pi-open-tui

A polished TUI extension for the Pi coding agent. Combines the best of pi-haiku, pi-claude-code-tui, and pi-zentui into one cohesive package.

What's in it

• Animated Pi logo header — 16-frame color-changing logo animation + "Let's build something great" tagline
• Single-line Starship-style footer — left-aligned cwd, model, thinking level, git branch/status, and runtime; right-aligned context percentage/window, token counts, cache rate, cost, and clock
• Rounded editor — accent rail + borderMuted rounded corners, clean visual frame
• 60+ runtime detection — Node, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C/C++, Deno, Bun, and many more
• Git status — branch, ahead/behind, modified/untracked/staged/stashed, detached HEAD commit hash + tag
• Live clock — current local time in the footer, refreshed once per second
• Turn telemetry — timestamp, token counts, cache rate, actual cost, duration, generation speed, and TTFT after each complete agent run
• Zero prototype patches — uses public Pi APIs (setHeader/setFooter/setEditorComponent), safe across Pi updates
• Interactive settings UI — /open-tui opens a tabbed settings dialog (General / Footer / Telemetry)
• Popup session selector — /resume-popup searches, sorts, renames, deletes, and switches sessions without leaving the TUI
• Tool call cards — readable, state-aware cards for read, write, edit, find, grep, ls, and bash tool calls

Install

pi install npm:@nogardxu/pi-open-tui

Or try it for one run:

pi -e npm:@nogardxu/pi-open-tui

Commands

• /open-tui — open the tabbed settings dialog (General / Footer / Telemetry)
• /resume-popup — search and switch sessions in an overlaid selector

Configuration

Run /open-tui to open the interactive settings UI. Configuration is stored at ~/.pi/agent/open-tui.json:

{
  "enabled": true,
  "icons": {
    "mode": "auto"
  },
  "footer": {
    "separator": "dot"
  },
  "git": {
    "statusRefreshIntervalMs": 30000
  },
  "footerSegments": {
    "cwd": true,
    "model": true,
    "thinking": true,
    "gitBranch": true,
    "gitStatus": true,
    "gitCommit": false,
    "runtime": true,
    "context": true,
    "tokens": true,
    "cost": true,
    "extensionStatuses": true,
    "clock": true
  },
  "telemetry": {
    "enabled": true,
    "perTurn": true,
    "timestamp": true,
    "inputTokens": true,
    "outputTokens": true,
    "cacheRate": true,
    "tps": true,
    "ttft": true,
    "duration": true,
    "cost": true
  }
}

• icons.mode: auto (detect Nerd Font), nerd (force Nerd Font glyphs), or ascii (plain fallbacks)
• footer.separator: dot, pipe, slash, or arrow; controls separators between segments on each side of the single-line footer
• git.statusRefreshIntervalMs: Git status polling interval in milliseconds; defaults to 30000 (30 seconds)
• footerSegments.gitCommit: shows short hash + tag on detached HEAD (off by default)
• footerSegments.extensionStatuses: shows statuses published by extensions through Pi's setStatus() API inline on the left side (on by default); turn it off to hide them
• telemetry.perTurn: shows telemetry after each completed LLM turn (on by default); turn it off to keep only the settled aggregate notification

Turn telemetry

When telemetry.perTurn is enabled, open-tui shows a transient notification after each completed LLM turn. When the complete agent run settles, it also shows one aggregated notification across all tool-call turns. The settled aggregate is shown even when per-turn notifications are disabled:

 14:32:07  ↑ 567  ↓ 1.2K   82.5%   0.012   29.7s  󰓅 42.5 Tok/s   1.2s

The notifications use the footer's icon mode. Turn telemetry uses the dim theme color; the settled aggregate uses the slightly brighter muted gray so the two levels are easy to distinguish. Segments are separated by two spaces. Configure its master switch, timestamp, input/output token, cache rate, TPS, TTFT, duration, and cost segments from the Telemetry tab in /open-tui.

TPS is the complete generation throughput for the agent run: all provider-reported assistant output tokens divided by the summed generation time of every LLM turn, measured from turn_start through the assistant message_end. This includes time-to-first-token, hidden reasoning, buffering, and stalls so the token count and timing cover the same interval. Tool execution between turns is excluded. A run with no output tokens or no measurable generation time is shown as —. The cost segment uses the actual accumulated usage.cost.total; it is not a per-million-token rate.

Local development

pi -e .

License

MIT

Acknowledgements

This project builds on the work of several Pi community packages:

• pi-haiku — the 2-line footer structure (location+model · timer+context) and working-timer pattern
• pi-claude-code-tui — the 16-frame animated Pi logo and rounded editor border technique
• pi-zentui — the Starship-style footer segments (git status icons, runtime detection, context gauge), generation-based session lifecycle, and interactive settings UI pattern
• pi-tps — the turn timing, stall detection, and conservative TPS measurement approach

The animated logo frames are derived from pi-claude-code-tui, which in turn derive from Pi's official install script (pi.dev/install.sh). The runtime detection list and git porcelain parsing borrow structure from pi-zentui.

Special thanks to the LINUX DO community for their support.