🦖 pi-rex

A Pi extension that reopens your conversations in Rex terminal blocks after the Rex server restarts.

Rex restores sessions, tabs, splits, and working directories on its own, but not the programs that ran in them. pi-rex remembers which Pi conversation ran in each block and resumes it in place.

🚀 Installation

pi install npm:pi-rex

✨ Usage

The extension installs its resume scripts under ~/.local/state/pi-rex the first time Pi starts, and keeps them current after updates. Add these lines to Rex's init.lua so Rex runs it when its server starts:

local state = os.getenv("XDG_STATE_HOME") or os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.local/state"
rex.exec.start({ "bash", state .. "/pi-rex/rex-resume" }, { detach = true })

Rex runs it whenever its server starts.

From then on, each Pi in a Rex block records its conversation after its first reply. When the server restarts and Rex brings the blocks back, pi-rex types pi --session <id> into every block that had a recorded conversation. You pick up where you left off, in the same block and directory.

pi-rex waits until each block's shell sits at its prompt before typing, so a slow shell startup, such as entering a devenv or direnv environment, doesn't swallow the command. If Pi had moved its conversation to another directory, such as a worktree, pi-rex changes there first.

What gets resumed:

• Conversations that were open when the server stopped or crashed.
• Conversations you switched to with /resume or /fork.

What doesn't:

• Conversations you quit with Ctrl+D or replaced with /new.
• Pis that never got a reply, because they have no conversation on disk yet.
• Other programs; they come back as a plain shell.

pi-rex only acts on a server that started within the last two minutes, and once per server instance. It never types into a block where Pi or another program already runs.

🧰 Requirements

• Rex for macOS, version 0.1.0-preview.23 or later, which restores sessions across server restarts.
• bash and the rex CLI. The script finds the CLI inside the installed Rex app if it isn't on PATH.

🩺 Troubleshooting

The script logs what it did to ~/.local/state/pi-rex/log. Records live next to it, one file per block.

If a conversation didn't come back, check that the block had a reply before the restart: ls ~/.local/state/pi-rex.