dsh-toggle-leftside

English | 中文

A DSH client plugin that adds hover-to-peek to the collapsed left sidebar.

The shipped shell treats the sidebar as a binary closed ⟷ expanded toggle and has no preview state. This plugin drives that same ctx.layout.toggleSidebar() action from pointer focus, adding a temporary middle state, and while it is open it renders the sidebar as a floating drawer on top of the main area so the main area is never squeezed.

Contents

• Installation
• Features
• Interaction & effect
• Known limitations
• Version history
• License

Installation

DSH plugin

deepseek harness → Plugins → search github:bqbs/dsh-toggle-leftside → install.

Commands

• web

dsh plugin --profile web add github:bqbs/dsh-toggle-leftside

• desktop

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:bqbs/dsh-toggle-leftside

Verify: collapse the sidebar, move the pointer to the window's left edge or onto any collapsed icon and dwell ~150ms — the sidebar should temporarily expand as a floating drawer; moving away ~200ms auto-collapses it, and clicking the toggle pins it fully open.

Features

• Hover preview (PEEK): near the left edge while collapsed, the sidebar temporarily expands while the main area keeps its full width.
• Click to pin (PINNED): clicking the toggle during a preview turns it into the native "pinned open" state; a second click collapses it.
• Collapsed brand mark: puts the product brand mark on the collapsed toggle in the Windows caption (the non-Windows rail already shows it natively and is left alone).
• Settings switch: a toggle under Settings → Compact left rail, stored in localStorage, effective immediately with no reload.

Interaction & effect

State machine:

COLLAPSED ──hover the left edge for 150ms──▶ PEEK
PEEK      ──pointer leaves for 200ms──────▶ COLLAPSED
PEEK      ──click the toggle──────────────▶ PINNED
PINNED    ──click the toggle──────────────▶ COLLAPSED   (shipped behaviour)

• Floating drawer: on entering PEEK the sidebar's inner *_root is lifted out of the grid flow (position: fixed) and overlaid on the main area, which keeps its collapsed geometry and width.
• Animation: the drawer opens/closes with a 180ms slide (left: -12px → 0) + fade (opacity 0 → 1), animating the drawer only — the main area never moves. The entrance plays once per peek.
• Trigger zone: a hot strip along the window's left edge plus the toggle itself. The strip is as wide as the collapsed column when that column is visible (the web icon rail, ~56px, so any icon opens it); on desktop the collapsed column has no width, so it falls back to a fixed, wider 28px edge strip.
• Layering: the drawer uses z-index: 25 — above the main-area overlay (20) but below every shell menu layer (icon menu 70, dropdown/hovercard 100/101, and the portaled menu/tooltip/toast layer 1100), so shell menus always paint on top of the drawer.

Known limitations

• Pointer-driven only: no keyboard shortcut triggers a peek; on touch, because hover semantics differ, previews mostly rely on edge drags and feel less fluid than desktop hover.
• Depends on shell DOM structure: elements are located by class-name suffix. Renamed hashes are tolerated, but a structural change (e.g. how grid items are split) could break it.
• Narrow desktop trigger: on desktop the collapsed column has no width, so the trigger falls back to a 28px left-edge strip and must be hugged precisely.
• Brand mark missing on first paint: the collapsed-toggle brand mark only appears after the first peek caches the SVG; before any hover the original icon is shown.
• Preference isolated per browser: the switch lives in localStorage and is not synced across devices/browsers.
• Single sidebar column only: assumes one left column and does not handle multi-column or dynamic add/remove layouts.
• No reduced-motion handling: does not honor the system "reduce motion" preference and still plays the animation.
• Reload required after edits: client.js is loaded through window.__ModuleLoader__ from a graph snapshot, so changes need a window reload.
• No-op when already expanded: when the sidebar is already open, the plugin adds nothing (PEEK can only start from the collapsed state).

Version history

Current version 0.1.0

License

Released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for the full text.