dsh-system-monitor-desktop

dsh-system-monitor-desktop

中文 | English

Author: DeepSeek + DeepSeek-Harness

The standalone Windows build of the DeepSeek Harness system monitor: an always-on-top status bar that runs on its own, no Harness required.

⣿ CPU 3.2% 71.9°C 丨 MEM 29% 9.1/31.2 GB 丨 GPU 0% 44°C 0/11.9 GB 丨 网速 ↓ 20.1 KB/s ↑ 5.1 KB/s  ⚙ ⟳ 📌 ✕

Features

Docked, hidden, and showing the opacity slider at work (real desktop captures, not mockups):

The settings window, from the ⚙ button or the tray menu:

Running it

Packaged build

Download dsh-system-monitor-desktop-<version>-win-x64.zip (about 110 MB) from the latest release and run dsh-system-monitor-desktop.exe. No installer, no registry entries — deleting the folder uninstalls it.

From source

npm install
npm run icons     # generates assets/icon.png, icon.ico, tray.png (drawn by the script, no image library)
npm start

Packaging

npm run dist      # writes dist/dsh-system-monitor-desktop-win-x64/

Using it

• Drag: while floating, drag anywhere on the bar except its buttons. Docked, the bar is not draggable — the screen edge decides where it sits.
• ⚙ settings: opens the settings window.
• ⟳ refresh: re-probe the hardware now instead of waiting for the next sample.
• 📌 pin: toggle dock-and-auto-hide.
• ✕ hide: sends the bar to the tray (it does not quit). Bring it back with a left click on the tray icon, or "Show / hide the bar" in the tray menu.
• Tray menu: show/hide, dock and auto-hide, click-through, always on top, settings, reset position, open the settings folder, quit.

Docked, the bar keeps its own width — it is not stretched into a band across the screen. What stays at the top edge while hidden is a 6 px rounded sliver the width of the bar itself; put the pointer on it to bring the bar back.

Turning click-through back off

Once click-through is on, the bar receives no mouse events at all — its own buttons stop responding, which is the point of the feature rather than a bug. While it is on the buttons are visibly dimmed and the outline turns dashed, so the state is obvious at a glance. Two ways back:

1. The tray menu (always available): right-click the tray icon and clear "Click-through".
2. A global shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+L, then Ctrl+Alt+B, then Ctrl+Alt+Y — the first that registers wins (the others are skipped if another app holds them). Whichever took is shown in the tray menu and in the settings window.

Revealing a docked bar still works with click-through on, because the hover check reads the global cursor position (screen.getCursorScreenPoint) rather than relying on the window receiving mouse events.

Did it actually work? There is a command that asks Windows

setIgnoreMouseEvents reports nothing, so this repository ships a self-check that asks the operating system directly:

npm run probe          # writes to ./probe

It reads the window's extended style back (WS_EX_TRANSPARENT — set or not), asks WindowFromPoint which window a coordinate belongs to, sends a real mouse click and sees where it lands — then drags, re-asserts always-on-top, hides and re-shows, and runs the dock cycle, re-reading the bit after each, because those calls go through SetWindowPos and could plausibly drop it.

A real run, with click-through on:

[probe] on-no-options
[probe]   exStyle=0x00080028 bits={"transparent":true,"layered":true,"topmost":true,...}
[probe]   windowFromPoint=66018|SysListView32|FolderView  pointHitsBar=false
[probe]   real click at (2433,41) -> renderer saw 0; foreground after: 66014|Progman|Program Manager
[probe]   -> click-through EFFECTIVE

Read it as: transparent:true — the style bit really is set; pointHitsBar=false — Windows does not consider that coordinate to be the bar; and after a real click the foreground window is Progman (the desktop itself) while the bar's renderer "saw 0 clicks" — the click went through. The control step (click-through off) is the mirror image: transparent:false, pointHitsBar=true, and the renderer receives the click.

Configuration

Settings live in %APPDATA%\dsh-system-monitor-desktop\settings.json and can be edited directly (tray → open the settings folder):

{
  "pinned": false,        // dock to the top edge and auto-hide
  "clickThrough": false,  // let mouse events pass through
  "alwaysOnTop": true,    // keep the bar above other windows
  "openAtLogin": false,   // start when I sign in
  "theme": "auto",        // auto | light | dark
  "opacity": 0.94,        // background opacity, 0.2–1
  "position": null,       // floating position {x, y}; null means top-right
  "language": "auto"      // auto | zh | en
}

A corrupt, partial, or hand-edited file falls back to the defaults rather than failing to start, and an out-of-range opacity is clamped into 0.2–1 (fully transparent would leave the text floating over the desktop, which is unreadable).

Where the numbers come from

The collectors are byte-identical to the Harness plugin's (tools/verify-vendor.mjs proves it — see below), so both products measure and format everything the same way:

No runtime dependencies: no drivers, no elevation, no network access, read-only. The only processes it starts are typeperf and nvidia-smi, both shipped with Windows or the graphics driver.

On the Windows CPU-temperature unit. The PDH counter is widely documented as "degrees Kelvin", but ACPI's underlying _TMP is deci-Kelvin. Measured on a Windows 11 AMD laptop: ~355 at rest and ~367 under sustained 4-thread load. Read as Kelvin that is 82 °C → 94 °C — a laptop CPU settling under its 95 °C throttle. Read as deci-Celsius the same trace would be a 1.2 °C rise under full load, which no physical package does. It is therefore read as Kelvin.

Where the code came from

The ten files under src/shared/ are copied from dsh-system-monitor (eight collectors, the view model, and the bilingual dictionary), unchanged. That is what makes the two products agree on the format and the colour thresholds of a reading.

Copies drift silently, so they are pinned twice:

node tools/verify-vendor.mjs           # checks tools/vendored.json, and compares against the plugin source when present
node tools/verify-vendor.mjs --write   # re-records the hashes (when upgrading the copies on purpose)

test/app.test.mjs needs only tools/vendored.json, so drift is caught even with no plugin checkout around.

Development

npm test        # node --test "test/*.test.mjs"
npm run icons   # regenerate the icons
npm run dist    # build the portable folder

Self-check diagnostics

A GUI app cannot be verified by unit tests alone, and this one was built without a human watching the screen, so it ships several diagnostics that walk themselves through the behaviour and write down what happened — as text and as pictures. They are all electron . --xxx, and they work in the packaged build too.

npm run capture                 # walk every state and screenshot it into ./capture
npm run probe                   # ask Windows whether click-through really works, into ./probe
npm run drag                    # drag the bar with real mouse input, into ./drag
npm run login-test              # round-trip the sign-in entry (and restore it)

Or choose a directory: npm start -- --capture=D:\shots.

Layout

Known limitations

• Windows only. The dock geometry is portable, but the tray, the always-on-top level, click-through, and the drag behaviour were tuned on Windows.
• Not intended for macOS.
• Network throughput and GPU each start a short-lived process (typeperf / nvidia-smi) every 2 s and 1.5 s; CPU temperature every 4 s. On a very busy machine a reading can lag by a few seconds — by design: the bar never blocks on hardware.
• The sign-in entry records the executable's full path. This is a portable build, so moving the folder means setting it again.
• The settings window is hidden from the taskbar too; open it from ⚙ or the tray menu, and click again if it is behind something.
• Version 0.x: the configuration may still change.

License

The Unlicense — completely free, with no conditions on use. Copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell or distribute it, in source or binary form, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with no attribution, no notice to keep and no terms to comply with. See LICENSE for the full text.