Nexus-Aethra/Nexus-Terminal

dshell is a terminal-first AI workbench packaged as a set of eleven @nexus-aethra/dshell-* npm packages shipped together through the single bundle @nexus-aethra/dshell-bundle@0.1.13, and it targets DeepSeek Harness (dsh) exclusively. Rather than forking the host, the project plugs into dsh's documented Cordis extension points and carries its own cordis.patch.yml, so the upstream dsh installation stays upgradeable while the dshell rows appear in the layer stack the moment the bundle is installed. There is no profile edit, no manual config file, and a side-effect of the install is that two upstream rows normally absent from a stock dsh profile — including @deepseek-ai/dsh-ssh — are pulled in automatically.

The screen is one merged timeline in which real shell output and AI turns interleave by time, with each AI turn rendered as a collapsible task block, and the input row shows either a $ or a ✦ glyph to indicate whether Enter runs a command locally or sends the prompt to the agent. The agent runs in its own PTY so it never blocks or hijacks the foreground program, sessions form pipes to delegate work and share files by path through a shared buffer (chunks above 32 MiB are sha256-verified), and SSH device sessions execute commands, files and the visible terminal entirely on the remote machine. It is aimed at developers and operators who want one chronological surface for both the shell and the AI instead of a chat-style UI, and the README ships eleven design notes plus per-package ownership and a phased roadmap.

Prerequisites are strict: Node 24.21.0, pnpm 9.15.0 on PATH, and dsh 0.1.5-rc.2, 0.1.6-alpha.2, 0.1.7-rc.2, 0.2.0-rc.1 or 0.2.0-rc.2, installable as either the desktop app or the CLI from @deepseek-ai/dsh@next; mismatched peer versions cause dsh to skip the bundle unless overridden with dsh plugin --profile <name> allow-version <package@version> --dsh-version <exact> --accept-risk, which records the grant in compatibility.json. Documented limits include an immutable session working directory, a single browser WebSocket per session, polling-only refresh of the pipe panel at about three seconds with transfer status at one second, archive-versus-delete semantics, transcript files capturing typed input under 0600/0700 permissions at $DSH_HOME/dshell-pty/, full-screen detection on Linux only, and a first-run caveat that a freshly installed dsh may surface two rows as did not activate until the extra upstream packages are installed — none of which is fatal, since the rest of dshell continues to work in that state.