dsh-session-title-pattern

Session title (session-title-pattern)

English | 中文

One small tool for the dsh sidebar: titles you can read at a glance — which day, what kind of work, what it was about.

• Automatic titles — every title becomes 0913｜排查｜登录失败: which day, what kind of work, and what it was about, summarized from the whole conversation by a model (two Chinese characters for Chinese, one word for English)

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-session-title-pattern

Every stable release is published to npm, so it works right after installing — no extra configuration and no local build.

Automatic titles

What a title looks like

By default dsh uses a sentence the model happened to produce (for example 「确认当前模型身份及工具查询」); with a dozen sessions on screen you cannot tell which day a session belongs to or what kind of work it was. This plugin turns the title into three parts:

MMDD ｜ type ｜ topic
0913 ｜ 排查 ｜ DeepSeek-Harness login failure

• Date — the day the session was created, four digits MMDD (your machine's local time zone, so no off-by-one day around midnight). It does not drift when the title is recomputed: keep chatting past midnight, or run /retitle later, and the prefix still shows the day this conversation started
• Type — what the session is about, following the interface language: a Chinese UI gets two Chinese characters (排查 / 生成 / 配置…), an English UI gets a single word (Debug / Config / Docs) — an English conversation under a Chinese UI still gets a Chinese type
• Topic — a summary of the whole conversation, not the first few characters of the first message

The format is yours to change; the default template is {MMDD}｜{type}｜{topic}:

Placeholder · Meaning {YYYY} {MM} {DD} {HH} {mm} {ss} · Date/time parts, local time zone, all taken from the session creation moment; freely combinable ({YYYYMMDD}, {HHmmss}) {type} · Type. Omit it and there is no type; when it renders empty the whole segment disappears and the neighbouring separator goes with it {topic} · Topic. Omit it and there is no topic; it disappears the same way when empty

Change the template directly, e.g. {topic}｜{MMDD} (topic first) or {YYYYMMDD} {topic} (with the year).

When it updates

• On the first message — dsh schedules this itself and produces a first title
• Every 10 messages afterwards (configurable) — this plugin triggers one recompute; the other turns never call the model
• Only top-level sessions are handled; forked child sessions are not auto-named

Each recompute sends only "first message + last main line + last summary + the new turns" — a few hundred tokens in total, no matter how long the conversation has been going (earlier text is only ever compressed forward, never re-sent).

The model follows the session's current main model by default; you can also pick one in the settings.

Failures behave differently depending on what already exists:

• A title already exists: timeouts, errors, and a missing route all keep the previous title — a good title is never wiped out
• No title yet (the very first attempt failed): instead of waiting for the model, the plugin builds a fallback title locally — the date as usual, no type, and the topic taken from the leading words of the first message (the same rule dsh uses for its own first-prompt naming: the first 8 whitespace-separated words, then a byte cap; Chinese has no spaces, so for Chinese this is effectively the whole message cut by bytes), e.g. 0915｜login failure reason. The next recompute replaces it as soon as the model works

The type uses the same language as the interface copy — both follow dsh's interface language (Settings → General → Language). The topic follows the conversation's language. So an English conversation with a Chinese UI reads exactly 0915｜排查｜Login 401.

Manual recompute and rename

Click the header button: the first item to the right of the title is a pencil icon; it opens a "Rename session" card — the input is prefilled with the current title and can be edited by hand; "Generate" really computes a title and only fills the input; "Save" writes it and locks it (no further automatic updates), and the lock switch in the bottom-left corner releases it at any time.

Type a command: enter /retitle in the input box.

Automatic naming only fires for "a top-level session, the first human message, and no title yet", so later renames can only use the two entry points above. The three-dot menu on each session row (rename / fork / archive) is a closed platform component with no extension slot, so a third-party plugin cannot add menu items to it.

