Desktop Apps: what the data shows
All 117 projects in this category, what the distribution actually looks like, and which ones are still alive.
Desktop clients are how most people actually encounter DSH without opening a terminal. The trade-off is consistent across this category: you get a usable interface immediately, and you inherit whatever version of the runtime that client shipped against. Check the last push date before you commit to one as your daily driver.
The numbers
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Projects in category | 117 |
| Combined stars | 86,642 |
| Median stars | 94 |
| Highest | 32,630 |
| Pushed since Aug 2026 | 99 (85%) |
| Untouched since Jan 2026 | 0 |
Language mix: JavaScript (49), TypeScript (45), Rust (7), Python (5).
Licensing: MIT (77), none declared (17), Apache-2.0 (8).
The median project in this category has 94 stars while the largest has 32,630. That gap is the whole story: Most of what exists is someone's weekend experiment, published and forgotten. The handful at the top are not typical — they are outliers that happened to be found.
This matters when you choose. Ranking by stars is the only signal available across the whole ecosystem, but it is measuring attention, not quality, and it collapses to zero for anything new. A project with four stars and a push yesterday may serve you far better than one with four thousand and a last commit in March. That is why every entry below also carries a freshness marker.
Ranked shortlist
Sorted by stars, with a freshness marker: active means a push since August 2026, dormant means no recent activity.
| # | Project | Stars | Lang | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | dsh-desktop active | 32,630 | TypeScript | MIT |
| 2 | dsh-desktop active | 16,476 | JavaScript | MIT |
| 3 | desktop-cc-gui active | 4,512 | TypeScript | — |
| 4 | dashi-taskboard active | 3,386 | JavaScript | Apache-2.0 |
| 5 | deepseek-harness-desktop active | 3,242 | TypeScript | MIT |
| 6 | EAC-Desktop active | 2,228 | TypeScript | MIT |
| 7 | TokenTracker active | 2,116 | JavaScript | MIT |
| 8 | dsh-tavern active | 1,236 | JavaScript | AGPL-3.0 |
Install the top pick
dsh-desktop is the most adopted project here at 32,630 stars, written in TypeScript under MIT.
git clone https://github.com/anywhere-labs/dsh-desktop.git
cd dsh-desktop
npm install
npm run buildCheck its README for the exact registration step — the plugin entry point differs between projects and a wrong name fails silently in most setups.
What to skip, and why
Nothing in this category has gone untouched for nine months, which is unusual and worth noting — it suggests maintainers are still engaged.
Common questions
How many DSH plugins are in this category?
117, out of 714 catalogued across the whole directory. The median project here has 94 stars.
Which one should I install first?
dsh-desktop, on the strength of community adoption rather than our own testing — we index the ecosystem, we do not benchmark it. If it does not fit your workflow, work down the shortlist above; the gap between first and fifth place is usually narrower than star counts imply.
Are these safe to install?
They run with the runtime's permissions, which usually means access to your files and API keys. Read the source of anything you install, especially in the categories that touch the shell or the browser. No directory can make that decision for you.
How often is this page updated?
The dataset behind it refreshes daily from the GitHub API. This article is regenerated whenever the site is rebuilt, so the numbers above are current as of 2026-10-24.
Browse the full category
Every project, filterable by language and license, lives on the Desktop Apps category page. For the wider picture across all 714 projects, start at the full plugin index.