dsh-web-icon-indicator

📖 中文文档 · English · 📝 Changelog · Releases

Browser tab favicon reflects the current DSH session state — idle / running / asking / done — so you can see at a glance whether a session needs your attention, even when the tab is in the background.

✨ What it does

• Live session state on the tab favicon — the browser-tab icon mirrors idle / running / asking / done (aggregate priority: asking > running > done > idle), so background tabs tell you at a glance what your agents are doing — including ask_user_question prompts and approval / sandbox-escalation waits, which pin the icon to asking.
• One SVG, recolored & animated in the browser — ships a single whale template (icons/base.svg); every state, color and frame is rendered client-side as a data:image/svg+xml URI. No per-color icon files.
• Six built-in effects — static, blink, breath, rainbow, heartbeat, bounce — all driven by JavaScript, since favicons don't play SVG CSS animations.
• Fully configurable, applied live — every state's color, effect and cycle speed, plus the asking/done hold timings, apply to the running tab within ~1 s — no reload, no restart.
• Built-in settings UI, zero YAML — a Favicon indicator card in the DSH settings page edits the whole config with live color-swatch previews and persists it to settings.yaml for you (path below).
• Background-tab & restart-proof — animated states keep a wall-clock fallback while requestAnimationFrame is paused in hidden tabs, and the status poll self-heals across host restarts.

🛠 Configuration UI — how to get there

Changes are saved through the settings transport into the profile's settings.yaml and applied to the running tab within ~1 s — no reload, no restart. See Configure for the full key reference.

🎬 Default configuration, visualized

The four default states, exactly as they appear in the browser tab (the asking whale really blinks):

✨ All effects, animated

Every preview below is the real whale path, animated the same way the plugin renders it (the previews are self-contained animated SVGs — they play right in your browser):

Effect	What it does	Preview
static	A single colored frame, no motion — uses colors[0]
blink	Toggles colors[0] ⇄ colors[1] (a darker second color is derived if missing) over speed
breath	Pulsates smoothly between colors[0] and colors[1] (derived if missing) over speed
rainbow	Uses colors[0] as the starting hue, then cycles the color wheel over speed
heartbeat	Scale pulses with a sharp lub-dub beat over speed — color is colors[0]
bounce	The whale hops up and down over speed — color is colors[0]

Want to tweak colors and watch the tab favicon change live? Open the self-contained demo (demo/dynamic-color.html) — pick a state + effect, edit colors, and the favicon updates in real time (no build, no dependencies).

Install

This is a standard DSH bundle plugin. Install it into the web profile (the GUI/TUI profiles pick it up automatically through the cordis patch layer).

From npm (recommended):

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-web-icon-indicator@latest

From the Git source:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:waknow/dsh-web-icon-indicator

Or from a local directory / tarball:

dsh plugin --profile web add <path-or-tarball>

Or drop the directory into ~/.dsh/profiles/web/node_modules/<name>/ and ship a cordis.patch.yml that matches the one shipped here.

Configure

All keys are optional; defaults shown.

Each entry in states is one object per state: { effect, colors[], speed? }:

config:
  states:
    idle:    { effect: static,    colors: ['#1a1a1a'] }
    running: { effect: static,    colors: ['#FACC15'] }
    asking:  { effect: blink,     colors: ['#E5484D', '#FACC15'], speed: 400 }
    done:    { effect: static,    colors: ['#22A06B'] }

• effect — one of static | blink | breath | rainbow | heartbeat | bounce.
• colors — an array of hex colors. colors[0] is the primary. Multi-color effects read more entries: blink uses colors[0]⇄colors[1], breath breathes colors[0]⇄colors[1] (each derives a darker second color if omitted), rainbow uses only colors[0] as the starting hue.
• speed — optional per-state cycle length in ms (also the blink toggle interval). Default 1200.

Entries are shallow-merged over the defaults, so you can override only a few states. Example:

- id: dsh-web-icon-indicator
  name: 'dsh-web-icon-indicator'
  config:
    states:
      running: { effect: breath,    colors: ['#FF9900', '#FFD9A0'], speed: 900 }
      asking:  { effect: rainbow,   colors: ['#FF0000'] }
      done:    { effect: heartbeat, colors: ['#2ECC71'] }

Settings page & settings.yaml (DSH ≥ rc7)

The plugin registers the whole config surface above with the DSH settings
service under the web-icon-indicator namespace (a schemastery schema in
lib/index.js):

• Web GUI: open 设置 → 插件 → 插件配置 — a Favicon indicator card
  edits the same keys (asking/done hold, and per-state effect / colors /
  cycle), staged and saved through the settings transport. Each state is a
  collapsible row showing a color dot and a one-line summary (blink · #E5484D ⇄ #FACC15 · 400ms); expanding a row reveals its three fields, and
  the colors field previews parsed swatches live.
• Persistence: values land in the profile's settings.yaml (default
  ~/.dsh/settings.yaml) as a web-icon-indicator: section. The composition
  entry stays the base layer; resolution order is schema defaults →
  composition entry → settings document user layer.
• No server restart, no tab reload for settings-card saves: askingHoldMs /
  doneHoldMs apply live host-side, and per-state visual config (effect /
  colors / cycle) is synced into the running tab through the status poll within
  ~1 s. Only code-level default changes in lib/index.js need a tab reload (or
  a DSH web rebuild).
• The browser half is a hand-written lib/client.js (ModuleLoader factory
  format — no build step, no runtime deps beyond the shell's react). The DSH
  client scanner picks a new dsh.client declaration up on the next profile
  start.
• Deployments without a settings service are unaffected: the plugin falls back
  to reading the composition entry exactly as before.

