Chael-Chael/dsh-ascii-whales

Let whales drift through the quiet, and thoughts rise to the surface.

A blue ocean unfolds behind each empty chat. Schools of tiny fish scatter between characters; wakes fade slowly, and a pane of frosted glass holds the words you have yet to write.

中文 · npm · Releases

Install

Add dsh-ascii-whales through DeepSeek Harness's plugin manager, then restart that instance. For a Web profile:

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-ascii-whales

Open Settings → ASCII Whales. Use Desktop's own plugin manager for Desktop installations.

Your ocean

The animation fills the empty chat area behind the title and composer. It follows the native light/dark theme and disappears in existing conversations. Glass is neutral white or charcoal, with no blue tint; colors passing behind it are naturally blurred.

Your chosen color anchors the whale body's midtones, with deeper shadows and brighter highlights that preserve per-cell lighting and body volume. Both themes use the same body palette, carrying your shade of blue from daylight into night.

Choose Settings → ASCII Whales → Character style → Hanzi for Chinese characters: 吻 at the snout, 目 at the eyes, 背 along the back, 鳍 on fins and 尾 on tail flukes. Water and ocean characters fill the body; fish become 鱼, 鲤, 鲭 and 鲱. These labels follow the bending body. Hanzi use wider cells, adjustable with cell size.

The plugin embeds Geist Mono 600 for ASCII, matching the upstream demo, and Source Han Serif for Hanzi. These animation fonts load offline. Choose Font → Local custom to enter separate installed English and Chinese font names.

Click Scan local fonts, allow browser access, then choose from the dropdown menus. You can also type a font name directly.

Humpbacks retain long flippers and broad flukes. Orcas have a broader rounded head, short rounded flippers, and white eye and flank patches. Both retain your selected body color; the orca patches stay off-white and are independent of the eye-background setting.

Setting	Default	Range
Show whales	On	Entire scene and its glass
Whale species	Humpback	Humpback / Orca; saved and available in all three character styles
Character style	ASCII	ASCII / Hanzi / Kanji; applied immediately and saved
Font	Bundled default	Bundled default / Local custom; separate saved English and Chinese names
Eye background	Follow main color	Controls the eye cell background, with contrasting text. Defaults to body shading; choose black or white. Kanji defaults to transparent and adds an eye tile only for black/white
Colorful shimmer	Off	ASCII / Hanzi: selected-color shades by default; enable the original seven-color glyph accents. Body color is unchanged. Not applicable to Kanji
Whale color	#4d6bfe	Visual swatches and system color picker; fish and wakes follow
Whales	3	1–20
Size	1.2×	0.1–10×
Speed	0.65×	0.1–10×
Body swing amplitude	0.8×	0–3×; zero removes body waves, while the spine still follows turns
Turning agility	0.7×	0.1–3×; higher values allow tighter turns
Tail-beat frequency	0.8×	0.1–5×; independent of swimming speed
Scene opacity	1	0–1; 1 is fully opaque
Cell size	1×	0.1–10×
Background grid opacity	0.05	0–1
Small fish	170	0–1000
Wake intensity	1	0–10
Frosted glass	On	Independent toggle
Glass blur	14 px	0–64 px
Glass opacity	0.45	0–1

Size, cell size, speed and wake step by 0.05 below 1 and 0.1 from 1 upward: 0.95 ↔ 1 ↔ 1.1. You can also type values directly.

Set grid opacity, fish count or wake to zero to hide it. The default whales have relative sizes of 100%, 70% and 84%; the size control scales them together. Small fish are dashes in ASCII mode and fish characters in Hanzi mode; their dimensions follow the character grid.

Settings use official DSH controls. Restore defaults uses the theme-aware primary button and brings back the original blue ocean. Preferences are saved in this browser. The animation follows reduced-motion preferences and pauses in background tabs.

Source and development

This adapts stackedlol/ascii-sharks, retaining its simulation, flexible spines, ASCII rasterizer and lighting. The whale shape, DSH integration, palettes and controls are adaptations. See source attribution for the pinned commit and credits.

The Kanji style adapts ascii-kanji-sharks · 漢字の海 by michikusa404 (MIT License, Copyright © 2026 michikusa404). Its ink-measured Kanji shading and text effects come from that project; movement and schooling use stackedlol/ascii-sharks. Our adaptations replace the shark silhouette with whales and add DSH integration, a transparent background, adjustable settings and offline fonts. The full license is preserved in vendor/ascii-kanji-sharks/LICENSE.

Thank you to michikusa404 for turning Kanji into an ocean, and to stackedlol for the character-based schools and animation. Their publicly shared source made it possible to bring this sea into DeepSeek Harness.

npm ci --legacy-peer-deps
npm run check
npm pack

Animation and fonts are bundled for offline loading. See development and recording and test results.

Kanji

Choose Character style → Kanji for the MIT-licensed ascii-kanji-sharks simulation, adapted to whales: schools, ink-measured shading and feeding text effects. Existing population, size, speed, color, grid, wake and font controls apply. Cells have a 4 px minimum (lower settings stop shrinking at this limit). Kanji uses the Chinese font field; the English font field applies only to ASCII. Fonts are bundled for offline use; both whale styles remain available.

All three styles support visibility, count, size, speed, opacity, cell size, grid opacity, small fish count, wake intensity, color, fonts and the glass toggle/blur/opacity. Color affects bodies, fish and wakes; eye backgrounds follow body shading by default, with optional black or white. Kanji glints and sound effects retain theme accents. The first three whales use relative sizes of 100%, 70% and 84%.

Kanji shares the stackedlol/ascii-sharks simulation, pursuit, turning and body wave with ASCII / Hanzi, retaining the whale silhouette with Kanji shading and text effects.

Character cells use comparable areas across styles: ASCII retains narrow cells, while Hanzi and Kanji share square cells. Cell sizes are fixed in CSS pixels, independent of window width: at 1×, ASCII uses 8×12 px and Hanzi/Kanji use 10×10 px. The same multiplier gives similar grain density; full-width cells retain a 4 px minimum.