DSH | dsh-arabic | Arabic interface pack and per-block RTL for mixed Arabic/English text

[SMSMy]

Unofficial project, independently developed and maintained by community members.

Project URL: https://github.com/SMSMy/dsh-arabic · npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dsh-arabic

Introduction

dsh-arabic is one plugin with two independent halves: an Arabic interface pack, and a bidi layer that decides text direction per block.

• Direction by prose dominance, not by the first strong character. dir="auto" gets developer text wrong whenever a line opens with a Latin token — Error: فشل الاتصال بالخادم and Hello كيف حالك are Arabic sentences that unicode-bidi: plaintext renders LTR. Here each block is weighed in words: code-like tokens (URLs, paths, @scope/name, shas, 15/15, dotted file names) do not vote and glue the Latin words around them into one technical unit; a tie resolves to Arabic; a block with no Arabic word is released; and a streamed answer may not flicker (hysteresis).
• The shell is never flipped. Flex/grid containers and rows owning interactive controls are excluded, so an Arabic label in the composer's toolbar cannot move the send button; a dir set by the app or the author is never overridden.
• A full Arabic interface pack — 59 namespaces / 3,228 strings, registered through the official locale service (no DOM text replacement, no monkey-patching), with an English fallback for anything untranslated. Arabic is added to Settings → General → Language, and a second switch turns the direction layer off and reverts completely.

How it integrates with DSH

• The host half (index.js) pushes two rows into the documented webserver/index-inject table: one style row (the direction CSS) and one script row (the page-side layer).
• The browser half (lib/client.js, declared through dsh.client.platform: "web") touches only the official locale service: ctx.locale.addLanguage({ id: 'ar', label: 'العربية', fallback: 'en' }) and then ctx.locale.register(namespace, 'ar', dictionary) for each of the 59 namespaces — plus one row in settings.general.item that toggles the direction layer.
• No @deepseek-ai/* package is declared as a dependency; the plugin works through the two documented extension points above and degrades safely if either changes.

Screenshots

Direction, before and after — rendered by Chromium with the real bidi engine: both columns carry the same five lines, each opening with a Latin token. The left column is the first-strong rule, the right one is prose dominance.

The activity light, frozen at one instant of its cycle: English above, Arabic below. The bright band is mirrored.

Install

dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-arabic

Restart DSH afterwards — the injection table is collected once at host startup — then Settings → General → Language → العربية.

Verification and known limits

55 bidi behaviour checks on a DOM shim, 32 locale-contract checks, 30 golden direction cases, a cross-batch consistency lint and a documentation-count guard, all on Node 20/22/24 in CI. The limits are documented rather than hidden: bare Latin words still outvote one Arabic word (شغّل git status stays LTR); the sidebar terminal is xterm.js and does not shape Arabic; the shell (sidebar, menus) stays LTR on purpose until the core adopts CSS logical properties; and the dictionaries are flat, so ICU plural forms are not available.

DSH محدَّد: مُختبَر على desktop 0.2.0-rc.2 · رخصة MIT · منشور على npm مع إثبات منشأ (OIDC).

[SMSMy]

0.3.2 is out — dsh-arabic 0.3.2 (npm dsh-arabic@0.3.2, trusted publishing with a provenance attestation).

It closes a gap this post did not cover: the question card the assistant asks with. The question sits in the card's own <header> — which a landmark-tag chrome test read as "the shell" — and each option is a flex <button> whose label and description are blockified <span> cells, which the block walk skipped. Both now take a direction of their own while the row itself stays put: the number badge and the Send/Skip buttons keep the sides the design gave them. The card is not mirrored; its text is.

Before / after — the same markup and the same strings, rendered by Chromium with the real bidi engine (right panel carries the dir attributes the layer writes, the number stays on the left in both):

The shapes this depends on are pinned, because a rename upstream is silent — data/card-pins.json with scripts/check-card-pins.mjs <app.asar> re-reads them from the installed app before every release, and tests/verify-rtl.mjs grew from 55 to 63 checks around the same cases.