@pi-spice/thinking-preview

Collapse streaming thinking blocks into a compact, live-refreshing preview.

pi streams reasoning tokens in full, which can flood the transcript on long thinking turns. This extension turns every thinking block into a compact preview instead:

│ ✻ thinking · 142 lines · alt+t to expand
│ …second-to-last line of the thinking…
│ …last line of the thinking…

The block renders as a blockquote, so it carries pi's │ left bar and quote color — visually distinct from plain thinking text, echoing the framed look of tool-call rows (an exact edit/bash-style background box isn't reachable from a Markdown transformer).

The preview refreshes on every streaming token, so the block doubles as a progress indicator — no flooding, but you always roughly know where the model is.

Install

pi install npm:@pi-spice/thinking-preview

Quick test without installing: pi -e ./extensions/thinking-preview/

How it works

• Uses a Markdown transformer (pi.registerMarkdownTransformer), which is display-only: the session file and the model context keep the full thinking text, untouched.
• Preview content is plain text — Markdown syntax characters are escaped and rendered verbatim — and every preview line (status line included) is hard-clipped to the available terminal width minus the │ bar, by plain character count with no per-charset width tables. A line of wide characters (CJK, emoji) can therefore render up to twice the budget and wrap an occasional extra row — accepted jitter in exchange for simplicity.
• alt+t (or /thinking-preview) toggles all thinking blocks between preview and full text. Expanded mode shows the full text as escaped plain text inside the same │ -framed block, with source line breaks preserved; long lines wrap naturally. Toggling re-renders history immediately and shows a notification. Restart resets to the collapsed preview default.
• The toggle is global and sticky: once expanded, new thinking blocks render in full until you toggle back.

Interaction with pi's built-in thinking controls

• ctrl+t (hide thinking blocks) takes precedence: while thinking is hidden, blocks render as a one-line label and this extension has no visible effect on the transcript — though the alt+t notification still fires. Press ctrl+t to make thinking visible again.
• ctrl+t showing thinking also goes through this extension, so it shows the preview — not full text. Use alt+t for full text.
• Toggling re-applies the default hidden-thinking label (Thinking...); if you customized that label elsewhere, it will be reset on toggle.

Notes

• Old thinking blocks pick up a mode change immediately (the toggle forces a re-render), and restored sessions render collapsed previews too.
• alt+t was chosen because every ctrl+letter combination is bound in pi's default keybindings. If you have alt+t bound to something else, /thinking-preview works as a fallback.