How it works

• Host plugin with a small browser half: registers routes on the existing webServer — the status JSON endpoint, a static /dsh-web-icon-indicator/base.svg (the whale template), and one tapIndex that injects a small browser script into every served index.html. The config surface is registered with the DSH settings service (web-icon-indicator namespace) for validation, persistence, and the settings-page card (see above).
• Status is aggregated across live agents.list() with priority asking > running > done > idle. The aggregation runs a reconcile() step on every request to detect running → idle transitions, because agent/status's idle delivery is not guaranteed at turn end.
• ask_user_question tool calls (via tools/pre-execute / tools/result) flip the session into asking with a configurable minimum-hold so the icon stays visible even when the user answers immediately.
• Permission / sandbox-interception waits are also surfaced as asking: when the agent hits a sandbox denial and escalates (sandbox_permissions + justification), or any other tool asks for approval, the approval service appends an approval/asked session event and blocks the agent until you decide. The plugin watches session/event (with an authoritative fold over the live session log as a fallback) and pins the session into the asking state for that whole wait, clearing it on approval/decided.
• The browser script polls /dsh-web-icon-status.json once a second, fetches base.svg once, and then on every requestAnimationFrame tick rebuilds the favicon as a data:image/svg+xml,… URI — replacing the __COLOR__ placeholder with the state's configured color and applying the state's configured effect. The status response also echoes the current per-state visual config, so a settings save reaches the running tab on the next poll (~1 s) without a reload. Browsers don't play favicon SVG CSS animations, so all motion is JS-driven. Because browsers pause requestAnimationFrame in hidden tabs, the poll also repaints a wall-clock frame for animated states, so background tabs keep animating (coarsely) instead of freezing; full-speed animation resumes when the tab is visible again. The poll also survives host restarts: a transient fetch failure restores the original icon and retries on the next tick (the SPA reconnects in place, so the icon comes back without a manual refresh).

Browser support & known limitations

The favicon is a plain image, so browsers never run the SVG's own CSS/JS animation inside the tab UI — every frame is rendered here in JavaScript. How well a changing favicon is displayed differs by browser:

Known limitations (current as of Safari 26.3):

• Favicons have their own cache. Chrome keeps a favicon database, Firefox a favicons.sqlite, and Safari a system-level icon cache — none of which a normal clear cache touches, and WebKit even caches the "no icon" case. That is why a changed icon can linger for an existing tab. The plugin already mitigates this: it serves base.svg and the status endpoint with Cache-Control: no-store, bundles a freshness query (?t=Date.now()) on its fetches, and replaces the <link rel=icon> node on each state change.
• Safari renders SVG favicons but ignores their internal CSS — no @media, no prefers-color-scheme, no CSS animation. So all recoloring must be baked into each frame's markup (which the plugin does) rather than driven by CSS variables.
• data:-URI SVG favicons are unreliable in Safari (WebKit bug 236616, still open; reproduced on Safari 17.6). The plugin currently builds each frame as a data:image/svg+xml URI, so on Safari the tab icon may not render at all — the biggest known gap.
• Dynamic JS updates in Safari are hit-or-miss; they may require a reload, and Safari "locks onto" the first icon it sees. There is no guaranteed, spec-supported way to swap a favicon live in Safari today.
• Pinned-tab icon (<link rel="mask-icon">) uses its own cache, separate from the regular favicon, and is a single-colour silhouette tinted by the color attribute — macOS + pinned-tab only, read at page load, not live.

Full mechanics with sources (WebKit bugs, Stack Overflow, browser-engineering blogs) and a recommended path toward smoother Safari colour changes live in docs/safari-favicon-research.md.

Caveats

• Favicon SVG CSS animations do not run inside the browser's tab UI — all effects are produced in JavaScript by rebuilding the data-URI each frame. This is a deliberate, zero-dependency design. (The animated previews in this README are demo assets for illustration only — the favicon itself is JS-animated.)
• Favicon behavior differs by browser, and Safari is the most limited — see Browser support & known limitations.
• The base template must keep its __COLOR__ placeholder in the #p { fill: … } rule; the browser replaces that token to color each frame.
• The plugin runs in the host plane; it must be mounted into a profile's composition, not a session-scoped agent preset.
• File reads go through the fs service with the configured iconsDir as cwd. Make sure that path is readable under your deployment's sandbox policy.

License

MIT