Title display width

dsh renders the title as the last breadcrumb segment, and the upstream stylesheet hard-codes max-width:220px for it — after padding and the MMDD｜type prefix, only seven or eight Chinese characters are left for the topic. When the client activates, this plugin injects an override rule (no configuration needed):

[class*="_crumbCurrent"]{max-width:min(640px, 60vw) !important;}

Only the current session's title is widened; ancestor sessions and subagent breadcrumbs keep the original width. If upstream renames the class, the rule fails silently (no error — the title just gets short again): select the title element in DevTools and check whether class still contains _crumbCurrent.

Configuration

Settings UI (recommended)

Since dsh 0.1.7 the settings live on the plugin's own page: open the Plugins view in the sidebar, find this plugin under Installed, and open its detail page — the configuration form sits between the description and the entry rows.

Item · Meaning Recompute every N messages · Default 10. 0 = compute once when the session is created Model for title summaries (provider / model) · Two dropdowns on one row: pick a provider on the left (first item "follow the chat model" = empty follows the session's main model), then a model on the right — selecting a provider auto-picks its first model. Options come from providers you have configured; falls back to two text fields when the directory is unavailable Timeout · Raise it when the model is slow (e.g. a free tier queueing) Title format / Title length limit · What the three parts look like, and how long the title may get

Edits are staged and written only when you press "Save"; each field marks whether it was customized and can be reset on its own; leaving the form discards unsaved edits.

The UI copy is bilingual and follows dsh's interface language (Settings → General → Language).

cordis.patch.yml in the profile

For scripted or bulk deployments:

- id: session-title-pattern
  config:
    retitleEvery: 10
    template: '{MMDD}｜{type}｜{topic}'
    maxBytes: 80

Key · Type · Default · Meaning retitleEvery · number · 10 · How many human messages between title recomputes; minimum 0; 0 = compute once when the session is created provider · string · empty · Model provider; must be paired with `model`; empty follows the session's main model model · string · empty · Model id; must be paired with `provider` timeoutMs · number · 90000 · Timeout for one model call (ms) maxOutputTokens · number · 2048 · Output token fuse; reasoning counts against it too. Not shown in the UI; reach for it here when needed maxInputBytes · number · 4096 · Input byte cap for one call template · string · {MMDD}｜{type}｜{topic} · Title format template maxBytes · number · 80 · Total title length cap (UTF-8 bytes), minimum 20

The ｜ in the default template is a full-width vertical bar (U+FF5C). A placeholder the plugin does not recognize stays in the title verbatim (e.g. {date}), so a typo in the template is obvious at a glance.

⚠️ maxBytes must be ≤ maxTitleBytes of the session-title row (dsh-base uses 80 by default); anything beyond is silently truncated.

Precedence is schema default → composition layer (this section) → user layer (settings UI): for a field you changed in the UI, editing cordis.patch.yml has no effect until you "Reset" it in the UI first.

When something goes wrong

dsh fails to start: this plugin ships browser-side code, so a very old dsh may not be compatible. In the profile's cordis.patch.yml, disable only this plugin and dsh recovers; upgrade dsh and install again afterwards:

- id: session-title-pattern
  disabled: true

Development

npm install
npm run build        # builds host first, then client
npm run typecheck

`lib/` is a build artefact committed to git — dsh loads main from package.json (lib/index.mjs) and never compiles TypeScript at runtime. After changing src/ you must run npm run build again and commit lib/ with it, or the change will not take effect.

Implementation details (the cost model, how v0.8.1 wires the configuration form into dsh 0.1.7's plugin-page slot, and lessons from past iterations) were carried in the now-retired root DEVELOPMENT.md (removed during the doc-system upgrade — its content is preserved in git history). Its version / task history now lives in docs/PROGRESS-HISTORY.md (closed releases) and docs/progress.json (in-progress), maintained via the koc-code-doc-progress skill; design / architecture details are pending extraction to docs/design/.

This README has two languages: this file and README.zh.md. Changing one means changing the other — the copy readers actually see is the one that counts.

License

MIT