DSH Desk Pet

A desk pet that shows you what your agent is doing.
It floats above every window — including fullscreen — and changes expression as DSH works, waits, finishes or fails.

_{idle · working · waiting · error · happy · sleeping}

中文

Install

With DSH already set up, one command:

dsh plugin --profile web add deepseek-desk-pet
dsh web

The pet appears on your desktop, floating above whatever you are working in. Nothing is added to the DSH page itself.

Pet only, no DSH: clone the repo and run ./bin/dsh-desk-pet.

To follow the main branch instead of the published version:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:anneheartrecord/dsh-desk-pet#main

The npm package is deepseek-desk-pet while the repo is dsh-desk-pet: npm rejects dsh-desk-pet as too similar to an unrelated dsh-deskpet.

No dependencies. It runs on the system /usr/bin/python3 and talks to AppKit through ctypes. Nothing to install, nothing to build.

Use

It starts in the background and detaches from your terminal, so you can close the window you launched it from.

States

Driven by your local DSH. Nothing to configure.

That last one takes two clocks on purpose: an agent with nothing to do is not the same thing as a desk with nobody at it.

Skins

_{DeepSeek Whale (default) · Blue Whale · Threadcore · Nautilus · Jellyfish}

Right-click to cycle, or --skin <id>. Every skin has all six states at three frames each.

Options

./bin/dsh-desk-pet --scale 0.5      # smaller (default 0.7)
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --skin jellyfish # start on a specific skin
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --reset          # forget saved position, size and skin
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --stop           # stop the running pet
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --foreground     # stay attached, log to this terminal
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --probe          # diagnostics, no window
./bin/dsh-desk-pet --inventory      # frames per skin per state

How it works

The pet watches ~/.dsh — running processes, session activity, and an optional hint file — and maps what it finds onto the six states. To drive it by hand:

echo '{"kind":"working"}' > ~/.dsh/pet-activity.json
rm ~/.dsh/pet-activity.json          # back to automatic

The pet publishes what it sees to ~/.dsh-desk-pet/state.json, which is how a second launch knows one is already running and how --stop finds it.

There was briefly a second pet mirrored into the DSH page. It is gone: two pets on one screen read as a bug, and the mirror was where the failures lived. The window that floats over everything is the thing worth having.

Why AppKit and not Tk

macOS ships Tcl/Tk 8.5.9, released in 2010, and on macOS 26 its drawing path no longer reaches the screen: the window maps, the canvas reports itself mapped, viewable, correctly sized and holding an image at the right coordinates — and what appears is an empty grey rectangle.

So the window is built directly on AppKit through ctypes. That is more machinery, and it buys three things Tk could not offer at all: real alpha instead of a 1-bit GIF matte, a window level that clears fullscreen Spaces, and a session panel that travels with the pet as a child window.

Development

/usr/bin/python3 -m unittest discover -t . -s tests -v     # 148 tests, no display needed
DSH_PET_ART_CHECK=1 /usr/bin/python3 -m unittest discover -t . -s tests   # + the pixel gate
node tests/plugin_smoke.mjs                                 # the plugin's HTTP routes

The art pipeline

./scripts/generate_frames.py    # fill in missing poses
./scripts/build_frames.py       # key, align, scale; writes both frame sets
./scripts/check_frames.py       # per-pixel inspection
./scripts/contact_sheet.py      # one reviewable image, no window required

New art goes on a magenta #FF00FF background, and props must not use magenta. The plate has to be a colour the artwork never contains: the first batch was generated on pastel plates — mint green behind the jellyfish — close enough to the characters that no key threshold could separate them, which is how that jellyfish once shipped with its eyes cut out.

generate_frames never redraws a character from scratch; every request is an image-to-image edit of an existing still, because text-to-image cannot hold identity across calls. Frame 00 of a state edits from the skin's idle pose; frame 01 edits from frame 00 of its own state, because a loop needs the same pose an instant later, not two different poses.

check_frames is the only test that looks at pixels. Everything else can only compare filenames — which is how a skin once passed the entire suite with holes punched through its face.

Custom skins

A skin is a folder of frames. Anything at assets/web/<id>/<state>/*.png appears in the cycle on its own, with no code change.

Known limits

• The window is a rectangle, so clicks landing on the transparent margin around the pet do not reach what is behind it. Per-pixel click-through is written but not yet wired up.
• No menu yet — right-click cycles skins rather than opening one.

What is planned next, and what is deliberately not: docs/ROADMAP.md.

License

MIT.