pi-transcript-window

Keep only the latest N TUI chat messages visible in the Pi coding agent terminal UI, while preserving the full session context underneath.

Fork of pi-hide-messages by newCman1, adapted for pi 0.84+ (the upstream patch targeted the removed renderSessionContext API; this fork patches renderSessionEntries and filters hidden entries directly).

Why

As a session grows, the TUI renders every entry — hundreds of tool calls, each with output — and ctrl+o (expand tool output) rebuilds all of them, making the UI slow. This extension hides older entries from the display layer only: the session file (~/.pi/agent/sessions/*.jsonl) and the model/agent context are never touched, so nothing is lost and compaction behavior is unchanged.

Features

• Auto-hide on session start/switch — keep only the latest N entries visible
• Manual control — /hide-messages 20 keeps the latest 20; /restore-messages brings everything back
• Branch-aware — hiding follows the active session path (works across /resume, /new, /fork)
• Display-only — hidden entries are never deleted; the agent keeps full context
• Configurable — global and project-level config.json

Install

pi install git:github.com/newCman1/pi-transcript-window

Or copy this folder into an auto-discovery location:

~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-transcript-window
# or project-local
.pi/extensions/pi-transcript-window

Usage

Command	Description
/hide-messages	Hide older entries, keeping the configured default count (resets a previously tuned count)
/hide-messages 20	Keep the latest 20 visible — permanent, written to the global config
/restore-messages	Restore all entries hidden by this extension
/window	Show the current ctrl+o expansion window
/window 30	ctrl+o expands only the latest 30 bash tool outputs
/window off	ctrl+o expands all tool outputs (no limit)

/window is independent of message hiding: it only controls how many recent bash tool outputs ctrl+o expands. Other tools (read/write/update) render as one-line summaries with cc-style and are not counted. Messages stay fully visible; only the expansion is limited to the newest N bash calls. /window off restores pi's default behavior (expand everything).

Configuration

Loaded from (project overrides global):

~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-transcript-window/config.json
.pi/extensions/pi-transcript-window/config.json

Option	Type	Default	Description
debug	boolean	false	Reserved compatibility flag
defaultVisibleCount	number	10	Visible chat items to keep when hiding
autoHideOnSessionStart	boolean	true	Apply the limit on session start/switch

{
  "debug": false,
  "defaultVisibleCount": 10,
  "autoHideOnSessionStart": true
}

How it works

• /hide-messages and /restore-messages record intent as append-only custom session entries (no historical JSONL rewriting).
• The extension patches InteractiveMode.prototype.renderSessionEntries (pi 0.84+) to compute a hidden prefix over the active branch at render time and filter those entries before the original renderer runs.
• Old entries remain in the session file and in the agent context — only the TUI display omits them.

Compatibility

• pi 0.84+ (patches renderSessionEntries). Peer range is ^0.84.0.
• Requires interactive (TUI) mode; degrades silently elsewhere.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Upstream: MasuRii/pi-hide-messages.