pi-sticky-last-prompt

Pins the most recent user message you have scrolled completely past as a one-line bar at the very top of pi's fullscreen TUI. Left-click the bar and the transcript scrolls so that message sits right below it — a quick way to jump back to what you asked.

Install

pi install ./extensions/sticky-last-prompt          # local
pi install npm:pi-sticky-last-prompt                # npm (if published)

pi's git sources clone a whole repository and install what its root package.json declares; the pi-collections root is never published and declares no pi manifest, so there is no git:.../pi-collections/... form. To install just this extension from the repo, clone it and pi install the subdirectory locally, or publish it to npm.

Or add it to the packages array in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "packages": ["./extensions/sticky-last-prompt"]
}

Behavior

• The bar shows the latest prompt that has scrolled completely above the top of the viewport — the newest message with not a single row left on screen, so the pinned jump always targets something invisible. While a prompt is crossing the top edge (head gone, tail still visible) the bar hides rather than duplicate text sitting directly beneath it; scroll down until the message is entirely out of view and it becomes the pin. While a newer prompt is crossing, older fully-hidden prompts do not keep the pin — the bar just stays blank until the newer one clears the edge. Text is whitespace-collapsed to one line, ellipsized if too long, and themed with your active theme (accent icon on a selectedBg strip). Skill invocations count as prompts too — pi renders them as collapsible [skill] name blocks rather than user messages — and are pinned under that same [skill] <name> label.
• Left-click anywhere on the bar to scroll the transcript to the message currently shown. The view lands just below the bar, and follow-tail is disabled so new output doesn't yank you back — exactly like pi's built-in search jump.
• Everything else keeps stock behavior: mouse wheel, text selection, scrollbar, right-click paste, middle click, drags. The extension swallows precisely one gesture — a left-button press inside the bar row.
• On /reload or when starting on an existing session, the bar re-derives from the rendered transcript — no seeding step; it just tracks wherever the viewport opens.

Requires fullscreen TUI mode (pi ≥ 0.84); in regular mode the extension stays dormant.

How it works

The pin is a non-capturing full-width overlay anchored top-left; its text is resolved from the live transcript tree on every paint (message offsets cached per width + content height), with no polling timers. Click interception wraps the renderer instance's internal selection handler: pi consumes clicks centrally before the extension input APIs see them, so that handler is the seam this extension uses. pi 1.4 also exposes a component-level handleMouse API to overlays; the bar still goes through the renderer patch it was built on. The same instance patching teaches hasOverlay() to ignore our non-capturing bar (and only ours), so the stock scrollbar and text selection stay live while it is shown. All internal access is defensive: if a future pi renames these pieces, clicking stops working but nothing else breaks.

Known tradeoffs

• While the bar is visible, scrollbar dragging and mouse text selection keep working: the extension reports "no overlay" to pi while its own non-capturing bar is the only overlay shown. When another overlay is on top (search box, dialogs), stock pi suppression applies.
• The bar covers the top transcript row while shown.
• Message offsets are re-measured whenever content height changes (e.g. while a response streams in). The walk renders each message component individually instead of one chat-block render, so that cost grows with transcript length on every frame where the cache misses — which is exactly while streaming. Between those frames everything is cached.
• Transcript rebuilds (/tree navigation, compaction, session load) swap the transcript container's children array wholesale; the offset cache keys on that identity, so the bar re-derives immediately from whatever messages the new branch renders — no stale labels even at identical heights.