pi-toolbox

Rounded transparent tool boxes with syntax highlighting for pi coding agent.

Features

• Rounded borders — ╭╮╰╯ box drawing instead of pi's default ┌┐└┘
• Every tool box — built-in tools, MCP calls (pi-mcp-adapter), subagents, and any other extension's tools all get the same frame
• Transparent background — no solid background fill, works with terminal transparency
• Status-aware border colors — grey while executing, green on success, red on error
• Bash syntax highlighting — commands get token-level coloring (commands, flags, strings, variables, operators, etc.)
• Scroll-safe caching — content fingerprint caching prevents re-rendering on every scroll event

Screenshot

[Image-#1]

Installation

pi install npm:@andy8647/pi-toolbox

Or straight from the repo:

pi install git:github.com/Andy8647/pi-toolbox

Restart pi to activate.

Releasing

.github/workflows/publish.yml publishes to npm on a published GitHub Release, using npm's Trusted Publisher (OIDC) — no NPM_TOKEN secret. Bump version in package.json, tag vX.Y.Z, and publish the release; the workflow fails fast if the tag and the manifest version disagree.

Configuration

Add a toolbox key to your ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "toolbox": {
    "enabled": true,
    "highlightBash": true
  }
}

Key	Type	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	true	Enable/disable the extension
highlightBash	boolean	true	Syntax-highlight bash commands

How it works

pi builds one ToolExecutionComponent per tool call, no matter which extension registered the tool. The extension API cannot wrap another extension's renderers, so pi-toolbox patches that component's render instead — which is why MCP and subagent boxes are framed too. Only bash is re-registered, purely to add syntax highlighting to the command row.

An unchanged box returns its cached line array outright, because a compositor like pi-powerline-footer's fixed editor re-renders the whole root on every mouse packet while scrolling. Measured against unpatched pi at 300 boxes / 2400 lines: +0.03 ms per full render.

No mouse handling

Expanding a single box by clicking it was tried and removed. It requires turning on terminal mouse reporting, which takes the wheel and clicks away from the terminal for the entire session, and it cannot coexist with an extension that already owns the mouse — pi-powerline-footer's fixed-editor compositor consumes every SGR mouse report for its own scrolling and selection. Use ctrl+o to toggle tool output.

Compatible themes

For the best transparent experience, set tool background colors to "" in your theme:

{
  "toolPendingBg": "",
  "toolSuccessBg": "",
  "toolErrorBg": ""
}

License

MIT