Insight - Selection & Definition for Hermes Desktop

Insight is a two-part plugin for Hermes Desktop that turns any selected text into an immediate definition. Select a word anywhere in the app, hit Define in the popup, and a right-docked panel streams an answer from the provider of your choice - with web search results, inline-cited sources, and thumbnails. The same popup offers Respond, which inserts the selection into the composer as a quoted reply. It is fast by design: stateless completion, the format template as the only system instruction, reasoning off.

• Renderer plugin - a single plugin.js. Selection popup (Respond + Define), definition panel, markdown rendering.
• Backend plugin - a Python backend plugin that runs inside the gateway where your providers live. It resolves the provider list from your install config, does web search honoring web.search_backend, and streams the completion.

Plugin ids: hermes-insight (backend, ships the desktop half at backend-plugin/desktop/plugin.js).

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What you get

Select any text in Hermes Desktop and a small popup appears with two actions:

• Respond - inserts the selection into the composer as a quoted (>) reply, so you can answer it in line.
• Define - opens the side panel and streams a definition of the selected term from the provider of your choice.

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Installation

The plugin is in the Hermes plugin catalog as hermes-insight; one install ships both the backend and the desktop half:

hermes plugins install BrokeSkill/Hermes-Insight/backend-plugin
hermes plugins enable hermes-insight

(From the catalog: hermes plugins install hermes-insight + hermes plugins enable hermes-insight.)

Manual

1. Copy backend-plugin/ to ~/.hermes/plugins/hermes-insight/ (Linux) or %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes\plugins\hermes-insight\ (Windows):

   plugins\hermes-insight\
       __init__.py      ← copy from backend-plugin/__init__.py
       plugin.yaml      ← copy from backend-plugin/plugin.yaml
       desktop\plugin.js ← copy from backend-plugin/desktop/plugin.js
   

2. Enable it:

   hermes plugins enable hermes-insight

   OR add hermes-insight to the plugins.enabled list in config.yaml next to any existing entries.

3. Restart the gateway (hermes gateway restart) and reload desktop plugins.

Verify

hermes insight --list-providers    # prints every provider from your config

The desktop half talks to the backend only through cli.exec (hermes insight ...), so no server, URL, or daemon is involved.

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How it works

Flow:

1. You select text in Hermes Desktop → a small popup appears with Respond and Define.
2. Respond quotes the selection into the composer (> ...) through the SDK's composer surface (host.composer.insertText). Define asks the gateway for the provider list once (model.options) and runs the completion through cli.exec (hermes insight --term ...).
3. The backend (optional) runs a web search via web.search_backend, attaches images, then posts a stateless chat completion to the chosen provider:
   • system message = the format template only (no memory, no skills, no agent)
   • reasoning_effort: none for OpenAI-compatible/local proxies.
   • no tools - definitions cite the search sources inline instead
4. The result renders in the panel with sources, citations and images.

No server, no daemon: the desktop half talks to the backend only through the SDK's cli.exec door, so nothing listens on any port and nothing outlives the CLI invocation.

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Configuration

Everything comes from your normal Hermes config.

• model.base_url / model.default - session model + default
• providers.* / custom_providers.* - the provider list shown in the dropdown (SELF CONFIGURABLE, OPTIONAL)
• web.search_backend + web.searxng_url / web.search_url - search + images
• web.extract_backend - used by search/extract

The panel lets you pick a provider/model per lookup; "Session model (current chat)" uses whatever model you're chatting with.

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ToDo / Planned

• Ask-Window inside the Definition-Panel

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License

MIT - see LICENSE. Forks and modifications are welcome and permitted; the original author (BrokeSkill) must be attributed.

© 2026 BrokeSkill