@pi-spice/thinking-preview

Collapse streaming thinking blocks into a compact live preview.

pi streams reasoning tokens in full, which floods the transcript on long thinking turns. This extension turns each thinking block into a status line plus up to two tail lines:

│ ✻ thinking · 8.4s · alt+t to expand
│ …second-to-last line of the thinking…
│ …last line of the thinking…

The block is a blockquote, so it keeps pi's │ left bar and quote color.

Install

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

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

What you see

• Thinking time. The status line shows how long the model thought in that run: whole seconds while it streams, the exact length once it stops. Time spent writing the answer does not count.
• Live tail. The two newest non-empty lines refresh on every token, so the block works as a progress indicator.
• Line count fallback. Blocks with no recorded time — after a restart, /reload, or a session switch (/new, /resume, /fork) — show a line count instead.
• Plain text. Markdown syntax is escaped, and lines are clipped to the terminal width by character count, so text in wide characters (CJK, emoji) can wrap an extra row.

Expanding

alt+t (or /thinking-preview) toggles all thinking blocks between preview and full text. Expanded blocks show the whole text in the same │ -framed block, with source line breaks preserved. The setting is global and re-renders history immediately. Session switches (/new, /resume, /fork) keep the current mode; a new pi process or /reload starts collapsed.

pi's built-in thinking controls

• ctrl+t (hide thinking blocks) takes precedence: while thinking is hidden, this extension has no visible effect, though alt+t still notifies.
• ctrl+t showing thinking renders the current mode: the preview, or full text if you toggled alt+t.
• Toggling re-applies the default hidden-thinking label (Thinking...); a custom label set elsewhere is reset.

Notes

• Display-only: the session file and the model context keep the full thinking text.
• If alt+t is already bound in your keybindings, /thinking-preview does the same thing.
• Mutually exclusive with @pi-spice/collapse-blocks. Both register an assistant-thinking transformer, and pi applies them in extension load order, so one wraps the other's output: thinking is double-framed. Install one.

License

MIT