dsh-workspace-promote

dsh-workspace-promote

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A DeepSeek Harness (DSH) host plugin that promotes the workspace you just submitted a task in to the top of the sidebar — once per submission, and never while the task is running.

One command, no patch editing — the package ships its own profile bundle patch:

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-workspace-promote

Restart dsh web afterwards (host-plane plugins mount at boot).

The gap it fills

DSH's sidebar handles the two layers very differently:

Layer	Native behaviour	Enough?
Sessions inside a workspace group	View options default to orderBy: "updated"; a session with new activity is promoted to the top of its group	✅ Native, no plugin needed
Workspaces themselves	Order comes from the durable workspaceIds array, i.e. manual drag order; it never reacts to what you are actually working on	❌ This plugin

So if you want "whatever project I am working on floats to the top", only the workspace layer is missing, and that is exactly what this plugin adds.

Trigger semantics

The plugin reorders on exactly one condition: a user/message event whose data.source.kind === "user" — a prompt a human actually submitted.

The same user/message event also carries two other kinds of content, distinguished by source.kind. All of them are ignored:

source.kind	What it is	This plugin
user	A direct human prompt	✅ promotes
plugin	Synthetic agent.inject() context (file-change notices, AGENTS.md, skill content, cron notifications) and goal continuation rounds	❌ ignored
tool	A tool result (role is user too)	❌ ignored

Execution-time events — assistant/message, step/start, step/end, turn/start, turn/end — are ignored as well.

Net effect: one submission, one promotion. The sidebar does not move while a task is being executed.

Hooking the raw session/event feed instead (the obvious first implementation) is what makes the sidebar jump continuously, because tool results are themselves user-role events.

How it works

• On a qualifying event it calls workspaceRegistry.insertBefore(id, currentFirst).
• If the workspace is already first, or there are fewer than two workspaces, it returns immediately and writes nothing — so bursts of events cannot cause a write storm.
• No state file: insertBefore mutates the durable workspaceIds order, so the result survives restarts for free, with no "insufficient activity samples after restart" problem.
• Ungrouped sessions and subagent child sessions do not participate.
• Any failure is logged only; it never affects the session itself.

Audit log

~/.dsh/workspace-promote.log (honours DSH_HOME). Append-only, and useful for answering "which behaviour is this process actually running, and when exactly did it fire":

2026-09-15T09:31:44.809Z boot pid=49220 trigger=human-prompt-only
2026-09-15T09:33:11.770Z promote workspace=039cce9b-... session=session-1ee5c45f-... from=a6680e0c-...

ctx.logger output has no guaranteed destination; this file does.

Trade-off

Real-time ordering competes with manual drag: if you drag workspace B to the top and then submit a task in A, A returns to the top. That is inherent to "dynamic ordering", not a bug.

Difference from dsh-workspace-sort

dsh-workspace-sort also orders workspaces by activity, but its semantics are "re-sort at most once per calendar day, then stay frozen" — the order in the morning reflects activity up to yesterday. This plugin triggers on the user's submission action instead, and keeps no state file.

Pick dsh-workspace-sort if you want the sidebar to stay put all day; pick this one if you want the project you are actively working on to be on top.

Verify

1. Submit a task in some other project → that project jumps to the top.
2. Watch the task execute (many tool calls, many steps) → the sidebar should not move again.
3. ~/.dsh/workspace-promote.log should gain exactly one promote line per submission.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile web rm dsh-workspace-promote

Then restart dsh web. If you instead wired it by hand into cordis.patch.yml, delete that workspace-promote row and restart.

Note: do not run both install paths at once. If you added the row manually and later install the package as a bundle, the same row id would be inserted twice — remove one first.

License

MIT