pi-sticky

Fully vibe-coded. Might break. Works for me.

Keeps the chat input and footer pinned to the bottom of the terminal while you scroll through chat history.

Works alongside your other extensions — it does not replace the editor or footer, it pins whatever is already registered.

What it does

Uses a terminal scroll-region technique (vendored from pi-powerline-footer) to split the terminal into two zones:

• Scrollable zone — chat history
• Pinned zone — status indicator, editor (e.g. from pi-vim), widgets, footer (e.g. from pi-status)

Mouse scroll and super+up / super+down (or Page Up / Page Down) move through chat history without the input area disappearing.

Installation

pi install https://github.com/burneikis/pi-sticky

Then add to your ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "extensions": [
    "~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-sticky",
    "~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-vim",
    "~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-status"
  ]
}

Load order is required

pi-sticky must be listed first. It wraps ctx.ui.setEditorComponent and ctx.ui.setFooter before other extensions call them. If pi-vim or pi-status loads first, their registrations will not be intercepted and the sticky behavior will not work.

Compatibility

Extension	Works?	Notes
pi-vim	Yes	Editor is pinned as-is, vim modes fully preserved
pi-status	Yes	Footer is pinned at the very bottom
pi-powerline-footer	No	Both extensions patch the same terminal primitives; use one or the other
Any setWidget extension	Yes	Widgets above/below editor are pinned alongside the editor

Configuration

No configuration required. The extension works with sensible defaults:

• Mouse scroll enabled
• Keyboard scroll: super+up / super+down, PageUp / PageDown, ctrl+shift+up / ctrl+shift+down
• Mouse text selection and copy-to-clipboard on release

Credits

The fixed-editor/ directory is vendored from pi-powerline-footer by Nico Bailon (MIT licensed).

How it works (technical)

All extensions registered in the same session share a single ctx object (the extension runner creates it once and passes it to every session_start handler). pi-sticky uses this to intercept ctx.ui.setEditorComponent and ctx.ui.setFooter in its own session_start before other extensions run theirs.

The interception wraps each factory to capture:

• The tui reference (the TUI instance, from the factory's first argument)
• The editor renderable (the object returned by the editor factory)

Compositor installation is deferred via setTimeout(0) so it runs after all extensions' session_start handlers complete. This ensures the footer (registered by pi-status) is already in tui.children when the compositor searches for it positionally.

The pinned layout from top to bottom:

statusContainer     (loading / thinking animation)
widgetContainerAbove (extensions using setWidget "aboveEditor")
editorContainer     (the chat input)
widgetContainerBelow (extensions using setWidget "belowEditor")
footer              (pi-status or built-in footer)

These elements are hidden from the scrollable TUI render and re-rendered explicitly in the pinned cluster on every frame.