Case-sensitive; otherwise Unicode case-insensitive.
ab — Whole Word	The complete match must not touch a Unicode letter, number or underscore. This is not language-aware word segmentation.
. — Regular Expression*	JavaScript Unicode pattern source, without / delimiters or trailing flags. Aa controls case sensitivity.

All toggles start off: punctuation is literal, and whitespace between query terms is flexible. Query length is limited to 1,024 UTF-16 code units. Invalid patterns and matching that exceeds 100 ms per session fail the whole search explicitly rather than silently omitting matches. Zero-width matches use a small vertical highlight. Matching runs on complete stored message text; snippets/highlights are bounded previews, not every occurrence in a long message.

Fuzzy modes

Use Text matching → Typo-tolerant / Subsequence; Exact stays the default. Choosing a fuzzy mode turns Regex off; turning Regex on restores Exact. The HTTP/tool API rejects requests combining useRegex: true with a non-off fuzzy value.

When a fuzzy search has results but no exact matches anywhere in the selected scope, a notice above the outcomes says “No exact matches found. Below are the fuzzy matches.” Exact detection respects case, whole-word and scope/content settings and scans complete messages before pagination. The notice is suppressed while loading, on errors or incomplete reads, and when no fuzzy results exist. A horizontal divider separates settings/explanations from results in both views.

• Typo-tolerant: wrokspace or workspce finds workspace. Compares complete Unicode letter/number/underscore words using insertion, deletion, substitution and adjacent transposition (optimal string alignment). Query words of 1–3 Unicode characters allow 0 edits, 4–7 allow 1, and 8+ allow 2. The matched word is highlighted.
• Subsequence: wrkspc finds workspace. Characters stay in order inside a single word, not across arbitrary message text; highlights mark the selected characters. Candidate words may have at most 4 × query-word length + 8 Unicode characters to limit noisy matches.
• Multiple query words form a contiguous phrase, in query order, with flexible whitespace. Punctuation stays literal. Words are maximal Unicode letter/number/underscore runs, not language-aware segmentation; fuzzy search is not semantic or synonym search.
• Match Case and Whole Word remain available. Fuzzy word tokens already compare full words; Whole Word additionally guards the complete phrase's outer edges, including punctuation-led/trailing phrases.
• Fuzzy queries are limited to 128 Unicode code points / 16 word terms, within the general 1,024 UTF-16-unit limit. Both modes keep chronological ordering, complete group counts, scope filtering and the same hard per-session matching deadline. Fuzzy results are not relevance-ranked.

Final replies are text blocks from the last non-interrupted assistant message of a successfully completed turn, provided that message contains no tool call. Progress text, reasoning, tool calls/results, open/interrupted turns and tool-only endings are excluded. This is inferred from durable events, not a stored final/commentary channel label.

Turn Final model replies only off to include stored user/system/developer inputs, intermediate assistant text, reasoning, tool calls/results and recorded failed-attempt text. Search does not retrieve hidden provider data, OCR images or open attachment files. Raw provider envelopes and stream duplicates of committed messages are not separately indexed.

Every eligible session is scanned before pagination so chronological ordering and group counts are complete for readable sessions. Large histories may be slow; later pages read history again. Unreadable sessions are reported as partial results, while a failed single-session read is an error. Changes to matching results or relevant metadata invalidate continuation cursors: search again to refresh.

Agent tool

search_session_text supports:

• action: "search" (default): matching reply/event snippets, event numbers and UTF-16 highlight ranges.
• action: "groups": paged conversation groups; total counts groups and totalMatches counts matching events.
• action: "sessions": eligible session catalog without text matching.

workspaceId restricts all three actions to one workspace; omit it for all workspaces. Discover IDs from the sessions response's workspaces catalog, including __ungrouped__. Responses include workspace scope metadata, and each session, hit and group carries workspaceId, workspaceTitle and workspacePath. An unknown workspace or a session outside the selected workspace is rejected instead of broadening the search. Registered sidebar membership takes priority; an exact, unambiguous cwd-root match is the fallback. Ambiguous or unmatched conversations remain Ungrouped; subagents inherit their parent's workspace. Continuation cursors bind the workspace scope.

Options: query, workspaceIds (up to 200 IDs), sessionIds (up to 1,000 IDs), after / before (inclusive/exclusive Unix epoch milliseconds), includeSubagents, includeArchived, content (final or all), order (newest or oldest), matchCase, wholeWord, useRegex and fuzzy (off, typo or subsequence). Empty/omitted arrays mean all; selections are OR within a list and AND between lists. Legacy workspaceId / sessionId remain supported, but cannot be combined with a nonempty corresponding plural field. Invalid/unavailable selections are errors, never silently broadened. Time bounds exclude messages with missing timestamps, apply before matching/group counts/pagination and do not filter the session catalog. Pass nextCursor back as cursor with unchanged action/query/options to continue. Defaults match the panel. Tool availability depends on the active agent and DSH policy.

session_search_settings reads the saved timing preference when called with {}; { "searchMode": "live" } or { "searchMode": "submit" } saves it through the same operation used by the plugin settings UI. This changes configuration, not conversations. The settings HTTP endpoint accepts owner-authenticated GET/POST; writes require JSON and failures are explicit.

Privacy and safety

Search operates locally in the current DSH profile. It does not edit, resume, restore or delete conversations. The HTTP endpoint requires DSH owner authentication and disables response caching. Snippets render as text, not session-supplied HTML; regex matching is bounded on the Host rather than executed in the browser.

Results can contain sensitive titles, IDs, paths, prompts, tool output and stored reasoning. Agent-tool results may enter model context and be sent to the configured provider. Queries may appear in request logs. Review results before sharing; never put private histories or credentials in issue reports.

Development

npm run check
npm test
npm pack --dry-run

No dependency installation or build step is needed. Syntax checks and synthetic tests do not establish visual correctness or compatibility with another DSH version. Verify installation, representative searches, keyboard behavior and light/dark rendering in the target application.

Runtime files: index.js (Host/HTTP/tool), settings.js (validated, persisted timing preference), search.js (matching/sorting/grouping/pagination), session-catalog.js (catalog/event extraction), client.js (UI/shortcut). Display resources include the bundle patch, localized metadata and an original SVG icon. Historical internal cursor/VM version markers are implementation identifiers, not the public package version.

Report an issue with your DSH/runtime version and a minimal synthetic example, not a private conversation export.

Releases and community listing

Every package-version change must add a user-visible entry to CHANGELOG.md; npm run check verifies the current version has one. Publish the matching vX.Y.Z Git tag and GitHub Release with notes referring to that entry. Local-only development versions are identified explicitly in the history.

A ready-to-copy community listing entry follows the community contribution guide: accurate one-line English/Chinese descriptions ending in a period, canonical repository URL and the session category. To submit it, open a separate PR to that community repository adding only data/plugins/Ziminli__dsh-session-search.yml with this entry. Do not edit their generated READMEs. This file in our repository is a template, not a submitted or accepted listing. The community also checks repository age (at least one day), the dsh-plugin topic, the installable dsh.bundle manifest and working code. Our exported SVG is for the DSH UI; the optional community icon field is omitted because that field requires a GitHub-hosted raster image.

License

MIT © 2026 Zimin Li. The included original SVG icon is covered by the same license.