dsh-desktop-restart-button

dsh-desktop-restart-button

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A restart button for DeepSeek Harness Desktop on Windows, plus a small tech-style boot animation that replaces the app's plain "Loading settings…" cold-start caption.

Both are drawn by an inline index-injection row, so app.asar is never touched — installing and uninstalling this plugin leaves the shipped application exactly as it was.

Why a plugin and not a menu item

The desktop window menu bar (应用 / 编辑) is built by Electron's preload script with exactly two hard-coded buttons, and the app exposes no restart IPC channel and no CLI entry point — its own app.relaunch() menu item only exists in development builds. There is also no way to use dsh plugin --profile desktop, because the desktop profile is managed exclusively by the Electron application.

The one supported extension point on the desktop is a profile plugin that pushes an inline script row into the host's index injection table. That is what this package is.

Install

Desktop profiles cannot be managed from the CLI. Install it through the app's own plugin manager:

1. Open 设置 → 插件 in the app.
2. Search for dsh-desktop-restart-button (or install from a local tarball).
3. Restart the app once.

The button appears in the title bar, right after 应用 and 编辑. On any platform other than Windows the plugin loads but adds nothing: the menu bar it attaches to only exists on Windows, and the restart path is WMI/PowerShell.

Why restarting needs a launcher at all

Electron puts children of the app into a Job Object, and every process the app spawns is killed when the app is killed. A restarter started the normal way would therefore kill the app and then die with it, leaving the user staring at a closed window. CREATE_BREAKAWAY_FROM_JOB is refused by that job.

The chain that works, and the one this plugin uses:

button click
  → POST /dsh-desktop-restart-button/restart
  → execFile powershell scripts/launch.ps1
  → WMI Win32_Process.Create          ← created by WmiPrvSE, outside the job
  → wscript.exe scripts/launch.vbs    ← GUI-subsystem binary, no console ever
  → restart.ps1                       ← kills the app, then relaunches it

wscript.exe is not an accident: WMI-created powershell.exe always flashes a console window, and neither -WindowStyle Hidden nor Win32_ProcessStartup.ShowWindow = 0 suppresses it (while CreateFlags = CREATE_NO_WINDOW makes the WMI call fail outright). A GUI-subsystem binary plus WshShell.Run(cmd, 0, False) is the only combination that stays invisible.

Measured on the author's machine: click → window back ≈ 5 seconds, most of which is Host startup, not the restart itself.

Safety

• Origin fence. The restart route accepts only dsh-app://app (how the desktop shell serves its own UI) and loopback origins. A random web page in your browser cannot reach it.
• In-job guard. restart.ps1 calls IsProcessInJob before touching anything. If it finds itself inside the app's job — for example because someone ran it by hand from a terminal that the app owns — it re-dispatches itself through the WMI launcher and exits without killing the app, instead of closing it and dying.
• No data is lost on purpose. The app is asked to close its window first and is only force-killed if it is still alive afterwards, so settings and session writes finish normally.
• Never leaves a closed app. If the relaunch does not take, the restarter retries for up to a minute before giving up.

Log: %USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-desktop-restart-button.log

Configuration

- id: dsh-desktop-restart-button
  name: dsh-desktop-restart-button
  config:
    bootAnimation: false

bootAnimation defaults to true. Set it to false to keep the app's original "正在加载设置…" caption. Requires an app restart to take effect, since the injection row is collected once at startup.

The boot animation

The overlay it replaces is the app's onboarding surface, which renders a lone [role="status"] node while the Host is starting. The plugin marks only that exact state (an overlay that has a status node and no wizard content) and hides the caption on the marked element via an attribute selector — the real onboarding wizard keeps its own text.

The animation itself is pure CSS/SVG (three counter-rotating arcs, a breathing core, a sweeping bar, a slowly drifting dot grid) with a prefers-reduced-motion fallback to static. No canvas, no rAF loop, no work after the overlay unmounts.

Notes and limits

• Windows only. dsh.bundle.platforms: ["win32"].
• Desktop only. It attaches to the preload-built window menu bar, which a plain dsh web session does not have. On web the plugin is harmless but invisible.
• The app relaunches process.execPath, i.e. the executable the host is running as. If that is ever not the desktop binary, it falls back to D:\deepseek\DeepSeek Harness.exe.
• The desktop host binds a random port every start, so the page you were on is not valid after a restart. The button does not try to navigate for you.

License

MIT