dsh-text-explain

简体中文 ｜ English

Made for people who don't speak AI. Select a passage in a DeepSeek Harness conversation — a term, an error message, a wall of jargon — and get it explained in plain words, right where you are reading.

40 seconds, unedited: a Godot build file explained as 「.exe is the cow, .pck is the suitcase — the cow and the suitcase have to travel together」, followed by two follow-up questions.

Why this exists

AI output is full of words you are expected to already know. The usual advice is "just ask the model" — but you have to know what to ask, and the answer often comes back in the same jargon you were stuck on.

This plugin removes that step: select the confusing part, click once, read the plain-words version. No prompt engineering, no second tab, no API key.

Features

• Context-aware. When you select text, it also grabs the whole message the passage came from and hands both to the model. "It will transfer the funds at the end" is ambiguous — until the model can see that "it" means the finance department.
• Depth knob (讲给谁听). Three depths — Plain / General / Pro, defaulting to Plain. Switch one and it re-explains the current question on the spot: the same sentence goes from kitchen-table analogy to engineering vocabulary. A switch in the popup lasts that popup only; set a default in Settings and press Save.
• Standby handoff (✦ New session). The button packs the selection, its source message and everything already asked into a handoff document, drops it into a fresh session and jumps you there. The new session answers with a single line — "背景已了解，等你开口" — and waits: no summary, no questions, no expansion. You already had your explanation; the new session is for what comes next.
• Markdown rendering. Answers render with headings, lists, quotes, code blocks, tables and links — via a hand-written, dependency-free renderer built from React elements (so it is XSS-safe by construction).
• Web search and local files (optional). Two toggles let the model call web_search / web_fetch for current information, and search_files / read_file to look things up in your local docs.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add github:HEArtattaCK2332/dsh-text-explain

Then restart the Web profile so the new bundle layer is loaded.

dsh plugin --profile web add file:<path-to-dsh-text-explain>

Usage

1. Select text in any conversation message. The popup automatically carries that message along as context.
2. Click AI 解释 to explain it, or 追问 to ask a question about it.
3. Read the streamed answer. Type a follow-up and press Enter to keep the same thread; close the window with ✕.
4. Switch depth with 讲给谁听 at the bottom of the popup. Changing it re-explains the current question immediately.
5. Toggle 🌐 联网 / 📄 读文件 before asking, if you want the model to search the web or read local files.
6. Click ✦ 新建为对话 when the thread is worth pursuing: the whole exchange lands in a new session as a handoff, which opens automatically and waits for you to speak.
7. Open 设置 → 划词解释 for defaults: which workspace a new session lands in, the default depth, and (under 高级设置) whether the two toggles start on.

Settings

Settings live on the host, in <DSH_HOME>/text-explain/settings.json (DSH_HOME defaults to ~/.dsh). The settings page keeps a draft: every click only edits that draft, 保存 writes the whole file, 刷新 throws the draft away and re-reads what is stored. Nothing you did not save is ever written to disk — not to the config file, not to browser storage (this plugin stores nothing in the browser at all).

Browser extension

The same backend also powers a browser extension: select any passage on any web page and read the explanation in a floating panel (three depths, switchable on the spot). Source lives in extension/ with its own README.

Load it unpacked: open chrome://extensions/, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and pick the extension/ folder.

Use it from other apps

The host half also speaks the OpenAI chat-completions protocol, so any client that accepts a custom API base URL can use this plugin as its backend — Obsidian plugins, browser extensions, your own scripts.

Base URL : http://127.0.0.1:3080/api/text-explain/v1
API key  : anything (or leave it empty)
Model    : text-explain-plain | text-explain-general | text-explain-pro

• GET /models lists the three depths.
• POST /chat/completions takes the standard shape and supports stream: true (SSE).
• The model name picks the depth: text-explain-plain is the default voice (for people who don't speak AI), text-explain-pro the most technical.
• A system message from the caller is ignored on purpose — the whole point of this plugin is that the explanation style is not up to the caller.
• Callers without an Origin header (curl, local scripts) work out of the box. Callers with one must be listed in allowedOrigins (see Design notes) — desktop apps included: Obsidian sends Origin: app://obsidian.md, so that exact line belongs in the allowlist.

Tests

Three stub-based self-check suites ship in the box. They need nothing but Node's built-in modules — no test framework, no npm install:

node test/run-all.mjs         # all three; or run any single file

• test/host.test.mjs — drives the real HTTP endpoints against a fake llm / webServer: the three depths must produce three different system prompts; an unknown level must fall back to plain (never an error); context must still be injected; an empty selection must be rejected. It also checks the settings endpoint creates no file until you save, sanitizes dirty input, and leaves stored settings untouched on a bad payload. Everything is written to a temp DSH_HOME, never your real one.
• test/settings.test.mjs — loads lib/client.js against React / fetch stubs: module shape, slot registration, settings normalization, cache behaviour, failure fallbacks, and the rule that matters — only Save issues a POST. The window stub deliberately has no localStorage, proving browser storage is really gone.
• test/render.test.mjs — renders both components on a React stub: the settings page (loading / ready / error, collapsed and expanded) and the popup with a full Markdown answer, exercising the hand-written renderer.

Design notes

• The selected text goes to deepseek-official / deepseek-v4-flash by default; no separate API key is stored by this plugin.
• Intentionally dependency-free and hand-written: no build step.
• Host half (lib/index.js) registers POST /api/text-explain and GET/POST /api/text-explain/settings as exact routes. The four depth prompts share one skeleton (「语境」/「格式」are common; only 「读者 + 怎么讲」 differ), so a single code path serves all four.
• Context comes from the DOM: the client walks up from the selection anchor to the outermost ancestor that still fits the same message (capped at 4000 characters). If that walk fails, the explanation still works — just without context.
• Web search uses Bing's RSS endpoint (format=rss) — no API key, and reachable on networks where DuckDuckGo is not. web_fetch strips HTML to plain text; it works for static pages, not JavaScript-rendered ones.
• search_files returns only document files (README / SKILL.md / package.json / …) and skips runtime directories such as undo, snapshots and logs. read_file refuses files over 512 KB, truncates long text, and never writes.
• Cross-origin calls (the door for a future browser extension): the endpoint inspects Origin first. No origin, or same-origin as the host, behaves exactly as before; only origins listed in the allowedOrigins allowlist get CORS headers, everything else gets a flat 403 — so a random web page cannot burn your quota. The allowlist defaults to an empty array, so the default behaviour is unchanged.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.